All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (5 page)

Even without a raised consciousness, Steinem's life, by the late 1960s, served as a striking emblem of the era's new possibilities for women: She was unmarried, widely traveled, professionally successful, and open about her sexual appetites. In a 1968 television interview, Canadian broadcaster Moses Znaimer asked thirty-four-year-old Steinem about her reputation as a “chick with a good sense of the vibrations;” he questioned how she'd gone undercover at
Playboy,
since he “thought you had to be stacked to be a bunny girl;” he asked if she cooked (she was ironing in the interview). He asked her if she ever wanted to marry.

“Eventually,” Steinem replied, “but it keeps receding two years into the comfortable distance.” Did she think about it a lot? Yes, she said. “You imagine what it would be like to be married to people you're going out with . . . maybe it's a lady's thing . . . You think, ‘Let's see, my name would be Gloria Burgermeister. . . . nah.' ” In the interview's final question, Znaimer asks Steinem what she wants to be “when you grow up.”

“Free,” Steinem replies, “and old . . . and a little mean.”
¹⁸

A year later, Steinem wrote a piece called “After Black Power, Women's Liberation,” in which she reported on the growing feminist movement. That same year, while covering an abortion speak-out in Greenwich Village, Steinem, who had had an abortion in Europe in her early twenties, experienced a conversion.

Within months, she was testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment; she co-founded, along with Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Myrlie Evers, Fanny Lou Hamer, and Friedan, the National Women's Political Caucus. In 1971, she and Letty Cottin Pogrebin launched
Ms
. magazine, the title of which rejected the notion that marital status should be the identifying feature of a woman.

Steinem's most powerful gift was her ability to synthesize radical sentiments into appealingly pithy, era-defining sound bites.

“We are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” she said, clarifying that an opposition to marriage need not be about the rejection of men or love, but rather about the filling out and equaling up of female life. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” she was often credited with coining (actually, the phrase came from Australian educator Irina Dunn
¹⁹
). More sharply, Steinem argued that marriage rendered women “half people,” and once explained that she had not married, and would not marry, because, “I can't mate in captivity.” It was a funny line, borne of deep dissatisfactions and anger over the way life had been until now.

Not everyone was charmed.

“I guess [she] gave some comfort to the singles,” Betty Friedan would later say of Steinem. “But really, Gloria was a phony. She always had a man. And I used to catch her hiding behind a
Vogue
magazine at Kenneth's having her hair streaked.”
²⁰

Steinem herself made the same point to me in 2012, noting that she had been “somewhat protected” from certain kinds of man-hating caricature and denigration because “I always had a man in my life.” However, that was part of what made her so useful when it came to offering a more fetching vision of unmarried life than had previously been available. Steinem's beauty, her independence, her unapologetic heterosexual appetites, and her steady stream of suitors could not easily be written off as
froideur
, as man-hating, as homosexuality. What was so disruptive about Steinem, and other women who were living like her, whether or not they had men on their arms, was that it seemed she just really enjoyed being free.

More young unmarried women were about to join her, thanks to two landmark cases decided in the early seventies.

The Supreme Court had made birth control legal for married couples in the 1965 case,
Griswold v. Connecticut
, basing its decision on the opinion that a ban violated the privacy of the marital bedroom's “innermost sanctum.” But, for single women, the relevant decision came seven years later. In 1972's
Eisenstadt v. Baird
, the Court struck down a law that prohibited the sale of contraception to unmarried persons, thus affirming “the right of the
individual
, married or single, to be free from unwarranted
governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”

The decision affirmed both parties within a heterosexual union as individual entities with rights, a break from some long-standing principles of marital law, which had, in various forms over two centuries, meant that women forfeited many elements of their identities and their liberties upon marrying. “The marital couple is not an independent entity with a mind and heart of its own,” wrote Justice William Brennan in his decision, “but an association of two individuals each with a separate intellectual and emotional make-up.” It was like a legal equivalent of
Ms
.
Magazine
: the recognition that Americans' rights should neither be circumscribed nor made more expansive based simply on whether they were wed. As the historian Nancy Cott writes, by “refusing to deny single persons the privacy that married couples were granted, [
Eisenstadt
] moved toward displacing marriage from the seat of official morality.”
²¹

One year later, the court ruled in
Roe v. Wade
that abortion was legal. The decision affected married and single women equally. But, for the unmarried, legal abortion provided yet another tool to protect their ability to live outside of marriage.

By 1973, the
idea
of independent womanhood was worming its way into the national imagination persistently enough that
Newsweek
published a cover story that fulsomely asserted that “singlehood has emerged as an intensely ritualized—and newly respectable—style of American life. . . . It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.”
²²
And, in 1974, Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, making it easier for women to secure credit cards, bank loans, and mortgages, and to buy their own homes.

While the women's movement had not been explicitly driven by efforts to advocate for single women, what it had succeeded at doing, via its impact on politics, economics, and the law, was to create options besides or in advance of marriage. With every passing year in the 1970s, there were simply more ways to valorize female existence: more jobs to apply for, flings to have, money to earn.

As these new temptations clashed with the retro realities of marriages begun in a pre-feminist era, the divorce rate skyrocketed, hitting close to
50 percent through the late 1970s and 1980s. The divorce boom had a huge impact on never or not-yet married women. First, it created more single people, helping to slowly destigmatize the figure of the woman without a ring on her finger. It also forced a very public reckoning with marriage as an institution of variable quality. The realization that a bad marriage might be bad enough to cause a painful split provided ammunition to those women who preferred to abstain from marriage than to enter a flawed one.

