All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (25 page)

And some women seek more official stamps on their female partnerships.

Amina spoke to me of a “non-cheesy way to celebrate single people,” noting that she's been taking care of herself since she was eighteen. “Everything I own I buy for myself. But there's nothing in society that celebrates me; in the eyes of my family I'm a failure because at this point I'm not partnered.” She said that she and Ann have a running joke about doing a TED Talk about “how we should get married to each other for the benefits of marriage. The romantic stuff we're not interested in, but the economic reality of being single, man . . . You need to have a single person starter kit.”

We also, of course, need to have affordable health care and housing, alongside stable social security and welfare systems. The state must play its role in supporting a population that no longer lives and dies within family units. Alongside social policy must come social recognition of the independent women turning to each other and relying on each other throughout their lives.

Imagined covenants of care, whether between women who want
to parent, or enjoy tax benefits, or seek support in old age or with the onset of illness, may seem unwieldy, dependent on the circumstances, fortunes, and reliability of those who enter into them. But, in this, they are not so radically different from traditional marriages, in which the promise of shared care for children is regularly shattered by divorce, by illness, by death, and the responsibility for caretaking through sickness and in health tends to be shouldered more heavily by one member of the pair, leaving the other alone.

Perhaps, if a future included more communal care between women, and if we saw models that flourished, those communal agreements could become more reliable and grow to contain more people, creating an expansive and resilient shield, in many ways more flexible than marriage, against the brutal realities of life and death, alone and together.

“I truly believe that women should be financially independent from their men . . . Money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what's sexy. And men define what's feminine. It's ridiculous.”

—Beyoncé, 2013

Eleanor Ross was born in 1916, the daughter of a New England Telephone & Telegraph employee and a mother who stayed home and later worked in a bank. Eleanor grew up a lover of animals, the outdoors, and science. She wanted very much to be a doctor. By the time she attended Colby College in Maine, it was clear that there was not money to get her to medical school; she won a research fellowship at the University of Iowa, and took a train through the New England hurricane of 1838 to the Midwest, where she would earn an advanced degree in biology.

During her graduate-school summers, Eleanor worked at the Jackson Laboratory on Mount Desert Island in Maine, on a study conducted by a pioneering female scientist, Elizabeth Shull Russell, and published in the August 1940
Journal of Experimental Zoology
, called “A Comparison of Benign and ‘Malignant' Tumors in Drosophila Melanogaster.” After completing her degree, Eleanor moved to Houlton, Maine, where her
father had been transferred by the telephone company. In 1940, she took a job at Ricker Classical Institute, a local liberal arts college and its partner high school; she became the founding professor of Ricker's Biology Department.

By the time Eleanor began to teach, there had been generations' worth of arguments waged within the press and between friends about the possibility that women might feel professional aspirations or commitments that were comparable to men's. As “The Bachelor Maid” had written in 1904 of her impulse toward intellectual pursuits, “so far as I can discover . . . it is just the same sort of ambition that a man feels; not a thirst for a little cheap publicity as an ‘intellectual woman,' much less the desire for a pseudo ‘independence' and an individual bank account, but an honest love for the studies of which my school-days gave me a glimpse.”

But wrapped up with “The Bachelor Maid's” very
raison d'être
was the fact that these ambitions were not, then, compatible with wifeliness and motherhood.

In
The Feminine Mystique
, Betty Friedan quotes the groundbreaking, never-married nineteenth-century doctor Elizabeth Blackwell as saying, “I am woman as well as physician . . . I understand now why this life has never been lived before. It is hard, with no support but a high purpose, to live against every species of social opposition . . . I should like a little fun now and then. Life is altogether too sober.”
¹

The culturally enforced weighing of femininity (love, marriage, motherhood) against profession (intellectual engagement, money, public recognition) so fascinated writers and readers that, at the turn of the nineteenth century, three separate novels chronicled the pull between medicine and emotional life for women. William Dean Howells published
Dr. Breen's Practice
in 1881; in it, the doctor heroine realizes the error of her medical ambition and gives up her career for marriage. The next year, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who advocated the burning of corsets, wrote about unfair labor practices for women and the unjust financial dependency of marriage, and married in her early forties a man seventeen years her junior, published
Doctor Zay
, in which the heroine suggests a contract with her future husband, ensuring that she'll be able to continue practicing medicine after their marriage. In 1884, Sarah
Orne Jewett, herself a Mainer who never married, wrote
A Country Doctor
, in which the heroine sends her besotted suitor packing in favor of remaining a physician.

By Eleanor's lifetime, the turn-of-the-century tide of educated women pushing into the upper echelons of the professional world was already receding toward its midcentury low; even the most popular progressive calls for women to join the workforce were tempered by the promise that no amount of work could knock family from its primary perch within the female consciousness. Mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, writing in
The Ladies' Home Journal
in 1921, made the scorching proposition that “Every young girl in the country today should be taught to be self-supporting, to do one thing well enough to earn by it when the necessity comes.” And yet, she followed up, even the most avid professional, “if she is born woman . . . is born mate and childbearer,” and must realize that her home “must be first.”
²

Eleanor did not marry at the age that many of her peers did. The year that she got her master's degree, finished work on the Drosophilia study, and became a biology teacher, the median age for first marriage for women in the United States was about twenty-one and a half;
³
she was twenty-four. But at the college where she taught, she met a political science teacher who also coached basketball, a potato farmer's son. They married in 1942, when she was twenty-six. There was no question but that she'd give up her job and move to the Air Force base in Arkansas where her husband would learn to fly before his World War II service in the Pacific. By 1943, he was based in Guam and Eleanor was back in Maine, expecting their first child, my mother.

