The Big Shift: Rebecca Traister on the New Single Majority

RT: Because circumstances vary so dramatically, it’s tempting to say, “Oh, there’s no unity of experience.” But the mass behavioral shift has been about women of all classes working toward independence from an early marriage model that was not working for them, whether because of economic circumstances or emotional reasons. If we have a conversation about single women and it winds up being about Sex and the City, it absolutely makes sense to say, “Hold on, single female life in America is not Sex and the City.” Look at the number of single mothers who live below the poverty line; look at the fact that a huge percentage of minimum wage earners are single mothers. But at the same time you can’t just stop there because to simply divide those two poles of experience and say that one doesn’t have anything to do with the other isn’t quite true. It elides the fact that challenging that socially and economically prescribed early marriage model, at least in the twentieth century, derived in part with low-earning black women whose marriage rates began to fall at the time that middle-class white women’s marriage rates began to rise, after World War II. The same economic circumstances, often government-manipulated, that created all-white suburban housing for nuclear families into which middle-class white women were pressured to go and marry early and have 2.5 babies and not be in the workforce anymore, the same kind of manipulations that razed black neighborhoods, that cut black families off from the kinds of economic opportunities that were being expanded for the white middle class, left black women in the situation where marriage no longer necessarily worked for them.
BNR: Even though they were then pathologized for not marrying.
RT: They were very swiftly pathologized, most famously in the Moynihan Report, and then openly vilified, which is what Reagan did with “welfare queens.” But the shift away from an early and lasting marriage model was pioneered by women in difficult economic circumstances. When that behavior gets imitated by more privileged communities, it’s more easily recognizable as social progress, as revolution. But when you simply cast these two things as opposite ends of the pole, you wind up with the idea that poor single women are victims and that wealthy single women are glamorous trailblazers.
BNR: You envisioned this first as a journalistic account and then went back and discovered a lot of historical precursors.
RT: When I sold the proposal for this book it was very much as a contemporary project. I said, “This is unprecedented in American history!” Then I did five minutes of research and was like, it is not in fact unprecedented at all.
BNR: What’s unprecedented is the degree to which it’s happening.
RT: Right, and what’s fascinating is that the previous iterations of singlehood in various ways created the conditions that make this period of changed marriage patterns more vast than it’s ever been. The first big period during which American women stopped marrying or marrying at younger ages was the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, largely because all the men moved west or were killed in the Civil War. So there was this gender ratio imbalance, and there were tons of women left on the East Coast. After Emancipation, black women married earlier and more often because they were legally free to do so for the first time, and that was true until after World War II. But middle-class white women married less and later. With these lives that were suddenly free from wifely and maternal responsibility, they came together spiritually — there were the Great Awakenings — and in the spirit of community service, which was the expectation for women. A lot of the women who gave their energy to these massive social projects of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understandably were women who weren’t giving all their energy within their homes but to abolition, to suffrage, to the burgeoning labor movement, to the settlement house movement, to the fight for birth control. And then of course they won a lot of these causes, and those wins in themselves then create the conditions from which 100 years later another generation of women that starts marrying later has an increased ability to make money, to have premarital sex more freely and more safely. There are all kinds of things that create the conditions for the massive single population that we have now, and a lot of those things were won by earlier generations of single women.
BNR: I’ve always noticed that many of the women involved in struggles like suffrage and abolition were unmarried. Was it that the type of women who strained against convention by staying unmarried tended to be in the vanguard of other social issues, or did they simply, as you said, have more time and freedom to pursue their ideals?
RT: I think it’s both. Plenty of the women who were single in the nineteenth century wrote about their desire to evade marriage. Marriage was scary in a lot of ways. It often involved having a lot of kids, losing your autonomy, being in service to a husband and children who were often born at an unremitting pace without the benefit of modern medicine. Maternal mortality rates were very high. You look at somebody like Margaret Sanger, who was married young and had kids but then left her husband and wound up living a kind of single life as she got into the founding of what would become Planned Parenthood.
BNR: She didn’t treat her kids so well. One of them had, I think, six children of his own; it seemed like his life was a rebuke to her life.
RT: Yeah, and her life was a reaction to her mother’s life. Her mother had been pregnant eighteen times by the time she died.
BNR: There are these generational swings. Do you think it’s conceivable that the average age of marriage will go down again?
RT: It’s very conceivable. But if you look at the broad story of women’s progress, there have been these swings back and forth, but there’s still been a general move forward.
BNR: My parents got married after only knowing each other for weeks, in part because my mother’s younger sister had gotten married and had a child while in college, so my mom, at twenty-five, felt like an old maid. It’s hard to imagine a return to that kind of pressure.