What the women's movement of the 1970s did, ultimately, was not to shrink marriage, or the desire for male companionship, as a reality for many women, but rather to enlarge the
rest
of the world to such an extent that marriage's shadow became far less likely to blot out the sun of other possibilities. As legal scholar Rachel Moran writes, “One of the great ironies of second-wave feminism is that it ignored single women as a distinct constituency while creating the conditions that increasingly enabled women to forego marriage.”
²³

At the conclusion of the 1970s, the number of never-married persons was at its lowest
²⁴
ever (mostly because the calculation included the enormous swell of married, now divorcing, Baby Boomers), but the rate of women who were getting married was beginning to slow noticeably, and the median age of first marriage had inched up to twenty-two.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan cruised into the Oval Office on a wave of aspersions cast on women he depicted as relying on government assistance in place of husbands, or in his parlance, “welfare queens.” His ascension had come on the back of, and in tandem with, the rise of the New Right, an alliance of fiscal and social conservatives aligned around a commitment to religious righteousness and reversing the victories of twentieth-century social progressives. He struck the Equal Rights Amendment from the Republican Party's platform, where it had remained since 1940; he supported the so-called Human Life Amendment, which would have banned almost all abortions, and defined life as beginning at fertilization.

It was morning in post-feminist America, and the backlash, against the women's movement and the single women whose swelling numbers seemed to emblematize its success most uncomfortably, was in full force.

In 1985, a study conducted by male researchers from Harvard and
Yale concluded that a never-married, university-educated forty-year-old woman had only a 2.6 percent chance of ever marrying. It spurred
Newsweek
to publish its infamous cover story “The Marriage Crunch,” in which it made the famously inaccurate claim that single women at age forty were more likely to be killed by terrorists than to marry.
People
published photos of unmarried celebrities under the headline “Are These Old Maids?”
²⁵
and warned that “most single women over thirty-five can forget about marriage.” The social and cultural resistance to the spurning of marriage was evident.

And yet, women kept right on
not
marrying. In 1990, the median age for first marriage for women jumped to nearly twenty-four, the highest it had been in the century in which it had been recorded.

The future had arrived. With it had come echoes of the past advances of unmarried women, this time threatening the status quo with the sexual and economic power won for them by previous generations. Rising to meet them would be new iterations of old political and cultural opposition, figures anxious to corral these Amazons back into the marital fold.

Abstention from or delay of marriage may have been a conscious choice for some women in the 1970s and 1980s, but it has now simply become a mass behavior. The most radical of feminist ideas—the disestablishment of marriage—has, terrifyingly for many conservatives, been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent, but ever more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life. The independence of women from marriage decried by Moynihan as a pathology at odds with the nation's patriarchal order is now a norm.

By 2013, about half of first-time births were to unmarried women; for women under thirty, it was almost 60 percent.
²⁶
The same year, the National Center for Family and Marriage Research released a study that revealed the marriage rate to be the lowest it had been in over a century.
²⁷
“Marriage is no longer compulsory,” the co-director of the NCFMR said in a statement about the study. “It's just one of an array of options.”

That array of options is pretty stunning compared to the narrow chute of hetero marriage and maternity into which most women were herded just a few decades ago. Millions of women now live with, but do not marry, long-term partners; others move in and out of sequential monogamous relationships; live sexually diverse lives; live outside of romantic or sexual relationships altogether, both with and without children; marry or enter civil unions with members of the same sex or combine some of these options.

The journey toward legal marriage for gays and lesbians may seem at odds with what looks like a flight
from
marriage by heterosexuals. But in fact, they are part of the same project: a dismantling of the institution as it once existed—as a rigidly patrolled means by which one sex could exert legal, economic, and sexual power over another—and a reimagining of it as a flexible union to be entered, ideally, on equal terms.

Taken together, these shifts, by many measures, embody the worst nightmare of social conservatives: a complete rethinking of who women are and who men are and, therefore, also of what family is and who holds dominion within it . . . and outside it. The expanded presence of women as independent entities means a redistribution of all kinds of power, including electoral power, that has, until recently, been wielded mostly by men.

In 2012, unmarried women made up a remarkable 23 percent of the electorate. Almost
a quarter
of votes were cast by women without husbands, up three points from just four years earlier. According to Page Gardner, founder of the Voter Participation Center, in the 2012 presidential election, unmarried women, who have a vested stake in their own economic and reproductive rights, drove turnout in practically every demographic, making up “almost 40 percent of the African-American population, close to 30 percent of the Latino population, and about a third of all young voters.”

Single women helped put Barack Obama back in the White House;
they voted for him by 67 to 31 percent, while married women voted for Romney. In the 2013 Virginia race for governor, the Democratic candidate beat his Republican rival, carrying women by nine points, but single women by what the
New York Times
called
²⁸
“a staggering 42 percentage points.” Unmarried women's political leanings are not, as has been surmised in some quarters, attributable solely to their racial diversity. According to polling firm Lake Research Partners, while white women as a whole voted for Romney over Obama,
unmarried
white women chose Obama over Romney by a margin of 49.4 percent to 38.9 percent.
²⁹
In 2013, columnist Jonathan Last wrote about a study of how women aged twenty-five to thirty voted in the 2000 election. “It turned out,” Last wrote in the
Weekly Standard
, “that the marriage rate for these women was a greater influence on vote choice than any other variable” measured.
³⁰