I always hated it when my heroines got married. As a child, I remember staring at the cover of The First Four Years, willing myself to feel pleased—as I knew I was meant to—that Laura Ingalls had wed Almanzo “Manly” Wilder and given birth to baby Rose. I understood that despite the hail storms, diphtheria outbreaks, and other agrarian misery that Wilder chronicled in the last of her Little House books, Laura’s marriage and motherhood were supposed to be read as a happy ending. Yet, to me, it felt unhappy, as if Laura were over. And, in many ways, she was.
The images on the covers of previous Little House books, drawn by Garth Williams in the editions I owned, had been of Laura in motion, front and center: gamboling down a hillside, riding a horse barefoot, having a snowball fight. Here she was, stationary and solidly shod, beside her husband; the baby she held in her arms was the most lively figure in the scene. Laura’s story was coming to a close. The tale that was worth telling about her was finished once she married.
It was the same with Anne of Green Gables’ Anne Shirley, whose days of getting her best friend Diana Barry drunk and competing at school with rival Gilbert Blythe were over when, at last, after three volumes of resistance and rejected proposals, she gave in and married Gilbert. Beloved Jo March, who, in Little Women, subverted the marriage plot by not marrying her best friend and neighbor Laurie, came to her clunky, connubial end by getting hitched to avuncular Professor Bhaer. And Jane Eyre: Oh, smart, resourceful, sad Jane. Her prize, readers, after a youth of fighting for some smidgen of autonomy? Marrying him: the bad-tempered guy who kept his first wife in the attic, wooed Jane through a series of elaborate head games, and was, by the time she landed him, blind and missing a hand.
It was supposed to be romantic, but it felt bleak. Paths that were once wide and dotted with naughty friends and conspiratorial sisters and malevolent cousins, with scrapes and adventures and hopes and passions, had narrowed and now seemed to lead only to the tending of dull husbands and the rearing of insipid children to whom the stories soon would be turned over, in pallid follow-ups like Jo’s Boys and Anne of Ingleside.
My dismay, of course, was partially symptomatic of the form. Coming-of-age-tales, bildungsroman, come to their tautological ends when their subjects reach adulthood. But embedded in the structure of both literature and life was the reality that for women, adulthood—and with it, the end of the story—was marriage.
Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs. It was often at just the moment that their educations were complete and their childhood ambitions coming into focus that these troublesome, funny girls were suddenly contained, subsumed, and reduced by domesticity.
Later, I would learn that Shakespeare’s comedies ended with wedlock and his tragedies with death, making marriage death’s narrative equivalent and supporting my childhood hunch about its ability to shut down a story. My mother, a Shakespeare professor, would note wistfully to me that some of the Bard’s feistiest and most loquacious heroines, including Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, ceased to have any lines after their dramatically conclusive marriage alliances.
Weren’t there any interesting fictional women out there who didn’t get married as soon as they became grown-ups, I wondered, even as a kid.
As I got older, I would discover that yes, there were plenty of stories about women who didn’t get married. I would read about Tar Baby’s Jadine Childs, whose determination to flout gendered and racial expectations gets her cast out from her world, and about Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, who barters sex for capital gain and ends up empty. I’d read Persuasion, about Anne Elliot, who, unmarried at twenty-seven, veers perilously close to an economically and socially unmoored fate before being saved from the indignity of spinsterhood by Captain Wentworth. I’d read about Hester Prynne and Miss Havisham and Edith Wharton’s maddening, doomed Lily Bart.
These were not inspiring portraits. Collectively, they suggested that women who remained unmarried, whether by choice or by accident, were destined to wear red letters or spend their lives dancing in unused wedding dresses or overdose on chloral hydrate. These characters might not have wed, but their lack of husbands constrained and defined them, just as surely as marriage would have.
They seemed to confirm Simone de Beauvoir’s observation about real life women, which I would also, eventually, uncover: that, by definition, we “are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being.”
By the time I was on the verge of becoming a woman, ready to leave home for college, nothing could have been more implausible to me than the notion of becoming a wife to anyone anytime soon. By most accounts, marriage was coming to swallow me up in just a few short years. However, with my mind firmly absorbed by picking classes, worrying about roommates and keg parties and finding a job near campus, nothing could have seemed less likely.