RT: In the early twentieth century more women were delaying marriage or not marrying. President [Theodore] Roosevelt started talking about race suicide: he felt that white middle-class women who weren’t reproducing at as high rates as immigrants were dunning the American prospects. That preceded decades worth of social pressure to get middle-class white women back into homes, and it worked. You can make a lot of arguments about why it worked, but after World War II you get the baby boom and this period of the domestic sarcophagus for middle-class white women. The mid-twentieth century was a really artificial moment at which middle-class white women were marrying as teenagers, dropping out of college to get married. I could envision a similar thing happening. There’s such a conservative push to get women married and married early again. It comes out of the mouth of practically every one of the Republican candidates. Jeb Bush wrote a book [1995’s Profiles in Character] about how we should be shaming single mothers. My favorite moment of the 2012 election was the debate question where they asked Romney and Obama what they would do to stem gun violence and Romney’s answer was you should marry someone. What? It was a total non sequitur except that conservatives blame every ill — poverty, gun violence, everything — on changed marriage patterns, i.e., independent adult women who are living outside of the marital institution in one way or another.
BNR: You conclude the book with an appendix with your own suggestions for dealing with our new demographic realities, including a higher federally mandated minimum wage and paid family leave. Can you discuss why they’re important for single women specifically? To the extent that there are more single women, there are also more single men.
RT: Right, but American public policy and civic institutions were built with one formulation of the citizenry in mind, a model in which there was a breadwinning person and a domestic laborer. The assumption was that the earner was male. He got a series of things from the government: tax breaks for being married, for having a kid, for owning a home. The assumption has also been that that person had an unpaid or low-paid person, always a woman, who stayed at home and was working to put meals on the table, do laundry, pick up children from school at three o’clock in the afternoon — just think about how our country is built on the assumption that there is somebody who’s going to pick up a child at three o’clock in the afternoon! People don’t live like that anymore. Some do, but an increasingly small percentage. So you need to account for this totally changed road map for what adult life is like for men and women and especially women who bear children. If you have a single woman, a two-woman couple, a co-earning couple, or a woman who is the breadwinner in any respect, whether because she earns more or because she’s the only parent, you no longer can have a country that doesn’t support the ability to have kids and economically survive the time it requires to stay home and get them and yourself healthy. You have to readjust policy. Obviously these things affect women and men, but I believe that two-thirds of the minimum wage workforce is female and many of them single mothers, so if you have women who are doing both the earning and the domestic work, it is imperative that we correct some of our protections and some of our policies to better enable them to live stably and freely within the republic.
BNR: I want to go back to the history. There were so many gems. I particularly loved the nineteenth-century Massachusetts governor who proposed shipping the “excess women” out west, to territories where women were in short supply. That really dramatizes the extent to which women were not seen as fully independent human beings.
RT: Yeah, we’ve got to put them on a train and send them somewhere.
BNR: Did any of your research surprise you?
RT: It all surprised me. The idea that at a certain age women went from being spinsters and began to be called thornbacks, which is the name for a spiny sea skate. That’s pretty amazing. There’s a great academic book that I cite by Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller called Liberty: A Better Husband. She writes about how the places where there were some small opportunities to be independent, women would just run toward them. Women went west when they opened the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma — one raced her horse to stake out her piece of land, and another staked out a piece of land and wound up living on it alone until she was 105. These stories of women who in times that were much more difficult than ours just went for it when everything was set up against them. Western states were some of the first places that women could go to some of the land-grant colleges and where they could own property because they could go and get the land for themselves.
BNR: And they got suffrage faster.
RT: Wyoming, which was the first to get suffrage, Alaska, Texas — places that we think of as really red states had these great histories of women in politics. It’s a frontier mentality: if you could tough it out, you could have some power.
BNR: There’s still this idea that if you’re single you have to grow up. But you point out that if you’re single, you’re doing everything for yourself: making all the decisions, feeding and supporting yourself. Why does the idea of single people as being in a state of extended adolescence persist?
