All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (33 page)

And again, economic struggle is not the exclusive domain of people of color. Hanna Rosin writes persuasively about how the collapse of blue-collar jobs around the nation—the shipping of manufacturing offshore—has resulted in decreased marriage rates around the country. Coontz points out that, even
before
the start of the recession, “the average employed guy with a high-school degree made almost $4 less an hour, in constant dollars, than his counterpart in 1979.”
⁵³
Even for those who are not living below the poverty line, the financial stress of unemployment, stagnated wages, high education costs, and the reverberations of the mortgage crisis make the prospect of partnering much more tenuous. Not just practically, but emotionally.

In a story about the pervasive health problems experienced by poor white women, journalist Monica Potts wrote, “In low-income white communities of the South, it is still women who are responsible for the home and for raising children, but increasingly, they are also raising their husbands. A husband is a burden and an occasional heartache rather than a helpmate.” Poor women, Potts writes, “are working the hardest and earning the most in their families but can't take the credit for being the
breadwinners. Women do the emotional work for their families, while men reap the most benefits from marriage.”

Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have explained that “money is related to love. Those with more household income are slightly more likely to experience that feeling. Roughly speaking, doubling your income is associated with being about four percentage points more likely to be loved.” Perhaps, Stevenson and Wolfers guessed, having money makes it easier to find time to date, or maybe there are correlative reasons: “It's possible,” the economists continue in a Valentine's Day editorial, “that other factors correlated with income, such as height or appearance, are the real source of attraction. Or maybe being loved gives you a boost in the labor market.”
⁵⁴

It's also possible that
not
having money distracts a person from her personal life, or puts her in a dating pool with others who are
also
distracted by not having money. Financial tension makes marriages far more unstable. Impoverished communities have higher rates of depression, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and gun violence.

When (white) men had union-protected jobs at manufacturing plants and could get a good rate on a loan for a three bedroom house and had a pension plan, marrying one of them—especially when women didn't have these kinds of opportunities themselves—made sense. But when men are struggling and women are more capable than ever of economic, social, sexual, and parental independence, marriage doesn't just become unnecessary; bad versions of it can become burdensome and deleterious to women.

Jason DeParle's story about the two women in Michigan whose circumstances, we are to believe, are shaped by their marital status, reveals that the father of Schairer's three children “earned little, berated her often, and did no parenting.” She later met and moved in with another man, but DeParle reports that, “It took a call to the police to get him to go.” There's not much of a case that marrying either of these guys would have had a positive impact on Schairer's fortunes, economic or familial.

It's important to remember that, while poverty certainly makes single life harder, it also makes married life harder, so much harder that single life might be preferable. The number of married parents living below the poverty line increased by almost 40 percent between 2000 and 2012.
⁵⁵
In
his 2014 book,
Labor's Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America
, sociologist Andrew Cherlin points out that while the median income for dual-earning couples rose by 30 percent between 1980 and 2012, and the median income for single mothers rose by 11 percent, the median income for married but
single
-earning configurations did not rise at all. Marriage by itself did not automatically improve economic prospects; having two earners did.

Of course, single mothers in tricky financial circumstances might well benefit from a partner in non-economic capacities. Many women yearn for, and their lives might be significantly improved by, mates with whom they are in love, who offer them emotional support, who share the domestic labors, care for children, split the emotional burdens of life and family, whether or not they provide second incomes. But those good, well-matched, mates aren't simply available for the asking, and bad marriages—as well as the divorces that are often their conclusion—are economically and emotionally devastating, especially for women, and most especially for women who are already economically vulnerable.

Emmalee works as a customer service representative in Brooklyn. Twenty-four, she is the mother of a toddler and lives with, but is not married to, the father of her child. “With marriage comes divorce,” she said. “I just feel like you're probably a bit more separated from each other.” Emmalee likes the way things are now. “I like being together with someone but not married,” she said, but by the time she's thirty-five, “I can see myself pushing [for it]: Like, okay, I'm getting old, maybe I should get married, especially if I'm still with him. In another ten years or so, I would look into that.”

Because it is now
possible
for women to live without marriage, because they are more able than ever before to have independent professional, economic, sexual, and maternal lives, marriage has become potentially
more
meaningful than ever before. As Edin and others have argued, the lack of correlation between childbearing and marriage leads marriage to have a
“high symbolic value;” it's something that women and men feel is worth holding out for, waiting for, being prepared to enter responsibly.

The problem is, once again, that, in low-income communities, the opportunities to gain that steady footing are far fewer than they are for those with access to good educations and good jobs.

One favorite spin on these structural inequities, frequently put forth by conservatives, including Phyllis Schlafly, is that economically disadvantaged people don't marry because combining incomes can push family earnings too high to qualify for help from the government. And because of the way welfare laws are structured, this is true for some.

In addition to her earnings as a customer service representative, Emmalee receives food stamps, Medicaid, and help from the Women, Infants, Children program (WIC), which provides supplemental nutrition for low-income women and children up to five years old. “I make ends meet,” she said. “I'm able to survive. I get a little help from the government without being married. If I was married, I probably wouldn't get that extra help from them.” Emmalee lives with her boyfriend, the father of her child. She said that the question of government aid wasn't wholly behind their decision not to marry. “Not my end result,” she said, “but kind of, yeah.”

