All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (4 page)

Terri McMillan's
Waiting to Exhale
, a 1992 novel about four female friends, some recently jilted, juggling the personal and the professional,
remained on the bestseller list for months, and would be made into a movie. Four years later, British writer Helen Fielding published
Bridget Jones's Diary
, and was credited with kicking off a new publishing genre, “chick lit,” devoted to the stories of women, whom Bridget's best friend would, in self-parody, describe as “a pioneer generation daring to refuse to compromise in love and relying on our own economic power.”

As the millennium dawned, it was impossible to watch out for all the women who were coming to change America.

If women slowed their rush to the altar in huge numbers starting in the 1990s, their
ability
to do so was built directly on political, economic, social, and sexual victories won by the previous generation, during what is commonly known as the Second Wave of the women's movement. Several Second Wave feminists would remind me pointedly during my research for this book that my generation had far from invented contemporary habits of marital abstinence or delay; by many measures, theirs had.

And, to some degree, they're right: Many women whose consciousness had been raised and opportunities expanded by feminism actively decided, for political and personal reasons, to postpone or forego marriage.

They didn't do so in numbers large enough to create a demographic earthquake, to change the marrying behaviors of the masses, at least not right away. Because while its victories would transform the landscape in ways that would make it far more possible for my generation to delay marriage, the Second Wave was not built on opposition to marriage, but rather a desire to address its suffocating circumstances.

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the Unites States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover
material, ate peanut-butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question “Is this all?”
⁹

Is this all? Betty Friedan's first paragraph sliced the mid-century American situation for middle-class white women to its quick: asserting that the ennui, anger, and unhappiness experienced by millions of American women was the product of the “millions of words” spilled by experts assuring women that “their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers.” These sages had spent a decade and a half, Friedan reported, telling women “how to catch a man and keep him . . . that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights—the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for.” Those women who'd been raised with the limited scope of female possibility offered by mid-twentieth century America, Friedan argued, believed that “All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.”

The Feminine Mystique
would sell 1.4 million copies of its first paperback printing and, though its popularity was likely a symptom of the fact that Friedan's ideas were already in circulation and gaining steam in other quarters, it would be widely credited as having kicked off the Second Wave.
¹⁰
Early marriage and domestic confinement were so pervasive for middle-class white women in the middle of the twentieth century that the nation's most mass, conscious move to emancipate women erupted directly in response to it.

Yet, funnily enough, as the legal scholar Rachel Moran argues, while the feminist movement of the 1970s was in part a “direct response to these conditions of early and pervasive marriage,” the ironic side effect was that
single
women had almost no place in the underpinnings of the movement.

As much as
The Feminine Mystique
was a cry against the limitations that early marriage and motherhood imposed on women, it did not assume (or even consider) that marriage itself was the problematic element, or that it might ever be optional for women. Friedan's vision of female empowerment entailed the expansion of activity
outside
the domestic sphere, but it did not question the primacy of that sphere itself.

Friedan's reflexive connections between male attention and female fulfillment—as well as the rather dim regard in which she held most single women—are evident throughout her book.
¹¹
“Strangely, a number of psychiatrists state that, in their experience, unmarried women patients were happier than married ones,” writes Friedan with obvious perplexity. Elsewhere, she cites Susan B. Anthony as the early feminist who most closely resembled the myth of the “embittered shrew,” conceding (generously, she must have thought) that while Anthony “felt betrayed when the other [suffragists] started to marry and have babies,” she did not end up some “bitter spinster with a cat.”

When Friedan, who would co-found and become the first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, was asked about NOW's mission in a television interview, she replied that the group's message was about revising the “conditions that prevent women from easily combining marriage and motherhood and work.”
¹²
The group's mission statement amplified this intention, noting that NOW did “not accept the traditional assumption that a woman has to choose between marriage and motherhood, on the one hand, and a serious participation in industry or the professions on the other . . . We believe that a true partnership between the sexes demands a different concept of marriage, an equitable sharing of the responsibilities
¹³
 . . .” It was (and remains!) a revolutionary vision, but the organization was not the National Organization of
Married
Women, and yet there was no hint of recognition that not every woman's life would (or should) include marriage and children, in that order.

This was only one way in which Friedan's vision was blinkered.

In addition to her inability to conceive of middle-class white women who might not
want
the youthful unions into which they were being nudged, Friedan also didn't consider the population of American women who were already altering marriage patterns, who had in recent years been marrying at declining rates and at later ages, who had been working outside the home for longer than that, supporting themselves and sometimes their children, both alongside, and independent of, husbands. Friedan did not include black women in her vision.

Black women, who experienced both gender and racial wage discrimination, who were less likely than their white peers to have college educations or economic power, and whose families and potential husbands
were also less likely to have college educations or economic power, were also far less likely than white women to have the
choice
of not working outside their homes. They were therefore far less likely to experience the kind of domestic disenchantments from which Friedan's readers suffered.

