All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (26 page)

Delaying marriage in order to set down professional roots, to build a solid reputation and an economic base, is an old tactic. Singer Marian Anderson turned down a marriage proposal in high school from suitor Orpheus Fisher for fear that marriage would wreck her career ambitions. She went on to become famous in Europe, befriending composer Jean Sibelius
and scientist Albert Einstein, and had already sung her historic rendition of “My Country 'Tis of Thee” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 when she finally agreed to marry Fisher in 1943, at age forty-six.

The benefit to women of marriage postponement is so reflexively understood that, as former president Bill Clinton told the story in 2015, he had to ask his girlfriend to marry him, and come to Arkansas where he was pursuing a political career, three times before she said yes. He recalled telling Hillary Rodham, “I want you to marry me, but you shouldn't do it.” Instead, he urged her to go to Chicago or New York to begin a political career of her own. “Oh, my God,” he remembered Hillary responding at one point. “I'll never run for office. I'm too aggressive, and nobody will ever vote for me.” She moved to Arkansas and married him, working as a lawyer, law professor, and for the Children's Defense Fund. She didn't put the gas on her own political career until after her husband left the White House and their daughter was in college.

Today, marriage delay is a move that women are making across the country and across classes, in both unconscious and
very
conscious ways, and the economic impact is clear. In 2013, Pew released census data revealing that, in the words of the report, “today's young women are the first in modern history to start their work lives at near parity with men. In 2012, among workers ages twenty-five to thirty-four, women's hourly earnings were 93 percent of those of men.”
⁶
Those workers represent the very same generation of women who are remaining unmarried for longer than ever before. Between 2000 and 2009, the percentage of never-married adults in that same age bracket rose from 34 percent to 46 percent.

The millions of women who are staying single, whether for life or for some chunk of adulthood, play a transformative role in the way we perceive women's relationship to work. As universities and workplaces fill with more women who support themselves through wage-earning work, our eyes are slowly beginning to adjust. We're getting better equipped to discern and digest the reality of female ambition.

Single women are helping the world get used to working women.

In 2005, I watched from the audience as the usually flinty comedian, Tina Fey, began to cry, while accepting an award, as she described how her “brilliant” mother had been told by Fey's grandfather that she would not be going to college because “that was for boys.” When it was Tina's turn for college, Fey recounted, her mother had taken an additional job in order to pay for it. Fey added that she hoped her mother derived satisfaction from the fact that her daughter had “found some success in [professions] that were just for boys.”

Every generation has struggled to overcome the gendered obstacles set before the previous one and, often, eliminate those obstacles for the next. It's striking, when talking to women about their personal and professional choices, how deeply the experiences of mothers and grandmothers influence the decisions and strategies of daughters and granddaughters. It's easy to presume that each generation of women corrects in opposition to the last, with mothers and daughters ping-ponging back and forth between prioritizing work and wifeliness, engaging in feminism or antifeminist backlash. The truer story is that even the most intense waves of backlash have rarely fully undone the progress made previously. The story of women in America has moved slowly and sometimes circularly, but largely in one direction: toward more freedom to participate in public, professional, and intellectual life.

My mother has always said that watching her mother's transformation from thwarted scientist to reborn teacher inculcated in her a commitment to
never
stopping working. “When I saw that when she was working she stopped being so unhappy,” my mother told me, shortly before retiring after almost five decades as an English professor, “That's when I knew I was never going to be a stay-at-home person.” Eleanor's work, my mother went on, “was how she defined herself. And to be honest, it's one of the reasons I've looked at retirement with certain trepidation. Work is how I define myself. I mean, I love being everybody's grandmother and mother and wife and all of that—that's wonderful. But basically, there's got to be something that's
me
, and that's been my [working] life.”

Columbia law professor Patricia Williams spoke with pride of a photograph
of her own mother, marching in the procession to receive her Masters degree in 1951, visibly pregnant with Williams. Williams's mother was married. Williams's mother “didn't ever think that she should marry
instead
of getting an education. She always thought that you should never become dependent on anyone, including a man.” Williams's grandmother also had a career, as the executive secretary to the president of a photography studio. Three generations of Williams women—descended from a slave-and-master union—had some college education.

A similar familial legacy was passed on to reproductive health activist Alison Turkos, raised by a mother who worked for the IRS and a father who worked for IBM. When Alison was a child, her father had more flexibility when it came to vacations and sick days, so he stayed home with her when she was ill, took her to doctors' appointments, and accompanied her on class trips. Her mother, meanwhile, remained intent on letting Alison and her sister know, from a young age, that one should never “enter a marriage or a relationship unless you could financially support yourself; you
always
had to have a job.” Alison opened up a Roth IRA when she was twenty-two, after her first job as a nanny.

Turkos's and Williams's maternal models stand in stark contrast to Gloria Steinem's, yet had a similar impact. Steinem's mother, Ruth Nuneviller, had been a pioneering journalist in Toledo, Ohio, but stopped working entirely after becoming mired in an unhappy marriage to Steinem's father, and experiencing a series of mental health crises that left her nearly paralyzed by depression, cared for for most of her adult life by her daughters. Ruth's circumstances created in her younger daughter a very strong “desire to separate myself from my mother, so I wouldn't have the same fate,” Steinem said. She also recalled how, when she briefly became engaged as an undergraduate, her mother offered this backhanded and ultimately prophetic observation: “It's a good thing that you're getting engaged early, because if you got a taste of being single, you'd never get married.”

