All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (14 page)

And that's to say nothing of the other structural components of a metropolis: the walkable access to multiple entertainments, to bars and clubs and movie theaters and gyms and basketball courts and parks. There is the public transport, the trains and subways and buses and trolleys that can get you to jobs and friends and family cheaply and (usually) swiftly.
¹⁶

Even for those who can't easily avail themselves of the higher-end urban perks, the dense population allows for things like the “neighborhood watch” aspect that Letisha discussed: the streets lined with nosy neighbors, residents sitting on sidewalks in lawn chairs, paying attention to everyone who passes. In apartment complexes where residents know each other, there can be more off-the-cuff childcare options, more people from whom to borrow a cup of sugar.

The big populations of urban centers still create more jobs: often, yes, grossly underpaid jobs delivering take-out and washing gym towels for the more affluent, but still, more jobs than are available in rural communities, from which you might have to drive miles to get to the nearest mall or amusement park or hospital that might employ you.

In fact, one worry goes, cities might
promote
more prolonged independence by providing the kinds of amenities and support that one might otherwise require a mate to enjoy.

Speaking about her perceptions of different regional marriage patterns, Melissa Harris-Perry described to me how the girlfriends with whom she'd attended college in the south had mostly married early, while those she met later while working at Princeton remained single. It left her with the impression that “high-achieving black women marry in their twenties in the South” but far later in the North. Wondering why this was the case, Harris-Perry recalled a friend whom she described as “a classic fifty-year-old New York bachelor,” who had once explained his persistent
singlehood by noting “that on any day he could have his laundry done, he could get food in the middle of the night if he was hungry, he could go out and sit in the park, or he could go to a show; the proximity of all the services, arts, and cultural events, plus a wide variety of people to be dating made marriage not particularly interesting.”

The notion that women too might get from urban homes what, in another era, they got—or what men got—from marriage is a radical, progressive revision of what marriage means. Cities allow us to extract some of the transactional services that were assumed to be an integral, gendered aspect of traditional marriage and enjoy them as
actual
transactional service, for which we pay. This dynamic also permits women to function in the world in a way that was once impossible, with the city serving as spouse, and, sometimes, true love.

Dodai Stewart grew up in New York. Her father, a doctor who was twenty years older than her mother, died when Dodai was a teenager, and her mother has never remarried. Dodai has been in and out of several relationships with men she had every intention of marrying, but, for a variety of reasons, it's never come to pass. Just after she turned forty, Dodai told me, “My long-term relationship is with New York. Definitely. I write about the city. I photograph the city. The city is Girlhattan.”

Dodai remembered one of her exes, a San Franciscan who told her that he couldn't wait to get married and have a lawn. Dodai never wanted a lawn. He didn't know what the old punk nightclub CBGB was; he couldn't manage to distinguish, either culturally or geographically, between uptown and downtown. Dodai couldn't take it. “When you don't understand my city,” she said, “you don't understand me.” She chose New York over the man. She feels strongly that the city is a more rewarding mate. “The city talks to you all the time,” she said. “It leaves you messages. You walk by graffiti, and everything changes suddenly because you read something that speaks to you. New York is a character in my life.”

The fact that Dodai was raised in New York, by a mother who has lived independently here for more than twenty years, may make it easier for her family to understand her independent path. For those urban dwellers raised in earlier-marrying regions and amongst earlier-marrying friends, the dynamics can be trickier.

Nisha, from suburban Napierville, Illinois, described to me the disjuncture she feels between her life in her hometown and her life in Washington, D.C., as a twenty-four-year-old who works in social media and is in a relationship but remains unmarried. She's begun to note that some of her friends and high-school classmates are marrying, but her social circles in Washington and New York, where she also works, remain single. In the city, she said, her friends “are focusing on our careers and enjoying city life, but some of my friends from home are wondering when their boyfriends might propose.”

Everyone she knows in D.C., Nisha told me, has both a day job and side projects and social calendars so packed that it's difficult for her to imagine meeting any old-fashioned marital milestones. She thinks that, in five years, her perspective will be different. “There is that invisible line of thirty,” she said. “When women get close to thirty is when people start to wonder about you.” Her parents, immigrants from India, have said to her that they hope she doesn't wait that long. But, she added, they also understand that in a new economy, it's “not smart for a woman to be financially dependent on a man.”

Of course there are millions of single women who never leave, or indeed who move in a reverse migratory pattern, from cities to suburban and rural areas. And, while the age of marriage is rising everywhere, in the places where people tend to marry earlier, the stigma of remaining unmarried can be strong.

Kristina is a thirty-five-year-old archaeological lawyer who lives in Bismarck, North Dakota. She was born and raised in Philadelphia, and because of the ever-changing, regional nature of her work and studies, has lived as an adult in Massachusetts; Dallas, Texas; Carlsbad, New Mexico; Reno, Nevada; Rhode Island; Fairfield, Connecticut; Farmington, New Mexico; and Missoula, Montana.

With her vast geographical range, Kristina could say with confidence that, “being single is a handicap in the more rural places.” When she told friends that she was moving from Missoula to Bismarck, many expressed concern that she'd be moving to a more urban area without a husband
for protection. She told me that her response was often, “I moved from Connecticut to New Mexico by myself, and you're worried about the high crime rate in
Bismarck
?”

As Kristina began to make friends in North Dakota, she said, some people expressed shock that she wasn't married and had never been married. She also reported that, on several occasions, after being asked if she were hitched and replying no, people would respond by saying “Oh, I'm so sorry.” But as an inhabitant of a place where early marriage is the norm, even she has internalized some of the prejudice and alarm about people she meets who remain unmarried. If she meets a man her age who has never wed, she said, “My red flags are all over the place. ‘What's wrong with you? I know
I'm
single, but I'm feisty from the East Coast. Now you explain yourself to me.' ” She thinks that if she lived in a city, she'd be more comfortable dating single men, because the swifter normalization of single adult life in cities makes the men who are single seem more . . . normal.

