All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

Epigraph

A Note on Interviews and Attribution

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Watch Out for That Woman: The Political and Social Power of an Unmarried Nation

CHAPTER TWO

Single Women Have Often Made History: Unmarried in America

CHAPTER THREE

The Sex of the Cities: Urban Life and Female Independence

CHAPTER FOUR

Dangerous as Lucifer Matches: The Friendships of Women

CHAPTER FIVE

My Solitude, My Self: Single Women on Their Own

CHAPTER SIX

For Richer: Work, Money, and Independence

CHAPTER SEVEN

For Poorer: Single Women and Sexism, Racism, and Poverty

CHAPTER EIGHT

Sex and the Single Girls: Virginity to Promiscuity and Beyond

CHAPTER NINE

Horse and Carriage: Marrying—And Not Marrying—In the Time of Singlehood

CHAPTER TEN

Then Comes What? And When? Independence and Parenthood

Conclusion

Appendix

Where Are They Now?

Acknowledgments

About Rebecca Traister

Selected Bibliography

Notes

For my parents, who never gave me a hard time about it

Nellie Bly: “What do you think the new woman will be?”

Susan B. Anthony: “She'll be free.”

—1896

While researching this book, I conducted interviews with close to one hundred women around the country. Some I sought out because their work corresponded to the issues I wanted to address; some had written affectingly on the topics of singlehood or marriage; some were friends or friends of friends; some were women I bumped into in airports; some were strangers I befriended because I wanted to include as broad a range of geographic, religious, economic, and racial experience as possible; some were women tracked down by my nimble research assistant, Rhaina Cohen. A few women got in touch with me after hearing through their own social or professional circles that I was writing about single women.

From those original hundred interviews, I wound up quoting the tales of about thirty women at length in these pages. Surely those thirty stories include an overrepresentation of people like me: It is fair to say that there are likely more college-educated feminists, writers, and New Yorkers here than most readers know in their real lives. But I have worked to ensure that these are not the only stories.

Nearly all of the interviewees agreed to be identified by their full names. Those who did not are referred to by their first or middle names only. Likewise, I deferred to individual preferences when it came to later references: Some women are called by their first names as their tales progress, reflecting the intimate nature of the stories they offer, some preferred to be called by their last.

The interviews took place between 2010 and 2015 and reflect the experiences and realities of the women at the time they were interviewed. During the fact-checking process, some of the interviewees who felt that their circumstances, perspectives, or thoughts on singlehood had changed significantly since the time of their interviews asked to update their status. I have included a “Where Are they Now?” section to account for their lives up through publication.

Finally, I did not set out to write a book that relies almost entirely on the words, scholarship, stories, and insight of women. In fact, when I realized, late in the process, that I had written more than three hundred pages of a book in which only a handful of men were cited, I felt bad. After all, men are socially, economically, and emotionally crucial to women and to the story of female independence, and they comprise half of the world that is being remade around us. But though they have been at the center of many female lives for many generations, men are not, as it turns out, at the center of the story I have laid out here.

I always hated it when my heroines got married. As a child, I remember staring at the cover of
The First Four Years
, willing myself to feel pleased—as I knew I was meant to—that Laura Ingalls had wed Almanzo “Manly” Wilder and given birth to baby Rose. I understood that despite the hail storms, diphtheria outbreaks, and other agrarian misery that Wilder chronicled in the last of her
Little House
books, Laura's marriage and motherhood were supposed to be read as a happy ending. Yet, to me, it felt unhappy, as if Laura were over. And, in many ways, she was.

The images on the covers of previous
Little House
books, drawn by Garth Williams in the editions I owned, had been of Laura in motion, front and center: gamboling down a hillside, riding a horse barefoot, having a snowball fight. Here she was, stationary and solidly shod, beside her husband; the baby she held in her arms was the most lively figure in the scene. Laura's story was coming to a close. The tale that was worth telling about her was finished once she married.

It was the same with
Anne of Green Gables'
Anne Shirley, whose days of getting her best friend Diana Barry drunk and competing at school with rival Gilbert Blythe were over when, at last, after three volumes of resistance and rejected proposals, she gave in and married Gilbert. Beloved Jo March, who, in
Little Women,
subverted the marriage plot by
not
marrying her best friend and neighbor Laurie, came to her clunky, connubial end by getting hitched to avuncular Professor Bhaer. And Jane
Eyre: Oh, smart, resourceful, sad Jane. Her prize, readers, after a youth of fighting for some smidgen of autonomy? Marrying
him
: the bad-tempered guy who kept his first wife in the attic, wooed Jane through a series of elaborate head games, and was, by the time she landed him, blind and missing a hand.

