All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (27 page)

Even in socially and religiously conservative climes, the economically stabilizing effect of women finishing their educations and launching their own careers becomes ever clearer, prompting a reevaluation of marital and educational timelines. Academic drive, the urge to capitalize on educational opportunity, a plan to put off distracting romantic entanglement, all with the conscious desire to make later independence possible: These motivations were mentioned by nearly every college student or recent graduate that I interviewed for this book.

The daughter of a construction worker and a high school aide who emigrated to the United States from Albania in 2001, Yllka, twenty, attends a public university in New York City. The first person in her immediate family to go to college, Yllka is studying finance and wants to work in investment banking. Her parents urge her to learn to cook and clean, telling her “you're not going to get a husband otherwise,” but they're also very supportive of her education and career. At the moment, Yllka doesn't want a husband or a boyfriend. For most of her friends, she said, relationships “feel like an extra class, organization-wise. [We] don't want to have a relationship. It's so much work. It takes a lot out of you and is a huge time commitment.” Yllka's priority is her schoolwork, she said, precisely because “I don't want to be reliant or dependent on others. “If she someday meets the right person, she can imagine getting married. But, she emphasized, “If I do decide to go on that path, I want to provide for myself so we can both be equal in the relationship.”

This sentiment directly jibes with the research of Elizabeth Armstrong, a University of Michigan sociologist who told the
New York Times
that women were choosing casual hookups over romantic entanglements,
in the words of the
Times
reporter, “because they saw relationships as too demanding and potentially too distracting from their goals.”

When Caitlin Geaghan, twenty-three, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012, she ended her relationship with her boyfriend because she knew that, after six years together, the next step would be marriage, and she really didn't want to get married. She wanted to be an interior designer. She wanted to travel. “If I had chosen to stay with him,” she said, “I would have been choosing to stay in one place.” Caitlin told me that she loved her boyfriend, who was devastated by their breakup. But she never regretted her decision. Now living in Washington, D.C., working at a small interior design firm, Geaghan said that she works a lot, but that that's what she'd expected and wanted. She reads. She spends time alone. She is taking flying lessons, in order to get a private pilot's license. She'd like to go to London, or elsewhere in Europe, or perhaps start her own design firm. “As far as my personal life,” she said, “I really don't have any plans for that. There is no age by which I want to get married. I don't anticipate it being anytime soon.”

Alison Turkos, reproductive health activist, has serious professional goals: She wants to work to repeal the Hyde Amendment and increase access to abortion services for more people. In fact, she wants to work toward these goals every minute of every day. “I don't want to have to text a partner and say, ‘Hey, I know we were supposed to do this but I want to do this other thing instead.' I want to put myself first and for me right now that means that I want to put my work first.” Turkos said, “My career is the best partner I've ever had.” Of her friends, some of them in relationships, she said, “They go to bed at night with their partners and I go to bed at night with
A Clinician's Guide to Medical and Surgical Abortion
. And I love it.”

A drive to be financially independent from men is one of the things that motivates young people to work. But lucky women find in their educational or professional lives something equally sustaining: excitement, purpose, reward, recognition. For these women, it's not simply about economic practicality; the pursuit of education and professional ambition is also about experiencing other kinds of passion.

Nineteenth-century never-married doctor Elizabeth Blackwell once wrote,
“How good work is—work that has a soul in it! I cannot conceive of any thing that can supply its want to a woman. In all human relations, the woman has to yield, to modify her individuality . . . but true work is perfect freedom, and full satisfaction.”
¹⁰

It was a satisfaction echoed by Cornelia Hancock, raised in a Quaker home in New Jersey to be a wife, who was twenty-three in 1863, when she took off to work as a volunteer nurse on the bloody, rotting fields of Gettysburg, where she slept outside on a cot. “[I]t seems to me that all my past life was a myth,” she wrote in a letter home. “I feel like a new person . . . and walk as straight as a soldier, feel life and vigor which you well know I never felt at home . . . I cannot explain it, but I feel so erect.” Hancock would go on to open a school for freed slaves in South Carolina, and was a founder of the Children's Aid Society of Philadelphia. She never married.
¹¹

In the decades since the Second Wave encouraged middle-class women to seek fulfillment and remuneration outside their homes, the flood of women into schools and workplaces has been immense. In 2010, women held the majority of all jobs in the country, along with 51 percent of all management positions. About a third of the nation's doctors are female, and 45 percent of its lawyers.
¹²
Women now graduate from high school more often than men; they receive about half of all medical and law degrees and more than half of master's degrees. The percentage of not just bachelor's degrees, but also of master's, law, medical, and doctoral degrees being awarded to women is the highest it has ever been in the history of the nation.
¹³

But the eruptive enthusiasm of women for educational opportunity is no millennial fluke. The University of Chicago opened in 1892; by 1902, there were more female students than male, and more women than men in
Phi Beta Kappa
; fears that Chicago would come to be thought of as a women's institution led the university to implement a short-lived sex segregation policy.
¹⁴
Similar pressures applied at Stanford, which opened in the 1890s to such a crush of female applicants that the school's benefactor, Jane Stanford, capped women's enrollment at five hundred, lest the university become thought of as a “female seminary.” By 1900, there were as many or more women than men in universities in California, Illinois, Iowa,
Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin.
¹⁵

Back then, the academic doors that swung open to women slammed hard on marital expectation.

Among the alumnae of the first twenty-four Vassar classes, roughly one-third of graduates were married.
¹⁶
At Vassar in the 1870s, only two in five graduates would marry by the age of twenty-four. Fifty-three percent of Bryn Mawr students who graduated between 1889 and 1908 remained single, like 47 percent of female graduates of the University of Michigan in the same period.
¹⁷
During the 1870s,
¹⁸
according to Betsy Israel, the marriage rate among educated women plunged to 60 percent,
¹⁹
compared to 90 percent for all women in the general population. And for those pursuing advanced degrees in law, science, medicine, and academia, matrimony was even less likely. In 1890, over half of all female doctors were single, and of those women who earned PhDs between 1877 and 1924, three-quarters would not wed.

