All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (13 page)

In metropolises, women are more likely to find a deep and diverse pool of romantic and sexual prospects, and to encounter a combination of community and anonymity that unburdens them of centuries of behavioral expectations. Cities have come to stand, in the cultural imagination, for sex and excitement and power. That they draw women toward these things makes them a catalyst for women's liberation, and for a reimagining of what it might mean for women to have full lives.

Urban landscapes often physically force people of different classes, genders, races, and religions to mix and to meet in the public spaces that they share with each other. At the end of the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century, crammed tenements often became so fetid with disease that healthy residents exploded out of them by necessity, gathering on sidewalks, hanging out of windows and on stoops, socializing in public thoroughfares. Young people, often living with multiple generations in a single flat, sought relief from airless rooms by meeting up with each other in large groups on the Bowery.

Kathy Peiss writes of the working-class leisure activities and marketplaces of early twentieth century New York, noting that “Streets served as the center of social life in the working-class districts . . . Lower East
Side streets teemed with sights of interest and penny pleasures: organ grinders and buskers played favorite airs, itinerant acrobats performed tricks, and baked-potato vendors, hot-corn stands, and soda dispensers vied for customers.”
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Working women had to traverse streets to get to jobs, early morning and late-night shifts. As the sight of them became more common, less freighted with sexual hang-ups and musty expectations of propriety, the more acceptable the notion of women as part of the urban fabric became.

In an 1896 interview with Nellie Bly, Susan B. Anthony kvelled about the habit of women bicycling. “I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,” she said, “I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent.”
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Women began promenading without shame, publicly socializing and visiting the parks erected to be the lungs of industrialized cities. The outdoors offered opportunities to push social and sexual boundaries, and young people, writes Peiss, “used the streets as a place to meet the other sex, to explore nascent sexual feelings, and carry on flirtations, all outside the watchful eyes and admonitions of parents.”
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So liberating was a life lived in the urban wild that the YWCA worried, Peiss reports, about how “young girls . . . in this unconventional out-of-door life, are so apt to grow noisy and bold.”

By the turn of the twentieth century, writes Betsy Israel in her book
Bachelor Girl
, “so many single girls were visibly out there—working, eating in restaurants, dancing—that it became harder to immediately categorize them.”
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This inability to immediately affix women with rigid class identity or expectation meant an increased potential for personal reinvention and flexibility amidst crowds of new people.

Alison Turkos was born in 1988 in Underhill, Vermont, a town with fewer than 3,000 residents and zero traffic lights. In high school and college, she said, she didn't have much of a romantic life; she was working through
questions about her identity and sexuality. When she moved to New York City to work in reproductive health activism, she said, “I discovered this incredible community of queer men and women and this whole genderqueer population.” It was so freeing, she said, that it allowed her to feel more confident about who she was, and to come out as queer, first to her family, then to the people in her hometown.

Of course, the endless appeal of a city life has drawbacks, as Alison observed, noting that as much as she loves living independently in New York, there's an insatiability that she finds discomfiting. “Everyone always feels that they can do better appearance-wise, or find someone who makes more money or is more intellectually stimulating. There's always going to be someone or something who's more enticing, more interesting.”

The madding crowds of people and of possible diversions can be overwhelming. From many urban interviewees, I heard repeated complaints of how hard it is to meet appealing mates, especially (for hetero women) as historic migration patterns hold and many cities remain home to more women than men.

Typically, single men outnumber single women where they always have: in many Western cities that once drew homesteaders and are now home to the tech industry. Eastern cities, including Boston and Atlanta, still have bigger populations of women. There are around 150,000 more single women living in New York City than there are single men,
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while the dearth of women in Alaska has long been so pronounced that Oprah Winfrey did a handful of shows about Alaskan bachelors throughout the 1990s.