At eighteen, I had never even had a serious boyfriend, and neither had any of my closest girlfriends. The people I knew who were my age in the early 1990s didn’t really “date.” We hung out, hooked up, drank beer, smoked cigarettes and pot and some of us, but by no means all of us, had sex. Very few got into heavy romantic relationships. Sure, perhaps I was just a misfit girl destined never to fall in love (a suspicion I logged many hours cultivating), let alone marry. But actually, I couldn’t envision any of my girlfriends married anytime soon either.
I was on the verge of tasting meaningful independence, of becoming myself. The notion that in a handful of years, I might be ready, even eager, to enter a committed, legal, purportedly permanent relationship with a new family and a new home was patently absurd.
Yet this was what had happened to practically every adult I knew in the generation before mine. Growing up in rural Maine, my mother had already had one serious boyfriend by the time that she turned eighteen. Many of the women with whom she’d gone to high school were married—or pregnant and on their way to getting married—by the time she’d left for college. As an undergraduate in the early 1960s, my mother would serve as a student guide to Betty Friedan when she visited campus to discuss The Feminine Mystique; she would also go on to marry my father at twenty-one, days after her graduation, before getting her Masters and her PhD. My aunt, five years my mother’s junior, had had a series of high-school swains before meeting my uncle in college and marrying him at twenty-three, also before getting her PhD. In this, my mother and aunt were not unusual. My friends’ mothers, my mother’s friends, my teachers: Most of them had met their spouses when in their early twenties.
Throughout America’s history, the start of adult life for women—whatever else it might have been destined to include—had been typically marked by marriage. As long as there had been such records kept in the United States, since the late nineteenth century, the median age of first marriage for women had fluctuated between twenty and twenty-two. This had been the shape, pattern, and definition of female life.
History suggested that beyond the kegs and term papers in my immediate future, perhaps even tied up with them, the weird possibility of marriage loomed. It loomed, in part, because there weren’t very many appealing models of what other kinds of female life might take its place.
I began work on this book seventeen years after I went to college, in the weeks before getting married at the age of thirty-five. Impending marriage did not, happily, feel like any sort of ending for me, but neither did it feel like a beginning.
By the time I walked down the aisle—or rather, into a judge’s chambers—I had lived fourteen independent years, early adult years that my mother had spent married. I had made friends and fallen out with friends, had moved in and out of apartments, had been hired, fired, promoted, and quit. I had had roommates I liked and roommates I didn’t like and I had lived on my own; I’d been on several forms of birth control and navigated a few serious medical questions; I’d paid my own bills and failed to pay my own bills; I’d fallen in love and fallen out of love and spent five consecutive years with nary a fling. I’d learned my way around new neighborhoods, felt scared and felt completely at home; I’d been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored. I was a grown-up: a reasonably complicated person. I’d become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself.
I was not alone.
In fact, in 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent.1 And that median age of first marriage that had remained between twenty and twenty-two from 1890 to 1980?2 Today, the median age of first marriage for women is around twenty-seven, and much higher than that in many cities. By our mid-thirties, half of my closest girlfriends remained unmarried.
During the years in which I had come of age, American women had pioneered an entirely new kind of adulthood, one that was not kicked off by marriage, but by years and, in many cases, whole lives, lived on their own, outside matrimony. Those independent women were no longer aberrations, less stigmatized than ever before. Society had changed, permitting this revolution, but the revolution’s beneficiaries were about to change the nation further: remapping the lifespan of women, redefining marriage and family, reimagining what wifeliness and motherhood entail, and, in short, altering the scope of possibility for over half the country’s population.
For the first time in American history, single women (including those who were never married, widowed, divorced, or separated) outnumbered married women. Perhaps even more strikingly, the number of adults younger than thirty-four who had never married was up to 46 percent,3 rising twelve percentage points in less than a decade. For women under thirty, the likelihood of being married had become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are wed,4 compared to the nearly 60 percent in 1960. In a statement from the Population Reference Bureau, the fact that the proportion of young adults in the United States that has never been married is now bigger than the percentage that has married was called “a dramatic reversal.”5
For young women, for the first time, it is as normal to be unmarried as it is to be married, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.