RT: Because we still equate adulthood with marriage. Even if people aren’t living this way, the cultural messaging was built around it, especially for women, who historically were supposed to move from their fathers’ houses into their husbands’ houses. The thing that ratified their worth, the signal of having been picked, was marriage. So for women who are living unmarried, in addition to the kinds of messages that are still sent about how they must be desperate or lonely or sad (and of course some women do feel those things), there is still this remnant of if you’re not yet married, then you’re not yet a grown-up. There’s also a high association of singleness with selfishness, which is exacerbated by the idea that women are supposed to be selfless, which means becoming a subsidiary to a man, serving the needs of children, of parents, of community. Independent womanhood is very discomfiting for people. You can see this all over contemporary conversation, that single women are selfish because they’re interested in pursuing their own careers over marriage, they don’t want to compromise, they’re too picky. And selfishness is associated with childhood, so that’s another way that single women are infantilized. But it’s crazy. As somebody who lived a single adult life for fifteen years and then fell in love and got married, my life in many ways was infinitely harder as a single person and infinitely more grown up. I fixed my own bookcases and I earned my own money, and I didn’t have the comfort of having another person on whose money I could rely or another person who could hold the bookshelf up while I put the nail in, the basic things. When you’re single, especially if you live alone, there’s nobody to split those tasks with.
BNR: Some of my friends who’ve been single for protracted periods have expressed exhaustion at having to take care of everything themselves.
RT: It’s exhausting!
BNR: You spoke to many single women in writing the book. Did you find that they still feel stigmatized or pressured?
RT: Many of them, yes. Everybody’s perspective varies, but there’s still enormous cultural pressure to marry. We fetishize weddings more than we ever have, and the wedding industry has ballooned. As weddings have become rarer, they’ve become somehow more imaginatively important as what sociologists call the capstone event that shows you’ve arrived. Now that they’re not there to mark the beginning of your adulthood, pop culture has recast them as the signal that your adulthood is successful. Some of the worst unhappiness is to be bound to somebody with whom you have an unhappy relationship. That kind of misery is the stuff of novels and plays, and we know that these stories exist, but we never treat them as a symptom of marriage, whereas the idea of loneliness or yearning for love is always treated as a symptom of singleness.
BNR: You talk about your life quite a bit and marrying at thirty-five after meeting your husband by chance in a restaurant. You say that the only action that had a direct impact on meeting him was that you didn’t marry anyone else before him. Presumably that would not have been true had you been born generations earlier.
RT: I’m sure in another time I would have married the boyfriend I had in my early twenties, with whom I maintain a strong friendship, but we were a terrible couple. That wouldn’t have been a happy marriage. Before the day I met my husband I would never have felt any confidence — nor do I think there’s any particular reason to — that staying single, just keeping myself free, would necessarily land me with a partner, because who’s to say that a guy who was a good match for me was going to cross my path? It could have just as easily not happened. I think there’s no formula for it except if at all possible don’t marry anybody who makes you unhappy. That’s the only pro tip I have.
BNR: You note that cities have been especially hospitable to single women, now and in the past.

RT: I was stunned to learn that even in early modern Europe, if a lace factory opened in a slightly more urban area of rural France, the single women would flock to it. Wherever there was the possibility of earning some money and some tiny smidgen of independence — certainly that was true in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The mills in Lowell, for example, the factories in New York, in part because female labor was cheap, were filled with young unmarried women. The pattern of migration to cities extends way beyond the United States and back hundreds of years. Cities are still the natural place for unmarried women to be. They offer infrastructure that makes single life possible. Jobs are the key and then beyond that public transportation, the convenience of purchasing food, the presence of neighbors and other watchful eyes. Bigger pools of friends, employers, potential mates. Cities have all that.
BNR: The book has a lot to say about female friendship and how important it is and how consuming it can be even though culturally it’s often regarded as a consolation prize. Here the historical research again illuminates your point. I’m thinking of Charlotte Brontë, whose marriage was mostly a financial arrangement, pouring her heart out in letters to a friend that her husband tried to have burned.
RT: The line she writes about how now I know in practice what I’ve always known in theory, which is wait, don’t get married, after marrying this guy — oh, it’s heartbreaking. But I think one of the things we’re getting better at is understanding that friendship isn’t the consolation prize, that friendships offer partnerships and family in ways that are just as legitimate and in many cases more rewarding than some of the early marriages that women entered historically have been.
BNR: Hopefully, marriage also becomes more rewarding now as people wait longer to choose their mates.
RT: That seems to be true, that the longer people wait, the lower the divorce rate goes. Divorce rates are going down as marriage ages go up.
BNR: Your first book, Big Girls Don’t Cry, was about women and the 2008 presidential election. You note in this book that in 2012 unmarried women made up 23 percent of the electorate. Do you have observations on this election cycle so far related specifically to single women?
RT: The fact that we’re talking about minimum wage, paid leave — these are issues that are precipitated in part by a change in marriage patterns and a change in the shape and tenor of female adult life. Single women, because they tend to be young and many are economically struggling, are also the people who it is most difficult to get to vote, especially in states where there’s been legislation enacted that makes voting harder. I think single women are going to have a tremendous impact — if they vote.