For those heterosexual women who hope to find partners, these numbers are often cited as the grim dead end of youthful urban jollity. As a twenty-two-year-old in my first steady job out of college, a divorced colleague in her forties regularly made me swear, as we chain-smoked in our office and gossiped about men, that if I hadn't married by the time I was twenty-eight, I would decamp for less urban climes. “You don't want to be one of those women,” she'd say darkly. “The ones who stay after it stops being fun.”

Ten years later, into my thirties and still having fun, I had dinner with a friend who'd lived in New York, but dispatched for New Orleans
in her mid-thirties, where she'd promptly fallen in love. “As soon as you cross to the other side of the Hudson,” she'd told me, “you'll meet a man.” More recently, while chatting with a group of women about the difficulty, especially for successful black women, of meeting a man in New York, MSNBC host and political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry cracked: “Just go stand in a mall in North Carolina.” Worried that that her remark had sounded glib, Harris-Perry later elaborated: “When I say if you stand in a mall you can get a husband, I'm not saying it's a
good
husband or one you'd want to marry.” She added, even more seriously, that what she meant to convey was her sense that, “in my experience, marriage is an expectation and a desire of young adulthood for both men and women in the South. Men are actually wanting and expecting to marry and seeing marriage as a sign of full achieved adult manhood.”

Precisely. And if the reluctance of most women to go stand in the mall but, instead, to tough it out (or live it up) in largely single cities tells us one thing, it's perhaps that these women are not really living their lives to find husbands who make such firm connections between marriage and adulthood.

Journalist Jen Doll wrote in
The Village Voice
, in a very fine piece about the varied pleasures of being single in New York City: “That, to a large extent, is why we live here. It's not because we wanted to settle down with the patient and reliable plod-along schmo, and have babies and live in a three-bedroom house with a two-car garage where we peaceably grill in the summer and make casseroles in winter until we die. It's not because we wanted our lives charted out before we lived them.”

Doll's view was one that the journalist Juliet Wilbor Tompkins had scoffed off a century before, in an essay called, “Why Women Don't Marry,” in which she wrote of young single women: “They are very happy. . . . with their battle cry of freedom! To their ignorance, life offers an enchanting array of possibilities. They see ahead of them a dozen paths and have but contemptuous pity for the woman of the past who knew but one dull highway.”

Whether Tompkins was correct about the contemptuous pity, what's true today, especially in light of more contemporary possibilities, is that that one dull highway is simply not for everyone. To that end, cities permit
a degree of self-selection; they siphon from the nonurban dating pool many of those who might rather be working or playing or sleeping with someone else. Perhaps the distractible and sexually voracious actually
shouldn't
be committing to the people they'd rather be doing something else than committing to, and cities offer a place for them to live and thrive.

When we cast, as we so often do, the choice not to permanently partner as a failure or as a tragedy, we assume partnership as a norm to which everyone should or must aspire. But cities allow those who might have made restless, dissatisfied, always hungry-for-something-else mates who caused their partners unhappiness to exit the marriage highway, veering instead onto paths that take them to places that they'd rather be.

It's not such a bad thing to always have something to do, someone to meet, work to complete, trains to catch, beers to drink, marathons to run, classes to attend. By the time some women find someone to whom they'd like to commit and who'd like to commit to them, perhaps it's not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night. These same women might have greeted entry into the same institution, had they been pressured to enter it earlier, with the indignation of a child being made to go to bed early as the party raged on downstairs.

And, if marriage never happens, or before it happens, what's also true is that some women simply want to stay and keep playing. As Doll wrote, “We don't know what we want. And so we want a little bit of everything, over and over again.” In Doll's formulation, “our status as single, independent, financially solvent New York women. . . . has us sitting on a mountain of unprecedented options. Options: Those are exciting. So we want all the options, bigger and better and faster and shinier, or taller or sexier or stronger or smarter, and yet somehow also different and completely our own. We want the tippy-top of what we can get—Why shouldn't we?”