British journalist Hannah Betts wrote in 2013, “Ask what has changed most about society during my lifetime and I would answer: the evolution from the stigmatised ‘spinsters’ of my childhood . . . to the notion of the ‘singularist,’ which is how I would currently define myself at 41.”6
Young women today no longer have to wonder, as I did, what unmarried adult life for women might look like, surrounded as we are by examples of exactly this kind of existence. Today, the failure to comply with the marriage plot, while a source of frustration and economic hardship for many, does not lead directly to life as a social outcast or to a chloral hydrate prescription.
It is an invitation to wrestle with a whole new set of expectations about what female maturity entails, now that it is not shaped and defined by early marriage.
In 1997, the year that I graduated college, journalist Katie Roiphe wrote about the befuddlement felt by her generation of unmarried women. Four years earlier, Roiphe had published The Morning After, a screed against campus date-rape activism rooted firmly in her belief in the sexual agency and independence of college-aged women. However, as Roiphe and her compatriots closed in on thirty, many living unmarried into their second decade of adulthood, she argued that they were feeling the long-term effects of that independence and longing instead for the “felicitous simplicities of the nineteenth-century marriage plot.”7
People live together and move out. They sleep together for indefinite periods. They marry later. They travel light. I recently overheard a pretty woman at a party say, not without regret, ‘When our mothers were our age, they had husbands instead of cats.” She is one of the many normal, pulled-together people I know inhabiting the prolonged, perplexing strip of adolescence currently provided by this country to its twenty- to thirty-year olds. The romantic sensibility—cats or husbands?—is fragile and confused. We go to parties and occasionally fall into bed with people we don’t know well, but we also have well-read paperbacks of Austen’s Mansfield Park or Emma lying open on our night tables: the dream of a more orderly world.
The unmarried state that Roiphe viewed as a kind of disorder was in fact a new order, or at least a new normal, in which women’s lots in life were not cast based on a single binary (husbands versus cats). Instead, women’s paths were increasingly marked with options, off-ramps, variations on what had historically been a very constrained theme.
While Roiphe may have felt herself in a prolonged period of adolescence because marriage had not yet come along to mark its end, she was in fact leading a very adult life, with a romantic history, an undergraduate education at Harvard, and a thriving career. The liberating point was that Roiphe’s status and that of her cohort didn’t hinge on the question of whether they had husbands or cats. It didn’t have to, because they had jobs. They had sex lives. They had each other. They inhabited a universe that Jane Austen, for whose “orderly world” Roiphe claimed to pine, could never have imagined: Austen’s novels had been as much ambivalent cries against the economic and moral strictures of enforced marital identity for women than they were any kind of reassuring blueprint for it.
Contemporary, unmarried life may have felt—to Roiphe and to many single women who continue to come after her—a lot more complicated, confusing and scary than the simpler single option on offer to women of previous generations. But the wholesale revision of what female life might entail is also, by many measures, the invention of independent female adulthood.
This independence can be punishing. Many single women are poor or struggling. Almost 50 percent of the 3.3 million Americans now earning minimum wage or below are unmarried women.8 Many of them live, often with children, in communities where unemployment, racial and class discrimination, and a drug war that puts many young men in prison combine to make the possibilities of stable marriages scarce, making singlehood less of a freeing choice than a socially conscripted necessity. More than half of unmarried young mothers with children under the age of six are likely to live below the poverty line, a rate that is five times the rate of the corresponding population of married women.9
Yes, many single women, across classes and races, would like to marry, or at least form loving, reciprocal, long-term partnerships, but have not found mates who want the same thing, or who can sustain it. Some are lonely.
Many women, unmarried into their thirties, living in geographic, religious, and socio-economic corners of the country where early marriage remains a norm, as well as many women who remain single less by choice than by circumstance, into their forties, fifties, and sixties, do not feel as though they are living in a new, singles-dominated world. They feel ostracized, pressured; they are challenged by family and peers.
However, statistically, across the country, these women are not alone. Their numbers are growing by the year. There were 3.9 million more single adult women in 2014 than there were in 2010.10 Between 2008 and 2011, the rate of new marriage fell by 14 percent for those who had not completed high school and by 10 percent for those with at least a bachelor’s degree.11
In the course of researching this book, I spoke to scores of American women from different backgrounds and classes and faiths and races about their experiences of living singly.
