All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (10 page)

While factory unionizers often focused on the physical dangers in workplaces, the labor movement in education concerned itself primarily with fair pay. The never-married Margaret Haley, known in the press as the “Lady Labor Slugger,” led the Chicago Teachers' Federation, one of the more militant teaching unions in the nation. She contested assumptions that female teachers could be paid less after a 1910 National Education Association survey found that they were often primary earners, either as single women or the sole supports of parents and siblings. Haley understood that since women couldn't vote, teachers needed to align with the male labor movement, and decided to join her 97 percent female union to the blue-collar Chicago Federation of Labor, remaking teacher unionism as an urban political force and getting herself dubbed by a conservative, anti-labor businessman, a “nasty, unladylike woman.”
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By 1920, nearly 40 percent of black women worked for wages, compared to about 18 percent of white women; a 1919 study showed that the typical black laborer in New York City was young, unmarried, and had at least a grammar school education. Historian Paula Giddings describes how, “For the first time [black women] were permitted to use machinery, and some even found jobs as clerks, stenographers, and bookkeepers. These new opportunities had a salutary effect which went beyond better wages.”
It remained true, however, that even as opportunities expanded, black women were following in the professional wake of their white sisters, taking jobs only as white women fought for and eventually won better opportunities. Black women got stuck with the hottest, dirtiest and most unsafe jobs in factories, and as Giddings writes, “they were paid from 10 to 60 percent less than ill-paid White women.”
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During these same years, other reformers—many of them suffragists, socialists, and labor agitators—were building the Settlement House Movement, creating residential spaces where rich and poor might come together to better understand and address class and racial injustice and pacifism. Chicago's Hull House, founded by two never-wed activists, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, provided everything from childcare to continuing education.

Settlement Houses were, in many cases, designed as sustainable places where single and divorced women might find community and a respectable life structure outside marriage; they were also a breeding ground for progressive economic policy. Frances Perkins, who worked at Hull House, would marry at thirty-three (and fight in court to keep her name), and remain the sole breadwinner for her family. Perkins would go on to become Franklin Delano Roosevelt's secretary of labor and the creator of Social Security. Florence Kelley, a suffragist, socialist, civil rights leader, and labor organizer who opposed child labor and sweatshops, fought for minimum wage laws and petitioned the Illinois legislature for eight-hour workdays for women and children; after leaving her husband, she moved to Hull House and then to the Henry Street Settlement, founded by the never-married social activist Lillian Wald, in New York.

The labor and Settlement House movements merged with the ongoing suffrage fight in natural ways. As Clara Lemlich explained, “The manufacturer has a vote; the bosses have votes; the foremen have votes; the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote.”

An older generation of activists, including Anthony and antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells, teamed with younger women who also picked up strategies from England's radical feminists. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, both unmarried, were often described as being of “one mind and spirit;” they picketed the White House and staged hunger strikes in the name of
voting rights. In later years, Paul would draft the Equal Rights Amendment, which read, simply, “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction;” it would be introduced to every Congressional session from 1923 until 1972, when it finally passed but was not ratified by the states. (It has been reintroduced, though never passed, in every session since 1982).

But the biggest victory would change the gender politics of the country forever. In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment; it was ratified by the states in 1920. For the first time in America's history, its female citizens could legally (if not practically, in the Jim Crow South) vote.

Over a century in which women had exercised increasing independence, living more singly in the world than ever before, the movements that independent women had helped to power had resulted in the passage of the 14th, 15th, 18th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution.

They had reshaped the nation.

The twentieth century dawned on a cultural landscape that was as remade as the political one.

Electric street lamps had come to cities around the country, creating “white ways” that made it feel safer for women to be on the streets at night. This development changed the kinds of jobs women could work, as well as the ways in which they could spend money and leisure time. Working-class young women in cities may have struggled economically, but the lit streets, Nickelodeons, Vaudeville houses, bowling alleys, music and dance halls that began to proliferate meant that these women (and men), according to Kathy Peiss, “spent much of their leisure apart from their families and enjoyed greater social freedom than their parents or married siblings, especially married women.” Young women “Putting on finery, promenading the streets, and staying late at amusement resorts became an important cultural style for many working women.”
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Peiss writes of the drive of some working-class women toward increased social and sexual freedoms, noting that single working women
“were among those who flocked to the streets in pursuit of pleasure and amusement, using public spaces for flamboyant assertion.” Although these so-called “rowdy girls” were vulnerable to public censure for immorality, Peiss writes, “young women continued to seek the streets to search for men, have a good time, and display their clothes and style in a public arena.”
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African-Americans continued the great migration from the south into northern cities, while new waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe poured into New York City. Blacks and immigrants began to mix in urban centers, not always peaceably. But the coming together of different kinds of people helped the sharp class and ethnic lines begin to blur, if only slightly, producing new, liberated fashions in dress and entertainments.