Letisha Marrero's parents had grown up in New York City. They were Puerto Ricans who were determined to give their children an American identity; they moved their family to a California suburb. Letisha came back to New York as soon as she could, working her way up at celebrity magazines, buying herself an apartment on the city's Upper West Side, dating but never finding anyone to whom she connected. When she was thirty-five, she became pregnant with a man she was about to break up with and decided to have the baby on her own.

Suddenly, the city to which she had been so driven became inhospitable. Seeking financial security, she sold her small Manhattan apartment, using the money to pay cheaper rent in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. However, when she had her daughter, with no partner and a job that didn't allow her the flexibility she needed to raise her child, she found herself pushed into increasingly underdeveloped areas, trying to find the combination of community she loved and the safety she sought as a single mother. “I didn't want to be a pioneer,” said Letisha. “Gunshots did not have any appeal to me whatsoever. I decided we had to get out somehow.”

When Letisha was laid off from a job in 2009, she realized that she had to move. She and her daughter Lola went to Virginia, closer to family and to Lola's father. Some of the relief she's felt since leaving the city, she said, has felt like “leaving an abusive relationship. It's like ‘Oh! Not everything has to be a struggle! I don't have to lug my groceries up five flights of stairs!' ” Getting her daughter into good New York City schools, and into the gifted programs in the public system was, she said, “a fight every single term. I didn't have the money and wouldn't want to pay $25,000 for my kid to go to elementary school, and here I don't have to fight to get her a good education.” She and Lola live in an apartment complex in Virginia, and Letisha now finds herself considering the appeals of yards and grills that prompted her parents to put down suburban roots.

Letisha also misses New York, and what it offered her as a single mother, even at the same time that it made it impossible for her to stay. “In New York, everybody on the corner knew who I was,” she said. “Oh, that's
the brown woman with the baby and the dog.” This sense of community was comforting, and felt safe, even in the neighborhoods that she understood to be unsafe. One of her apartments, Letisha recalled, was “right next to a shady bodega,” but she said, “Never once did I feel unsafe in there.” She said she was never harassed on the street, often felt like the shop owners who sat outside on sidewalks served as an informal neighborhood watch, and felt comfortable enough with her neighbors, in each of her New York apartments, that she could ask for help getting groceries and a stroller up the stairs. She sometimes even left Lola in a store with neighbors while she ran across the street to pick up her laundry. “The attitude was: She's one of us and we take care of our own,” she said. “I never felt like I was going to be in any danger. But you can't control the shootings, and I wouldn't go to block parties.”

In her Virginia apartment complex, Letisha said, none of her neighbors acknowledge each other.

For single women, with or without children, cities offer domestic infrastructure. The city itself becomes a kind of partner, providing for single women the kind of services that women have, for generations, provided men. Male participation in the public sphere has long been enabled by wives who cooked, mended, did laundry and housekeeping. When men were single (and when they weren't) another low-paid female population worked as their maids, laundresses, seamstresses, secretaries, and prostitutes.

Until recently, there was not a reverse set of services available to most single women. For the well-off, at least, cities go some way toward rectifying that, starting perhaps with providing residents with smaller living spaces that require less cleaning and maintenance. In a city, you are more likely to have a super to perform maintenance and, if you are affluent, a doorman to collect packages, groceries, and greet your guests. There are shops and carts on every corner devoted to preparing morning coffee and hot breakfasts for people on the way to work. It's in cities that there is a stereotype about high-flying young women who use ovens to store sweaters: a testament both to the lack of closet space and the fact that reasonably priced take-out food of nearly every ethnicity is available around the clock; in cities, the work of food preparation that for generations fell
to women becomes remarkably more negotiable. There are laundromats and tailors. There are neighbors to help with childcare; roommates with whom to split rents and electric bills. All these things make city living a partial answer to a question sociologist Arlie Hochschild has posed: “The homemaker of the 1950s is no longer at home, and so we must ask, ‘Who is going to do her work?' ”
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