So, there are logical reasons why economic need might have an impact on choices women make about marriage. But it certainly doesn't have
enough
of an impact to account for the number of unmarried women out there. As Tim Casey from Legal Momentum pointed out, “Welfare has such a negative image in society; it has such a stigma attached to it. Nobody wants to be on welfare.” People accept government help because they really need government help, not because it is a rewarding alternative to marriage. Welfare benefits, contra Schlafly, have never been “lavish”—far from it—and their value has only diminished over the decades.

Those who blame the rise of the welfare state for falling marriage rates, write Edin and Kefalas, fail to take this into account: “The expansion of the welfare-state could not have been responsible for the growth in non-marital childbearing during the 1980s and 1990s for the simple reason that in the mid 1970s, all states but California stopped adjusting their cash welfare benefits for inflation. By the early 1990s a
welfare check's real value had fallen nearly 30 percent. Meanwhile, marriage rates continued to decline while the rate of unmarried childbearing showed persistent growth.”
⁵⁶

And then there's the fact that most struggling women are just as attached to the idea of their own financial independence and future stability as their more educated and privileged peers.

The Fragile Families study found that the factors most likely to influence whether a couple married within a year after the birth of a child were not only the man's employment and annual earnings, but also the woman's education and wage rate, showing that economic stability—coming from both partners in the relationship—is one of the keys to romantic stability.

Emmalee, who has an associate's degree, is determined to get more secure in coming years. “I would see myself in more of a career,” she said, “Because [being a customer service representative] is not a career, this is just a job.” Emmalee wants to be in law enforcement, she said, “Because I want a better life for my son. I want more for him.” As a cop, she said, she'd have benefits and get pay raises. “I could probably get a house one day, and a car. The good stuff. And plus, I did go to college for something. What's really important to me right now that I can think of is more stability, definitely more stability, more certainty with my future.”

Edin and Kefalas contend that work and economic ambition are keys to low-income women's vision of the future. The single mothers Edin spoke to, she said in a lecture at the University of Michigan, “believed it was vitally important and emphasized to us over and over again that both
they and
their partners are economically ‘set' prior to marriage.” Many of these women, Edin continued, “have a strong aversion to economic dependence on a man.” They see their own economic stability, their jobs, as a “defense against patriarchal sex role expectations and a defense against bad behaviors,” including substance abuse, cheating, and domestic violence, as well as “insurance” in case of a break up. “They're worried,” said Edin, “that if they don't earn money they won't have the power to negotiate for equal say in the relationship.”

For the hardest-working and lowest-paid Americans, it's easy to imagine that the dream might be
not
working, but staying home instead. But
many of these economically challenged women feel that working for money is good for them and for their marriages. Adrianne Frech and Sarah Damaske did a study that showed that women who worked after having children were healthier physically and mentally by the time they hit forty than their peers who had not done paid work.
⁵⁷
And, even for lower-earning women, who are far more likely to be exhausted, depressed, and hamstrung by inflexible shift work,
not working
did not provide relief. Stephanie Coontz cites a Gallup poll from 2012 revealing that women from low-income families who did not work outside the home were less likely than working mothers from the same income brackets to report having “smiled, laughed, or enjoyed themselves ‘yesterday.' ”
⁵⁸

“My family, they believe that the woman is supposed to take care of the children and even if they work, still their primary focus is on the children and the man really doesn't play a big role in that,” said Pamela. “The man is just the moneymaker. The woman is supposed to cook and clean. I don't believe in that. I think the man should take a huge step in being involved in the child's life and being involved in the housekeeping.” Pamela said that when she considers the gendered power dynamics of marriage, she thinks of “what my mother would take from my dad.” Pamela described her father as “constantly abusive.” She insisted that it's a situation she would never tolerate in her own life. “I'd be ready to walk away after the person doesn't change,” she said. “You should be independent enough to not be treated that way.”

Pamela wants to be a lawyer. “I feel pressure
not
to conform to gender roles because I don't want to be like my mom,” she said. “My mom is stuck, and women [of her generation] who are like her are stuck. I honestly don't know why they feel that they're forced to stay with the man. . . .” Except, as she notes, that “If they are working, they're working as home-nursing aids or at a store; I don't see them taking more independent roles, like being a businesswoman or a teacher. That may be because they don't have the education to go ahead and fulfill those careers. But I do see most of them in the home.”

The increased number of single mothers—and the fire in their bellies—is visible on a national stage. Even with the comparatively few women in positions of power, a number of them, including former Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth
Warren, Wisconsin Congresswoman Gwen Moore, and Maryland Senate candidate Donna Edwards, have lived and worked toward their professional goals as single mothers.

This presents another wrinkle. As one nurse wondered, in a marriage class attended by journalist Katherine Boo in “The Marriage Cure,” her 2003 story on pro-marriage initiatives in Oklahoma, “How do you tell if he wants to marry you for the right reasons . . . ? When I wear my white uniform, guys around here know I'm working and chase me down the street to get their hands on my paycheck.”
⁵⁹

Poor women are not rejecting marriage. They, like their wealthier peers, are delaying it until it's something they can be sure of, until they feel stable and self-assured enough to hitch themselves to someone else, without fear of losing themselves or their power to marriage. Rich, middle-class, and poor women all share an interest in avoiding the dangerous pitfalls of dependency that made marriage such an inhibiting institution for decades. They all want to steer clear of the painful divorces that are the results of bad marriages; they view marriage as desirable only as an enhancement in life, not a ratifying requirement.