Black women had in fact already made some of the very points for which Friedan was being hailed. Philadelphia lawyer Sadie Alexander had argued in the 1930s that women yearned to “place themselves again among the producers of the world” by involving themselves in work “that resulted in the production of goods that have a price value.”
¹⁴
Not only would this increase women's status and security in the world, Alexander argued, in advance of Friedan, but “the satisfaction which comes to the woman in realizing that she is a producer makes for peace and happiness, the chief requisites in any home.”

Even worse was that at practically the same moment that Friedan was being credited with jump starting the women's movement by advocating extramarital wage-earning that black women had been doing for generations, black women were being blamed for a different sort of social disruption. Two years after the publication of
The Feminine Mystique
, women whose experiences had foregrounded its philosophies were at the center of a national conversation about the devolution of the black family unit and the social and economic blight it was presumed to have precipitated.

In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor and future New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan released a report called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” It was, in some ways, a thoughtful account of the systemic racial inequality that had plagued the nation since its founding, with Moynihan arguing that “the American Republic, which at birth was flawed by the institution of Negro slavery, and which throughout its history has been marred by the unequal treatment of Negro citizens” long had fallen short of “the full promise of the Declaration of Independence.” Moynihan rightly acknowledged the development of middle-class white suburbs and abandonment of poor cities to African-Americans as having created a class chasm between the races, noting that “because of this new housing pattern—most of which has been financially assisted by the Federal government—it is probable that the American school system has become
more
, rather than less segregated in the past two decades.”

Yet, despite these insights into the unequal histories and prospects of America's
black and white populations, Moynihan boiled his argument down to one, punishing point: that the root of black poverty lay with the breakdown of marital norms for which nonconforming women were responsible. The “deterioration of the Negro family,” Moynihan argued, was tied to the high number of dissolved marriages, illegitimate births and the fact that “almost one-fourth of Negro families are headed by women.”

There was some logic here: In economically unstable communities, raising children on single, low incomes is an inherently unstable proposition. But there was no consideration that those single incomes were a result as much as a cause, that reduced economic opportunity made marriage a less beneficial option for women, that women's work outside the home was, rather than a detriment, key to keeping disadvantaged black communities and families afloat. Instead, Moynihan positioned female independence from men and dominance within the family at the center of a “tangle of pathology” that created “a matriarchal structure which, because it is out of line with the rest of American society,” and its
patriarchal
structure, “seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.”

In the burgeoning feminist movement, the voices of figures more radical than Friedan began to get more notice for their arguments that women should not simply move toward the workforce, but away from marriage as the ratifying stamp of female worth.

In 1969, University of Chicago sociology professor Marlene Dixon wrote that “the institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women . . . In a very real way the role of wife has been the genesis of women's rebellion throughout history.” The next year, feminist Sheila Cronan wrote, “Since marriage constitutes slavery for women . . . Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.” Radical feminist writer Andrea Dworkin famously commented that “Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.”

In 1970, the median age of first marriage for women remained under twenty-one,
and 69.4 percent of Americans over the age of eighteen were married.
¹⁵
This is remarkable, in part, because of other social and political upheavals already well underway: In 1960, the FDA had approved the birth control pill for contraceptive use, an early step toward (or symptom of) what would become the sexual revolution. And, in 1969, the Stonewall riots had kicked off a gay rights movement that would be driven explicitly by the fight for acceptance by women and men who had no desire to partner with members of the opposite sex.

The emergence of gay women as a political faction was not an altogether welcome development within the Second Wave. Friedan herself would famously refer to lesbians as a “lavender menace” and, in later years, would voice her loathing
¹⁶
of women she called “man-hating” feminists, whose “down-with-men, down-with-marriage, down-with-childbearing rhetoric and actions” threatened to wrest control of feminism from “women who wanted equality but who also wanted to keep on loving their husbands and children.”
¹⁷

In fact, for some time, the intersections of the gay rights and women's rights movements seemed mostly to provide evidence both of the strength of homophobia amongst social progressives and gender iconoclasts, and of how inconceivable it remained even to many 1970s feminists that heterosexual women might live willingly single: The only way some feminists were able to absorb the notion of a woman who didn't necessarily want to marry a man was to understand her as homosexual.

At least until Gloria came along.

In the early 70s, feminism got a new and powerful popularizer, a woman who would come to stand (insufficiently and often to her own dismay) for the diverse, cacophonous, flawed, and multifaceted movement whose sometimes spiky messages she was so capable of transmitting smoothly to the broader public.

Gloria Steinem had come to New York from her native Toledo, and began a successful career as a writer for print and television; she was mentioned alongside other “new journalism” stars like Tom Wolfe, and was a stylish darling of New York's 1960s media scene, often photographed in the company of well-known men, many of whom she was dating.

Steinem was late to feminism. In 1962, she'd written a story about
contraception that laid out the ways in which women were asked to choose between career and marriage; the next year she did an undercover exposé of Hugh Hefner's sex-themed
Playboy
clubs. However, her political engagements were with the Democratic Party, the civil rights, and antiwar movements; they didn't yet extend to the burgeoning women's movement. In 1963, the year that the
Feminine Mystique
was published, Steinem had written
The Beach Book
, a guide to travel and tanning that featured a foil cover flap that readers might use to catch rays.