“We all expected to be married at twenty-six,” said Kitty Curtis, a New Jersey hairstylist who is, at twenty-six, not married. “I don’t really know anyone who is married,” she said. “And the ones I do know, there’s a sense that it’s weird, strange. It’s a foreign idea to be married before thirty.” Meaghan Ritchie, a fundamentalist Christian college student from Kentucky, told me that she will not marry before she’s at least twenty-two, because she believes that dropping out of college—as her mother did to marry her father—would not be an economically sound idea. Amanda Neville, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, flew to Russia to adopt a daughter, who is deaf, within a year of opening a wine store and beginning a new relationship with a boyfriend. Ada Li, a manicurist from China living in Brooklyn, told me that her decision to wait until her late thirties to marry and have a child was what made her life in the United States happy and free.
Some women actively decided against early marriage, in part out of fear that matrimony would put a stop to their ambitions. “The moment I saw that ring,” wrote Jessica Bennett, a journalist who turned down a proposal at twenty-four, “I saw dirty dishes and suburbia . . . I saw the career I had hardly started as suddenly out of reach . . . the independence I had barely gained felt stifled. I couldn’t breathe.” Some are sad to not yet have found mates, like Elliott Holt, a forty-year-old novelist who told me, “I guess I just had no idea, could never have predicted, how intense the loneliness would be at this juncture of my life.” And others, including Susana Morris, a thirty-two-year-old English professor in Alabama, are less worried about themselves than they are about how concerned everyone else is about them. “What’s anxiety provoking is that every time you open a magazine or a book or turn on the television, there’s someone telling you there’s something wrong with you as a black woman—you’re too fat, too loud, don’t nobody want to marry you. That is anxiety producing!”
These women are not waiting for their real lives to start; they are living their lives, and those lives include as many variations as there are women.
To be clear, the vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom. The revolution is in the expansion of options, the lifting of the imperative that for centuries hustled nearly all (non-enslaved) women, regardless of their individual desires, ambitions, circumstances, or the quality of available matches, down a single highway toward early heterosexual marriage and motherhood. There are now an infinite number of alternate routes open; they wind around combinations of love, sex, partnership, parenthood, work, and friendship, at different speeds.
Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.
This liberation is at the heart of our national promise, but that promise of freedom has often been elusive for many of this country’s residents. This makes it all the more important to acknowledge that while the victories of independent life are often emblematized by the country’s most privileged women, the war was fought by many Americans who have always had far fewer options to live free: women of color, poor, and working-class women.
When I began writing, I intended this to be a book of mostly contemporary journalism, an account of how generations of single women living at the turn of the twenty-first century were, by delaying or abstaining from marriage, reshaping the nation’s politics and families. In short, while I understood it to be built on political gains made in previous eras, I believed that I was chronicling a mass behavioral revolution staged by women of my era.
What I learned, as I began my research, is that while this moment is unprecedented in terms of its size, thanks to women’s contemporary ability to live more economically and sexually autonomous lives than ever before, it is certainly not without historical precedent. Today’s unmarried and late married women are walking a road toward independence that was paved by generations of American women who lived singly when it was far harder to do so than it is today. Crucially, many of those radically single and late-married women were the ones who were able to devote their unmarried, nonmaternal lives to changing the nation’s power structures in ways that might better support today’s army of free women.
In 1877, the never-married suffragist, abolitionist, and labor activist Susan B. Anthony gave a speech called “The Homes of Single Women.” In it, she prophesied that the journey toward gender equality would necessarily include a period in which women stopped marrying. “In woman’s transition from the position of subject to sovereign, there must needs be an era of self-sustained, self-supported, homes,” said Anthony.12
She continued, clairvoyantly:
As young women become educated in the industries of the world, thereby learning the sweetness of independent bread, it will be more and more impossible for them to accept the . . . marriage limitation that “husband and wife are one, and that one the husband. . . .” Even when man’s intellectual convictions shall be sincerely and fully on the side of Freedom and equality to woman, the force of long existing customs and laws will impel him to exert authority over her, which will be distasteful to the self-sustained, self-respectful woman. . . . Not even amended constitutions and laws can revolutionize the practical relations of men and women, immediately, any more than did the Constitutional freedom and franchise of Black men transform white men into practical recognition of the civil and political rights of those who were but yesterday their legal slaves.
And so, Anthony predicted, logic would lead us, “inevitably, to an epoch of single women.”
Here we are.
Smack in the middle of Anthony’s imagined epoch, an era in which—like the one in which Anthony herself lived—the independence of women is a crucial tool in their long struggle toward a more just and equitable position in the world.