What's true is that women (and men) are marrying later all over the nation, not just in the cities, even though it can sometimes feel that way. The conscious embrace of unmarried life—or at least a gimlet-eyed critique of the early marriage model as opposed to a romanticizing of it—is far from exclusively urban. In 2013, twenty-four-year-old Kacey Musgraves from Golden, Texas, was nominated for an American Country Music Award for Best Female Vocalist. Her song, “Merry Go 'Round,” begins: “If you ain't got two kids by twenty-one/You're probably gonna die alone/Least that's what tradition told you,” and then continues to convey doubt about what that tradition gets you: “We get bored, so, we get married, Just like dust, we settle in this town . . . We think the first time's good enough/ So, we hold on to high school love.”

For poor women, communal living, no matter your marital status, has long been a necessity. In 1855, of four hundred single women on a New York City census sampled by historian Christine Stansell, only eleven lived alone.
¹⁷
Piled into tight rooms in narrow tenements with siblings, cousins, parents, and grandparents is how most working women lived in cities until relatively recently, and how many poor and immigrant families still live around the country.

Even those who were forced to, or longed to, break from the multigenerational living arrangement could not easily set up house on their own. Fears about controlling sexuality, enforcing moral codes, and keeping women safe meant that for generations, many wage-earning girls lived in boarding houses; activist Virginia Penny wrote in 1863, “Many of these shop girls sleep half a dozen to a garret.”
¹⁸
That garret was usually closely monitored by older women who kept strict curfews and policed the virtue of their lessees with parental zeal.

Historian Joanne Meyerowitz writes of how, in 1891 Chicago, the matron of the Home for Self-Supporting Women contacted the Illinois Humane Society, who, in turn, contacted a young female resident's stepmother to get permission for the young woman to go out with a man from her South Dakota hometown. The stepmother thanked the organizations for protecting her stepdaughter from “the many traps and snares of the city.”
¹⁹

But the primal urge for women to carve out some space to call their own is familiar to anyone who has read Virginia Woolf.

Nineteenth century physician Harriot Hunt, who lived contentedly with her parents, and then a married sister, said, “It cripples one not to have a home of one's own.”
²⁰
And Louisa May Alcott wrote longingly, at age twelve, of a seemingly impossible fantasy: “I have been thinking about my little room, which I suppose I shall never have. I should want to be there about all the time, and I should go there and sing and think.” Alcott was one of the few women eventually able to afford her own space, and would later describe herself, as a kind of spider, needing “to be alone to spin.”
²¹

While poor men, like their working-class sisters, also crowded into tenement spaces with families or coworkers, more affluent single gentlemen, whose rights to inherit property and earn rent money were less tenuous, had a wider array of options. They could live in apartment houses and in clubs, their domestic (and presumably sexual) needs attended to
by paid help. In Manhattan, by the end of the nineteenth century, between a third and a half of men over age fifteen were unmarried, and many lived on their own. One bachelor wrote of his accommodations in a gentlemen's club: “Each member is as much at home as if he were in his own castle; the building . . . is kept with the same neatness, exactness, and comfort as a private dwelling. Every member is a master, without any of the cares or troubles of a master.”
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It sounds nice! And, for a long time, there was simply no female equivalent. But as more women came to cities not simply to work as domestics, but in the newly developing female professions, there had to be space for them to live.

Built in 1903, the twelve-story Martha Washington Hotel was one of the first complexes designed to individually house women who were arriving in New York to find work.
²³
When the building was landmarked in 2012, the
New York Times
described the era as one in which “single professional women had a difficult time finding places to live in which they were free from the suspicion of immoral behavior.” Even in the Martha Washington, which first admitted five hundred residents, and would go on to house stenographers, editors, and a lawyer who would become the first woman appointed a magistrate in New York, there were strict rules: Men were not permitted beyond the first floor and, at first, male bellhops were required to carry all heavy luggage; in 1904, fourteen women replaced those bellhops.

In 1906 the Trowmart Inn was built to house single women in Greenwich Village, and erected for “the class who labors for a small wage, and whose parents have no home within the city.” The Trowmart had no curfew, and was in fact expressly designed as a way station on the path to the altar. Its founder told the
New York Times
that he intended to create a place where men could court women, since an inability to live independently also meant structural obstacles when it came to dating, romance, and sex. As the
Times
described it, “Girls of gentleness and refinement do not care to be courted upon the open highway, nor in public parks, and thus the world is filling with spinsters who . . . had they a proper place in which to entertain their admirers, would develop into happy, excellent wives and still happier mothers.” The Trowmart's founder said that he'd be pleased, in the
Times
's words, “if the girls
have a happy home, and if a number of marriages accrue each year from the Trowmart Inn.”

These establishments helped create a path for women who wanted to live on their own, giving way to slightly more glamorous options, like The Barbizon, a “Club Residence for Professional Woman” built in 1927, which, while featuring tiny, Spartan rooms, also began to provide some of the services of older gentlemen's quarters. The
Chicago Tribune
reported of the Barbizon as it was being built that it was “especially designed for business and professional women with such unique features as a gymnasium, swimming pool, studios and other conveniences usually found only in men's clubs.” Two years later, the
Times
reported on the “modern Amazons” who were enjoying the Barbizon's athletic facilities, and noted that “it has been said that in their clubs women have more liberty than men.”