The eldest of five daughters, Carmen Wong Ulrich, president of a financial services firm, understood her Dominican mother to be a “renegade,” because of her determination that all her daughters get college educations. Wong Ulrich explained that her mother had cultivated this
obsession as a girl growing up in the 1950s and 60s, without any hope of pursuing a degree of her own. Pregnant and married at nineteen, Wong Ulrich's mother spent her life conscious of her dependence on her husband, a condition that turned her into a “super feminist,” her daughter said. Wong Ulrich, a forty-one-year-old (divorced) single mother, gives financial advice on television and in magazines, regularly encouraging women to get their own credit cards and bank accounts, “so you can leave,” she said.

This, she said, “is how my mother raised us: to not ever depend on a man, because you'll get stuck depending financially on someone who could be horrible, or who could go gallivanting, but who's got you by the scruff of your neck because they
have
something on you. That's how her life was.” The freedom of having your own money, Wong Ulrich said, “has to be freedom to
not
marry the guy, to be free to
leave
the guy, and to support yourself as a single person, possibly with kids.”

Here is the nexus of where work, gender, marriage, and money collide: Dependency. Dependency on men, primarily through marriage, was the perpetual condition of centuries of women. And many women, whether or not they are politically active, ideologically committed feminists, or whether they have simply considered the lives of their mothers and foremothers, understand, under their skin, that at the heart of
independence
lies money.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin explained to me that
her
mother, a middle-class Jewish woman, had divorced her abusive first husband back in 1927, when divorce, was considered “a
shonda
.” Her mother had struggled financially for ten years, working for clothing designer Hattie Carnegie, before marrying Pogrebin's father. But, even in her second marriage, Pogrebin's mother did not forget how hard it had been to extricate herself from her first one. She began to amass a
knippel
: Yiddish for a married woman's secret stash of money, to be used as a life raft in a world in which access to money and power was patrolled by the men you married. When she was a teenager, Pogrebin's mother died, and Letty inherited her
knippel
; the money bought her a small blue French car, a Simca, which gave her freedom and flair. “My mother's
knippel
, which was the result of her single-woman experience,” said Pogrebin, “allowed me to be a single woman.”
It also taught her, she said, “that you had to be independent; you
had
to be self-sufficient.”

When my friend Sara moved to Boston to live with her boyfriend, she left a high-level job in New York and found herself in a city in which there were very few jobs in her industry. After months of applying, but not finding, work, Sara was spending her days in the apartment she shared with her boyfriend. She, like my grandmother before her, became obsessive about cleaning. She became unhappy. She felt cold through the Boston winter. She needed to buy warm boots. For her whole adult life until this point, she'd been able to buy her own boots. But suddenly, she was reliant on someone else's money; she had to justify her every purchase. The lack of autonomy was gutting; Sara got a job as a retail associate at Crate & Barrel; it had nothing to do with the career she'd left in New York. But, she said, it saved her sanity. She could buy her own boots.

That money is key to independence isn't a new notion. It's one that's newer, perhaps, to classes of people for whom money has historically been more plentiful and who have been able to take their autonomy for granted. For populations that have long lived in economic struggle, the ability of women to work for (fair) wages has been key to the fights for both gendered and racial equal opportunity. “No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence,”
⁷
said Susan B. Anthony at the turn of the twentieth century.

Just a few decades later, while my grandmother was giving up her work as a teacher to take her turn as a wife and mother, lawyer Sadie Alexander was expressing concern about the fact that “the labor turnover among women is greater than that among men, due . . . principally to the fact that women do not consider their jobs as permanent. They have not developed a philosophy of work under which they regard the production of price-demanding commodities as their life work.” Women were conditioned to anticipate family events that would take them out of workforces, Alexander argued, which made them “slow to organize in unions” and in turn made men “slower to accept them” as professional peers. (In her thinking on women and work, Alexander was prefiguring not only Betty Friedan, but also Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose
Lean In
emphasizes what's
wrong with contemporary women's lingering tendency to “leave before they leave.”)

Alexander understood that out of financial necessity born of racial prejudice, “work for wages has always been more widespread among Negro than among white women” and suggested that this was, in fact, to the benefit of those women and their families and the world beyond. “The derogatory effects of the mother being out of the home are over balanced by the increased family income,” Alexander wrote, going on to suggest that the salutary effects of women taking themselves seriously as wage earners extended far beyond individual families. “The increased leisure that is enjoyed by women who have entered the industrial and manufacturing enterprises is giving rise to an improved educational and social standard among Negro women.”
⁸

The economic necessities that have nudged women into the work force have, in turn, sometimes forced a rethinking of femininity. Back in the 1890s, Wilbur Fisk Tillett, a Methodist clergyman from North Carolina, wrote about how, before the Civil War, “self-support was a last resort to respectable women in the South. . . . so deeply embedded in Southern ideas and feeling was this sentiment of the nobility of dependence and helplessness in woman, and the degradation of labor, even for self-support.” But, after the war, when resources were scarce, there was a recalibrating of expectation. Tillett reported in 1891, “Now . . . a woman is respected and honored in the South for earning her own living . . . Southern people, having passed through the financial reverses of the war, now realize as never before that a daughter's bread may some day depend upon herself, and so they want her well educated.”
⁹

Meaghan Ritchie is a twenty-year-old junior at Western Kentucky University, majoring in special education. Religiously home-schooled through most of high school, she and her family are Church of Christ Southern Baptists. Some of Meaghan's friends are already married now, but when she considers it, she thinks, “Oh, my goodness, I can't even
imagine
being married or having kids right now.” Meaghan doesn't have a boyfriend, and said that she gets no pressure to settle down anytime soon from either her father, an electrical engineer, or from her mother, a full-time mother who babysits for local children in her home. In fact, her father has told her that she
cannot
get married until she graduates. Meaghan's mother was a college sophomore when her parents married; her dad got a job, and her mother dropped out of school to move to Texas, never graduating. “Maybe that's the reason my dad wants me to finish college,” said Meaghan.