Syncopated rhythms, rooted in the black neighborhoods of New Orleans, led to ragtime-era dance crazes, which in turn gave way to sexually expressive fads like the Charleston and the Black Bottom that would take hold in the Jazz Age. Working women of New York's Bowery and West Village began to experiment with cropped hair and shorter hemlines that made it easier and safer for them to work in factories; as they became more visible on sidewalks and in public gathering places, middle- and upper-class women began to mimic their styles. Women were soon unburdening themselves of fashions that had, in the nineteenth century, weighed an estimated thirty pounds, turning to shorter skirts and looser fits.
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In 1914, as courtship rituals moved away from family homes or closely watched community dance halls, the
Ladies' Home Journal
used the term “dating” in its modern sense. Couples could engage more easily in sexual experimentation, and Stephanie Coontz reports that ninety-two percent of college girls surveyed in the 1920s said they had participated in sexual, below-the-neck fondling, and that, by this time, “young middle-class men were more likely to lose their virginity with women of their own class than with prostitutes.”
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As centuries of repression began to give way, reformers took up the fight to make contraception more accessible. That sex might be a pleasurable option for women without the high risk of pregnancy created room for both married and extramarital sexual liberty, the possibility of trying out multiple partners, of blissfully inconsequential experimentation,
or simply of bearing fewer children and enduring fewer dangerous pregnancies.

The fight to exert control over reproduction drew the attention of anarchist activists including the Russian-born Emma Goldman. Married twice herself, Goldman was a believer in free love and an early proponent of gay rights; she was also a vociferous critic of marriage, which she felt condemned women “to life-long dependency, to parasitism, to complete uselessness, individual as well as social.” As a nurse and midwife on the Lower East Side in the 1890s, Goldman had waged war on the Comstock Laws that barred the distribution of information about contraception and abortion. By the early twentieth century, she was smuggling diaphragms and cervical caps into the United States from Europe. She was also mentoring a young nurse and bohemian, Margaret Sanger.

Sanger, a married mother whose own mother had been pregnant eighteen times in twenty-two years and had died early of cervical cancer and tuberculosis, began writing pieces about sexual education for the socialist magazine
New York Call
in 1912. The next year she began work at the Henry Street Settlement and soon separated from her husband. In 1914 she published a newsletter called
The Woman Rebel
, which proclaimed that every woman should be “absolute mistress of her own body” and as such, should avail herself of contraception, which Sanger referred to as “birth control.”

In 1916, Sanger opened a family planning clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn; it was raided by police after ten days and Sanger spent thirty days in prison. Five years later, the same year that Sanger and her husband finally divorced, she would found The American Birth Control League, which would later become the Birth Control Federation of America, and, in 1942, would be renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The slow reveal of female flesh, the lightening of a limiting wardrobe, the early acknowledgements of female sexual drive, the push for more accessible means of preventing pregnancy . . . together they began to send a popular message: that abstinence from marriage no longer necessarily meant abstinence from sex, or from fun. The popular press in the early twentieth century called the educated, politicized, wage-earning, sexually liberated female “the new woman.”

She wasn't popular with everyone.

“In our modern industrial civilization, there are many and grave dangers to counterbalance the splendors and the triumphs,” President Theodore Roosevelt said at the beginning of a 1905 speech to the National Congress of Mothers.
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One of these dangers was the existence of women “who deliberately forego . . . the supreme blessing of children.”

Roosevelt had become fretful after the 1890 census showed a declining birthrate
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and began to worry about “race suicide,” the idea that a white Anglo-Saxon failure to reproduce would damage the nation. Roosevelt, who supported suffrage and women's involvement in labor, nonetheless blamed the declining fertility rate on those white women whose professional, political, and other nondomestic commitments were leading them to start families late and not at all. “A race is worthless,” Roosevelt railed, “if women cease to breed freely.”

After Roosevelt left office, he continued to express his anxiety, clarifying that it was not over “pauper families with excessive numbers of ill-nourished and badly brought up children” but rather with “voluntary sterility among married men and women of good life . . . If the best classes do not reproduce themselves the nation will of course go down.” Roosevelt's distinctions were rooted in the readily expressed racism of his time and in animosity toward Japanese and Chinese immigrants on the West Coast, whose comparative fecundity seemed to threaten the whiteness of the nation. But they were also an expression of judgment against the women exercising new forms of public autonomy. “It is the bare truth,” Roosevelt continued, “to say that no celibate life approaches such a life in point of usefulness, no matter what the motive for the celibacy—religious, philanthropic, political, or professional.”

Roosevelt's concerns were an inversion of the racial politics that would be echoed fifty years later by Moynihan, and mirror the arguments made more recently by population
agonistes
, including Jonathan Last and Ross Douthat. Different iterations of these anxieties, shaped by era and prevalent racial attitudes, share close ties: They home in on a resistance by women to wifeliness and motherhood as not simply
a
problem, but
the
problem imperiling their nation or race.

“The race, the race! Shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest,”
wrote Emma Goldman in 1911, “The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine . . . and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex awakening of woman.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, writes Chambers-Schiller, “the singlehood of women became a politically charged issue from which it was clearly understood that spinsterhood and independence were linked.” This recognition, she continues, “inspired a political and cultural backlash which, in the 1920s, returned women to marriage and domesticity.”

In 1924, the
Yale Review
posthumously published a piece by the sociologist William Sumner, who argued that the industrial age's new opportunities for women had “dislodged marriage from its supreme place in their interest and life plan. This is the greatest revolution in the conditions of the marriage institution . . . in all history . . . the importance of the fact that for great numbers of [women] it is no longer the sum of life to find husbands can easily be appreciated.”
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The dislocation of marriage as the single path for women—not to mention the impact that these unmarried women, independently and in concert with each other as colleagues and activists, were having on politics, professions, and populations—was a threat that drew further cultural blowback.