All the Single Ladies Tells It All Without Hesitation
If we can support ourselves, do we still need men?
Did you know that more American women are unmarried than married now and that those who do marry are waiting longer to walk down the aisle?
Those are just a couple of the things I learned from rereading Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies. Published in 2016, it’s a touch dated, but it still contains many passages I marked to save and share. I don’t know if you’re aware of my Childless by Marriage blog, but I have been writing about childlessness for years, and some of what she writes applies there as well.
Here’s some of what struck me:
The proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent in 2009. For the first time in US history single women outnumbered married women. The number of adults under 34 who had never married was up to 46 percent. As of 2016, Traister wrote, around 20 percent of Americans 18-29 were wed compared to nearly 60 percent in 1960. While women previously wed in their late teens or early twenties, far more are waiting until thirty or beyond now.
Famous women who never married include painter Mary Cassatt, poets Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, novelists Ann and Emily Bronte, Louis May Alcott, Willa Cather, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Pauline Hopkins, Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix, Jane Addams, and usan B. Anthony.
The word “spinster” was an early term for single women who spun cotton, wool and silk. It has come to mean women who are unwed beyond what was considered marrying age.
Women didn’t have the right to secure credit cards, mortgages or bank loans on their own until the passage of the Equal Opportunity Act in 1974. In the early years of this country, a woman's legal, economic and social identity was covered by the legal, economic and social identity of the man she married. Those who didn't marry struggled to support themselves with jobs limited to midwives, seamstresses, caretakers, governesses or tutors, all occupations that reflected women’s role as carer of home and children. Most widows were poor, with no means to support themselves or their dependents and depended on family and charity to survive.
Jane Austen: “Single women had a dreadful propensity for being poor.”
Anita Hill two hundreds years later: “We can decide that we’re going to be single, but we have to figure out how we’re going to be able to put a roof over our heads. We’re making eighty cents for every dollar a man makes. So there is a real issue with more and more women spending over 50 percent of their income on housing. Economic forces, Hill said, push women ‘into less independent relationships.’”
Many women tell the author they love being alone. They feel free to do what they want. Mallory Ortberg says, “Do you know how rare finding a moment's peace has been for women throughout human history? If you spent the rest of your days alone in a cottage on a solitary Alp, it would not begin to make up for the years your foremothers spent having to listen to men as a profession . . . a woman alone is a beautiful thing.”
The author says of a period when she was alone: “My days belonged to me. A good mood was mine to sustain, a bad one mine to nurse. If I wanted to watch a television program, I watched it. If I didn’t want to eat terrible Chinese take-out, I didn’t eat terrible Chinese take-out just because my boyfriend had a craving. I got to build my life around my desires: my books, my music, my hours of sitting uninterrupted on my stoop smoking cigarettes and thinking. Most important, I didn’t have the constant crick-crick-crick of being in a relationship with a person who wasn’t a good match scritching away at my brain, making me low-level unhappy even on the happy days.
“When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it’s important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary.” She quotes Amina Sow: “Always choose yourself first. Women are very socialized to choose other people. If you put yourself first, it’s this incredible path you can forge for yourself.”
Regarding the contention that unmarried childless women are immature: “In many ways, the emotional and economic self sufficiency of unmarried life is more demanding than that state we have long acknowledged as (married) maturity. Being on one’s own means shouldering one’s own burdens in a way that being coupled rarely demands. It means doing everything–making decisions, taking responsibility, paying bills, cleaning the refrigerator–without the benefits of formal partnership. But we’ve still got a lot of hardwired assumptions that the successful female life is measured not in professional achievements or friendships or even satisfying sexual relationships, but by whether you’re legally coupled.”
Sex and dating: Today with birth control, abortion, and more financial independence, women feel much less pressure to get married in order to have sex. Why get married and give up your freedom? That’s what many are saying. Or let me have my fun, get my education, start my career and then maybe . . .
She quotes Hannah Rosin, author of The End of Men: “For young women ‘who are in their sexual prime’ and also at the most potentially propellant moment of their careers and social lives, there is a recognition that “an overly serious suitor fills the same role an accidental pregnancy did in the 19th century: a danger to be avoided at all costs, lest it get in the way of a promising future.”
Women can afford to be fussier now. “Back when women needed a man, truly needed one, to earn money, provide social standing and a roof, needed to be married in order to enjoy a socially sanctioned sex life or have children who wouldn’t be shunned, standards could be lower. They were necessarily lower. A potential mate could more easily get away with offering only a paycheck, a penis, and a pulse.”
Traister concludes with suggestions for changes that would help the growing numbers of unmarried American women. Among them: stronger equal pay protections, a national healthcare system, insurance companies covering IVF, more housing for single people, protection of reproductive rights, better family leave policies, and more recognition that not every worker has a spouse and a traditional family.
This book is slow reading. The world is changing so quickly I worry about some of the information already being dated (abortion is no longer legal in some parts of the country), but there’s a lot here to chew on.
Guys, Traister is all about the ladies here. I wonder if anyone has written a book about single men. I think they should. That matters, too.
I welcome your comments.
P.S. I haven’t found a new dog yet, but I’m looking
PPS. We are up to 759 subscribers at this Substack. Thank you all.
As part of World Childless Week, I participated in a discussion with the Jody Day and the Childless Elderwomen on the topic of friendships, particularly those between people who have children and people who don’t. It was a great talk. Click here to watch the recording.
How did I end up alone? I didn’t have any kids. After my husband and I retired to the Oregon coast, far from family, he died of Alzheimer’s. You can read our story in my new memoir, No Way Out of This: Loving a Partner with Alzheimer’s, available now at your favorite bookseller. Visit https://www.suelick.com for information on all of my books.
I graduated from college in 1974 and got married two weeks later. I'm amazed at how restricted things were then.
It’s powerful stuff.
I love the quote “a woman alone is a beautiful thing”.
I’m grateful for my ancestral women, and all they went through, marched for and fought for. We too are fighting for future generations. And hopefully women’s rights will be restored in all states.