All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (6 page)

The connection between single female life and electoral engagement is no wonky secret. As one 2014
New York Times
story began, “The decline of marriage over the last generation has helped create an emerging voting bloc of unmarried women that is profoundly reshaping the American electorate.”

Conservatives are so aware of this that antifeminist pundit Phyllis Schlafly claimed in 2012 that President Obama was working to keep women unmarried by giving away so many social services to them. “President Obama is simply trying to promote more dependency on government hand-outs because he knows that is his constituency,”
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Schlafly said. This is how scary single women are today, and how badly Republican politicians want to lash out at them: During the October 2012 presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, when the candidates were asked about how they might stem the tide of gun violence, Romney replied that a major step in curbing “the culture of violence” in the United States was to “tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone.” Apparently, anyone (of the opposite sex) will do.

As the second decade of the twenty-first century has worn on, politicians of all stripes, aware of the political power of the unmarried woman yet seemingly incapable of understanding female life outside of a marital context, have come to rely on a metaphor in which American women,
no longer bound to men, are binding themselves to government. During the lead-up to the 2014 midterms, Fox News pundit Jesse Watters, referring to unmarried women as “Beyoncé Voters,” alleged that “they depend on government because they're not depending on their husbands. They need things like contraception, health care, and they love to talk about equal pay.” Meanwhile, some young conservatives at the College Republican National Committee took a less scolding approach, cutting a series of television ads that imagined a single female voter trying on wedding dresses in the spirit of TLC's reality show “Say Yes to the Dress,” except in the ads, the dress was actually a Republican gubernatorial candidate to whom this would-be-bride was pledging herself. Meanwhile, the liberal leaning
Cosmopolitan Magazine
launched a Get Out the Vote initiative that included a social-media–spread “Save the Date” notice for November 4, Election Day. It came with the unsubtle message, “You and the polls are getting hitched.”

Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, argued in
The Daily Beast
that the power of the single voter is destined to fade, since single people “by definition . . . have no heirs,”
³²
while their religious, conservative, counterparts will repopulate the nation with children who will replicate their parents' politics, ensuring that “conservative, more familial-oriented values inevitably prevail.” Kotkin's error, of course, is both in assuming that unmarried people do not reproduce—in fact, they are doing so in ever greater numbers—but also in failing to consider whence the gravitation away from married norms derived. A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from a clamshell: It was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequities of religious, conservative, social practice. Why should we believe that children born to social conservatives will not tread a similar path, away from conservative values, as the one walked by generations of traditionally raised citizens before them? The impulse toward liberation isn't inoculated against by strict conservative backgrounds; it's often inculcated by them.

What all the electoral hand-wringing reveals is the seriousness of anxieties about how, exactly, independent women might wield their unprecedented influence, if only they came out to vote in full numbers, which they too often fail to do.

Unmarried women are among the voters who are hardest to pull to the polls. In part because they are often poor, many of them overworked single mothers with multiple commitments, low-paying jobs that don't permit them time to stand in line at the voting booth, or women for whom social policy has already failed so badly that they might not even see the point of voting. According to Page Gardner, in 2016, “For the first time in history, a majority of women voters are projected to be unmarried.” Yet going into the last presidential election season, nearly 40 percent of them had not registered to vote.
³³

And yet, even with only a relatively small percentage of them voting, these single American women have already shown that they have the power to change America, in ways that make many people extremely uncomfortable.

In 2012, a then-unmarried Georgetown law student, Sandra Fluke, testified about the insurance regulations being proposed for women buying birth control. Fluke's argument barely touched on issues of sexual freedom; it was instead about money, wages, education, about the rights that women have to live multi-faceted lives—the kinds that are now more possible, since marriage has become decentralized as the defining experience of female adulthood—without being taxed extra to control their reproduction.

When he tore into Fluke's testimony in a lengthy on-air rant, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh couldn't seem to get past his spluttering fury at the fact that she was arguing for her rights to a product that would enable her to have unmonitored amounts of sex. Limbaugh turned promptly to eroticized denigration of the independent woman in a way that recalled the treatment of Anita Hill twenty years earlier. On his syndicated radio show, Limbaugh called Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute;” “so much sex,” “so much sex,” “so much sex,” he repeated, extending his condemnation to envelop Fluke's generational cohort, the “co-eds” who hook up “with as many partners as they want . . . Whatever, no limits on this.” Limbaugh said “unlimited”
repeatedly, conveying his unmistakable fury that women had successfully conspired to evade the restraints that marriage and custom used to provide.

Fluke, and the growing power of other independent women she seemed to represent, was an irritant to these conservatives. More than that, they feared, she might be contagious . . . positively pestilential.

A writer at
The American Spectator
called Fluke, whom he took care to refer to as
Mizz
, “the model Welfare Queen for the 21st Century;” and warned of “how many thousands of” her ilk “are graduating this year to enter government jobs or political campaigns. They will be spreading their ideas to all within hearing.”
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Less than a week after his Fluke attack, Limbaugh was tearing into a book on food politics written by another young woman when he paused to ask on air: “What is it with all these young, single, white women?”

Watch out for these women, these men were saying. They are everywhere.