It's difficult to discern whether academic degrees and the professional opportunities that came with them made women less desirable to men looking for submissive wives; whether education broadened the hopes and ambitions, and perhaps raised the romantic standards, of female students; or whether universities and careers provided sweet escape for those already leery about entering early marriages. The reality was surely some combination of these and other factors.

But, even if the first explanation, the one most favored by the popular press—always looking to punish ambitious women—held, the steadily growing number of women eager to nonetheless matriculate was testament to the fact that marriage itself was becoming ever less the sole measure of female worth.

There's a phrase we use quite easily about a certain kind of professional man. We say that he is “married to his job.” It's a gently critical appraisal, something that tells us that a man is committed, diligent, a workaholic. Increasingly, it's
possible to hear it, or the idea that it conveys, applied to women, but almost never with affection.

As married mother Eleanor Mills wrote in
The Times of London
in 2010 of her professionally driven, unmarried friends, “As they stare into a barren future . . . many singletons wish they'd put some of the focus and drive that has furnished them with sparkling careers, worn-out passports and glamorous social lives into the more mundane business of having a family.” Mills reported that many of her ambitious cohort realized “too late . . . that no job will ever love you back,” and added menacingly, “the graveyards are full of important executives.”

Putting aside the fact that graveyards also contain large numbers of wives and mothers, Mills was wrong on another front: A job may very well love you back. It may sustain and support you, buoy your spirits and engage your mind, as the best romantic partner would, and far more effectively than a subpar spouse might. In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection.

In fact, it's high time that more people acknowledged the electric pull that women can feel for their profession, the exciting heat of ambition and
frisson
of success. It happens, here and there, as in the 2009 film
Julie & Julia
, an ode to professional passion, told through the stories of chef Julia Child in Paris in the 1950s and blogger Julie Powell in New York in the 2000s, women who yearn not for love but to do work that they care about and more, yearn to be recognized and well compensated for it. The film was a love letter to female ambition.

In
The New Yorker
online in 2013, Sasha Weiss wrote about comedian Kristen Wiig's sendoff from her seven-year gig as a cast member on
Saturday Night Live
. Wiig, co-writer and star of
Bridesmaids,
was leaving to pursue her suddenly hot Hollywood career. In the final skit, Mick Jagger conducted a high-school commencement ceremony, in which the only real graduate was Wiig, whom he joked was leaving to become a nun. Onstage to get her diploma, she doffed her cap and gown to reveal an off-white dress; she began to dance, happily and tearily, with all the other cast members to the Rolling Stones “She's A Rainbow.”

“The graduation had morphed into a wedding,” Weiss observed brilliantly. “But Wiig, who often plays women anxious about being single,
seemed content to be marrying her career.” Indeed, it was a cathartic, celebratory moment, a “relief” as Weiss described it, that “doesn't exactly defeat the problem of American women still earning, on average, seventy-seven cents for every man's dollar,” but which was nonetheless stirring, celebratory. “It's heartening to see a raunchy, expressive, commanding female performer celebrated so publicly for her ambition,” Weiss wrote, especially since the guy serenading her was Jagger, “that symbol of male sexual freedom . . . who seemed to regard Wiig not as under his thumb, but as a peer.”
²⁰

The scene was not a moment of completely unalloyed joy: Wiig's heartbreak at leaving her job was evident on her face, and offered a glimpse of how deeply those of us lucky enough to enjoy our work attach ourselves to our workplaces, our coworkers, the identities that we've formed in relation to our work.

When I left my first journalism job at the place where I'd learned to write, been mentored, and also been underpaid and not particularly successful, I was thrilled to be moving on to a better position. I arranged to take a week's vacation between gigs. To my surprise and horror, I spent most of that week sitting in an armchair in my apartment, weeping. I had not been dumped by my job; I had dumped it. And yet, I cried, missing my office chair, my cluttered desk, my colleagues who were now eating lunch and talking about stuff without me; I cried because I wouldn't see my byline in the beautiful pink paper that week . . . or ever again.

I did wind up far happier in my next job. But, years later, when my old newspaper moved out of the building where I'd labored as a young reporter, I had a series of dreams about the old building, dreams from which I'd wake up shaken and sad. I had an emotional hangover, so deeply had I been shaped by that first, formative relationship to a job that was now, physically, permanently lost to me.

In 1861, when Sallie Holley was forced by the war to quit her antislavery lecturing crusade, she took to her bed and was administered a water cure to address her “torpidity of the liver.” Nurse Clara Barton lost her voice and fell ill after her Civil War work came to an end. Barton later found more battlefield work during the Franco-Prussian War but, at its close in 1872, she lost her eyesight and was committed to the Danville
Sanitarium for ten years. Only when she began to organize the American Red Cross did her health return.
²¹

When, after several years, my friend Sara left an all-consuming job she'd taken after returning to New York from Boston, she said, “It was extremely painful because of how deeply I loved and cared for it. But like a relationship that has run its course, I had to recognize it was time to move on . . . but, God, did it break my heart for a long time.” Sara described the job as her “heavy-duty relationship from thirty-one to thirty-six,” but then stopped, remembering that actually, she'd had a relationship with a man—a funny and lovable, but ultimately unreliable, man—in those years. “Perhaps it's interesting that he's who I chose to be with while I had the hardest job I will possibly ever have and one that I was extraordinarily passionate about,” she ventured. In other words: the job was the passion. The (fun but unsuitable) partner was secondary.