It was supposed to be romantic, but it felt bleak. Paths that were once wide and dotted with naughty friends and conspiratorial sisters and malevolent cousins, with scrapes and adventures and hopes and passions, had narrowed and now seemed to lead only to the tending of dull husbands and the rearing of insipid children to whom the stories soon would be turned over, in pallid follow-ups like
Jo's Boys
and
Anne of Ingleside
.

My dismay, of course, was partially symptomatic of the form. Coming-of-age-tales,
bildungsroman
, come to their tautological ends when their subjects reach adulthood. But embedded in the structure of both literature and life was the reality that for women, adulthood—and with it, the end of the story
—was
marriage.

Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs. It was often at just the moment that their educations were complete and their childhood ambitions coming into focus that these troublesome, funny girls were suddenly contained, subsumed, and reduced by domesticity.

Later, I would learn that Shakespeare's comedies ended with wedlock and his tragedies with death, making marriage death's narrative equivalent and supporting my childhood hunch about its ability to shut down a story. My mother, a Shakespeare professor, would note wistfully to me that some of the Bard's feistiest and most loquacious heroines, including Beatrice in
Much Ado about Nothing
, ceased to have any lines after their dramatically conclusive marriage alliances.

Weren't there any interesting fictional women out there who
didn't
get married as soon as they became grown-ups, I wondered, even as a kid.

As I got older, I would discover that yes, there were plenty of stories about women who didn't get married. I would read about
Tar Baby
's Jadine Childs, whose determination to flout gendered and racial expectations gets her cast out from her world, and about Theodore Dreiser's
Sister Carrie, who barters sex for capital gain and ends up empty. I'd read
Persuasion
, about Anne Elliot, who, unmarried at twenty-seven, veers perilously close to an economically and socially unmoored fate before being saved from the indignity of spinsterhood by Captain Wentworth. I'd read about Hester Prynne and Miss Havisham and Edith Wharton's maddening, doomed Lily Bart.

These were not inspiring portraits. Collectively, they suggested that women who remained unmarried, whether by choice or by accident, were destined to wear red letters or spend their lives dancing in unused wedding dresses or overdose on chloral hydrate. These characters might not have wed, but their
lack
of husbands constrained and defined them, just as surely as marriage would have.

They seemed to confirm Simone de Beauvoir's observation about real life women, which I would also, eventually, uncover: that, by definition, we “are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being.”

By the time I was on the verge of becoming a woman, ready to leave home for college, nothing could have been more implausible to me than the notion of becoming a wife to anyone anytime soon. By most accounts, marriage was coming to swallow me up in just a few short years. However, with my mind firmly absorbed by picking classes, worrying about roommates and keg parties and finding a job near campus, nothing could have seemed less likely.

At eighteen, I had never even had a serious boyfriend, and neither had any of my closest girlfriends. The people I knew who were my age in the early 1990s didn't really “date.” We hung out, hooked up, drank beer, smoked cigarettes and pot and some of us, but by no means all of us, had sex. Very few got into heavy romantic relationships. Sure, perhaps I was just a misfit girl destined never to fall in love (a suspicion I logged many hours cultivating), let alone marry. But actually, I couldn't envision any of my girlfriends married anytime soon either.

I was on the verge of tasting meaningful independence, of becoming myself. The notion that in a handful of years, I might be ready, even eager, to enter a committed, legal, purportedly permanent relationship with a new family and a new home was patently absurd.

Yet this was what had happened to practically every adult I knew in
the generation before mine. Growing up in rural Maine, my mother had already had one serious boyfriend by the time that she turned eighteen. Many of the women with whom she'd gone to high school were married—or pregnant and on their way to getting married—by the time she'd left for college. As an undergraduate in the early 1960s, my mother would serve as a student guide to Betty Friedan when she visited campus to discuss
The Feminine Mystique;
she would also go on to marry my father at twenty-one, days after her graduation, before getting her Masters and her PhD. My aunt, five years my mother's junior, had had a series of high-school swains before meeting my uncle in college and marrying him at twenty-three, also before getting her PhD. In this, my mother and aunt were not unusual. My friends' mothers, my mother's friends, my teachers: Most of them had met their spouses when in their early twenties.

Throughout America's history, the start of adult life for women—whatever else it might have been destined to include—had been typically marked by marriage. As long as there had been such records kept in the United States, since the late nineteenth century, the median age of first marriage for women had fluctuated between twenty and twenty-two. This had been the shape, pattern, and definition of female life.