And for those unmarried women who are not privileged white law students like Fluke, the ones over whom lawmakers can more easily exert punishing power, there is no end to the rhetorical and policy attempts to stuff them back inside a marital box and lock them there.

The idea that the decline in marriage—as opposed to broken social safety networks and economic policies that benefit the wealthy, the white, and the educated over the poor—is the source of inequality in our still fundamentally unequal world has lit a fire under Republicans in the early decades of the twenty-first century. As Florida Republican Marco Rubio has opined, “the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty . . . isn't a government spending program. It's called marriage.”
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Rubio's early competitors for the 2016 Republican nomination included Rick Santorum and Jeb Bush, politicians who have been campaigning on the denigration of single women since the Great Crossover of the mid-1990s.

In 2013, Mitt Romney's tone on the subject of early marriage became almost mournful, as he reported to graduates of Southern Virginia University during a commencement address there that “[S]ome people could marry, but choose to take more time, they say, for themselves. Others
plan to wait until they're well into their thirties or forties before they think about getting married. They're going to miss so much of living, I'm afraid.”
³⁶

This edged toward another arm of sociopolitical and economic anxiety about the growth in population of single women: the failure of these women to have enough babies.

“The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate,” wrote columnist Jonathan Last, perhaps not coincidentally the same man who has studied marital status as the biggest determining factor in partisan affiliation, in a
Wall Street Journal
column pegged to his 2012 book,
What to Expect When No One's Expecting
.

The warning reverberated in many venues, and critics fretted that women's increasing ability to devote portions of their adulthood to things other than marriage and motherhood is diminishing our national prospects. The
New York Times
conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote a piece entitled, “More Babies, Please” in which he called “the retreat from child rearing” a “decadence” and “a spirit that privileges the present over the future” and “embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.” Douthat was not specific about
whose
sacrifices had been so central to the steady repopulation of the nation, but Last himself was much more direct. Detailing the reasons for the falling number of babies, some of which he took care to call “clearly positive,” Last wrote of how “Women began attending college in equal (and then greater) numbers than men” and how “more important, women began branching out into careers beyond teaching and nursing.” Finally, he wrote, “the combination of the birth-control pill and the rise of cohabitation broke the iron triangle linking sex, marriage and childbearing.”
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Economist Nancy Folbre, responding to demographic Chicken Littles in the
New York Times
, wrote that she knew “of no historical evidence that either the productivity or the creativity of a society is determined by the age structure of its population.”
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But the anxiety may not have stemmed from historical evidence as much as it did from historical yearning: for a time before what Last described as “the iron triangle” linking women, marriage, and reproduction had been dismantled.

Whether those who worried were concerned about too many babies or too few babies, women living in poverty or women enjoying power, they all seemed to return to the same conclusion: Marriage must be reestablished as the norm, the marker and measure of female existence, against which all other categories of success are weighed.

The funny thing is that all these warnings, diagnoses, and panics—even the most fevered of them—aren't wholly unwarranted. Single women
are
upending everything; their growing presence has an impact on how economic, political, and sexual power is distributed between the genders. The ability for women to live unmarried is having an impact on our electoral politics. The vast numbers of single women living in the United States are changing our definitions of family, and, in turn, will have an impact on our social policies.

The intensity of the resistance to these women is rooted in the (perhaps unconscious) comprehension that their expanded power signals a social and political rupture as profound as the invention of birth control, as the sexual revolution, as the abolition of slavery, as women's suffrage and the feminist, civil rights, gay rights, and labor movements.

Crucially, single women played a huge part in all of those earlier ruptures. Though it may feel as though the growing numbers of unmarried women and the influence they wield have shaken the nation only in the past five decades, in fact, the story of single women's nation-shaping power is threaded into the story of the nation itself.

Women, perhaps especially those who have lived untethered from the energy-sucking and identity-sapping institution of marriage in its older forms, have helped to drive social progress of this country since its founding.

In 1563, England's House of Lords petitioned its Queen: “That it please your Majesty to dispose yourself to marry, where you will, with whom you will, and as shortly as you will.” The monarch was Elizabeth Tudor, England's “Virgin Queen,” who ruled from 1558 to 1603 and refused, to her death, to marry. Elizabeth considered several marriage proposals, some of which would have forged valuable international alliances, but remained independent, proclaiming after Parliament's first entreaty to her in 1558 “I have long since made choice of a husband, the kingdom of England,” explaining in another instance her desire to remain unencumbered: “I will have here but one mistress and no master.” She is reported to have said to a foreign emissary, “If I am to disclose to you what I should prefer if I follow the inclination of my nature, it is this: beggar-woman and single, rather than queen and married.”
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The truth was that it would have been much harder for a beggar woman to have remained single than it was for Elizabeth. As historians Judith Bennett and Amy Froide observed in their study of single women in early Europe, “Women almost never found occupations that paid as well as the work of men,” making life outside of marriage almost impossible, but, among elites, “wealthy heiresses who controlled their own destinies were better able than other women to forego marriage.” They cite Elizabeth as “an obvious example of the link between female control of property and singleness.”
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If Elizabeth is an example of how rare it was for centuries of women to flourish outside of marriage, she's also an example of the degree to which those women who contrived to remain single often found themselves better able than their married counterparts to exercise some control over their own fates, and, in extraordinary cases, to leave their marks on the world.