In 1945, my grandfather returned and took over his parents' farm. He did not believe that mothers should work outside the home. Eleanor became a farm wife: a zealous homemaker, churner of butter, obsessive cleaner of dirt brought in from the potato fields, and a great cook who, during the harvest, brought enormous baskets of hot stews and pies out to the men and children for lunch. But as my mother remembered, “She was always sick, had headaches, back problems. She was obsessive about the floor; she scrubbed it three times a week on her hands and knees. She was not a happy lady; it was clear, even to me, as a kid.”

In 1958, twenty years after Eleanor braved the hurricane to go get her biology degree, she had three children, aged four to fourteen. She had just lugged one of those hot lunches to the field, when the treasurer at the local college drove up, jumped out of his car, and explained that the school's biology teacher had just died. There was no one in the small town qualified to replace her. Could my grandmother fill in, just for a few weeks, until a replacement could be found?

My mother, a young teen who'd been working in the field that day, and remembered the conversation vividly, recalled that my grandmother looked for permission to her husband. He nodded; she should help out for a few weeks.

Eleanor retired twenty-two years later, after having been awarded an honorary doctorate.

My mother remembered, “When she went back to work, it was like night and day. She was busy; she didn't have to scrub the floor three times a week. She dressed up. She took more care with her appearance. She was happier. Everything about her changed.”

I'm quite certain that my grandmother, who died in 2012, would have said that the most important role in her life was as a mother and wife and, later, as a grandmother. But I also know that, when I was young, the gifts I'd receive from her in the mail included the clipped wings of a dead blue jay and sea creatures preserved in jars of formaldehyde; she taught me how to gut fish and identify their internal organs; she'd walk me up the hill behind the farm and tell me the names of every wildflower; the photograph we had of her in our house showed her dissecting a cat. Even as a Nana, she was a scientist.

One Christmas, when she was in her early nineties and slipping into dementia so severe that she no longer recognized her children or grandchildren, my cousins and I heard her talking loudly—practically bellowing—from the guest bedroom where she was asleep. Curious and concerned, we gathered outside her door to listen to what she was yelling about.

She was teaching a lengthy and perfectly lucid biology class.

Work—in lucky cases, work that is engaging, but even in other less fortunate circumstances, work that permits economic autonomy or simply an identity outside a family—is just as crucial and as defining a pillar of adult life for women as it is for men. Which is to say: lots of women, like lots of men, find passion and fulfillment in work, just as lots of men, like lots of women, find passion and fulfillment in their personal lives.

But the assumption that a woman who works cannot really be a full and functional wife, remains so pervasive that, as Bella DePaulo recounts in her book,
Singled Out
, when television journalist Barbara Walters was stepping down from
20/20
in 2004, she gave a parting interview to her friend, journalist Ted Koppel, and proclaimed that one of the reasons that she was dialing back after forty years in the news business was to enjoy her personal life. Koppel reminded her that she had been twice divorced. He then asked, “Was it the job? If it had not been for the job, would you still be married to one of those men?”
⁴
Walters replied that she wasn't sure.

Sometimes, even today, the only class of women who can be comfortably understood as being ambitious or publicly powerful are those who are unmarried and childfree. Take, for example, Oprah Winfrey, Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, the longest-serving female senator Barbara Mikulski, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. They are all women whose unusual power and positions made sense, both because, yes, structurally and strategically, they had not been forced to divide their educational and professional attentions, but also because, without families, it could be assumed that their lives were otherwise empty. Never mind that men with wives and litters of children have held positions of enormous influence and responsibility since the beginning of time. For women, the assumption that a family
must
come first persists so strongly that, when Barack Obama nominated unmarried Janet Napolitano to be head of Homeland Security in 2008, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell said that she'd be great for the job because “you have to have no life. Janet has no family. Perfect. She can devote, literally, nineteen to twenty hours a day to it.”
⁵
(Napolitano's predecessors,
Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, were each married, with two children).

The other traditionally acceptable pattern for ambitious women has been to enter the professional fray after children are grown. The fact of having
had
children renders this genus of women comprehensibly female, but doesn't scramble anyone's brain by suggesting that domestic and personal commitments might have existed equally and coterminously within the female brain. Ann Richards, the great Texas governor, didn't go into politics until after having had four children; she gave her career-highlight speech at the Democratic National Convention when she was fifty-four years old.

But this pattern of delay can gravely hobble women's ability to accrue power. In 2012, Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, highest-ranking woman in Congressional history and a mother of five, was asked by Luke Russert, a twenty-seven-year-old reporter who got his first network job at twenty-three, whether her decision to remain at the head of her party at age seventy-two inhibited younger people from participation. Pelosi explained to Russert that her “male colleagues . . . had a jump on me because they didn't have children to stay home [with]. You've got to take off about fourteen years from me because I was home raising a family.” Pelosi also said, “I want women to be here in greater numbers at an earlier age so that their seniority would start to count much sooner.”

This is where the expanding generation of unmarried and later-married women comes in. When adulthood is not kicked off by marriage and motherhood, women can begin to accrue professional power earlier. This is true not only in politics and government—where female stars like Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Amy Klobuchar, and Loretta Lynch, the first African-American attorney general, all dug their teeth into careers in law and politics
before
marrying or starting families, making it harder for those families to derail trajectories—but in the rest of the world.