All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (28 page)

In 2005, former Brandeis professor and lawyer Linda Hirshman wrote a scorching piece in
The American Prospect
, addressing those highly educated women she saw dropping out of the workforce to care for kids, and in doing so becoming dependent on their husbands. “Money,” Hirshman argued, “usually accompanies power, and it enables the bearer to wield power, including within the family.” But more than that, Hirshman suggested, for women, the family, “with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks. . . . allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government.”

Conservative columnist David Brooks responded in the
New York Times
by suggesting that “If Hirshman thinks high-paying careers lead to more human flourishing, I invite her to spend a day as an associate at a big law firm.” (Brooks was apparently unaware that Hirshman spent decades working at big law firms and had argued twice in front of the Supreme Court). Brooks also suggested that while “the domestic sphere may not offer the sort of brutalizing, dominating power Hirshman admires . . . it is the realm of unmatched influence” and that “men are more interested in things and abstract rules while women are more interested in people. . . . Power is in the kitchen.” Brooks's take was in service of precisely the paradigm of “power” that kept all those mothers and grandmothers dependent on husbands, and lacking the experience or skills that
might enable them to earn their own livings. Several years later, Brooks would cite a study that claimed that “being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.”

It's funny; when Sara finally left Boston, where she could have wound up married, she moved back to New York and became ascendant in her profession, in the job for which she felt such passion. It was a choice that produced an
actual economic
gain of over $100,000 a year, plus the psychic gain of no longer being in a relationship that had made her very unhappy.

Conservative polemicist Suzanne Venker (a niece of antifeminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly) wrote in a 2013 Fox News column, “Why Women Still Need Husbands,” “Financial independence is a great thing, but you can't take your paycheck to bed with you.”
²²
What's more, Venker argued, if women have babies, which she felt they should only have with husbands, “There's no way to be a wife, a mother and a full-time employee and still create balance. But you
can
have balance by depending on a husband who works full-time and year 'round.” Why not, Venker wondered, “let husbands bring home the bulk of the bacon so women can have the balanced lives they seek?”

Social conservatives, both men and the women who support a male-dominated paradigm of power, are always going to be threatened by the possibility that women might engage satisfyingly with their careers. Undergirding that potential for reward is the possibility that men might get pushed out, become accessories, see the space they would otherwise take up in the female life filled instead by wage-earning work.

It's threatening because it's true. But Venker and her compatriots make a mistake in holding up traditionally gender-divided marriages as an appealing alternative to career woman. Because when the choice is between an old-fashioned dependency relationship and work that satisfies, many women are going to choose the work. Research done by PEW, in 2013, reveals that among millennials, women are more willing than men to prioritize their work.
²³

Frances Kissling spoke of the advantages of being a single person in the workplace. “Professionally, there are certain things that accrued to me. I didn't have to think about the effect of my actions on a husband or children.” In her line of work—social crusading and agitation—that had particular upsides. “If I got arrested, who cares?”

Holly Clark is a twenty-six-year-old television news camera utility, whose mother's life was devoted to raising her children. “I am unwilling to do what my mom did,” Clark said, “and that's give up her life to raise my brother and me. I could never do that. Ever.” Holly said her mother became financially dependent upon her father when she chose to be a stay-at-home mom, locking her into the marriage. Holly sees marriage and career as lifelong commitments, and said that, so far, she has always chosen work. “The minute a relationship has interfered with my career,” she said, “it's out. Not even a second thought. You fuck with my career, you're done.” And so, for now, she's single. “It's funny,” she said, “people are making plans for New Year's and all I'm thinking about is hopefully working on a New Year's Eve special. Other people think ‘Who am I going to give my midnight kiss to?' and I think, ‘Where is the midnight shot going to be?' ” Holly acknowledged that her devotion has scared off suitors, because, she said, “For many guys, strong women are not something that they want.”

That's a note also sounded by Stephanie, a thirty-nine-year-old importer of Guatemalan art and Atlanta native who described her work as “like a love affair.” She travels the world, partners with NGOs in artists communities, and aids in the aftermath of natural disasters, all of which she sees as “vehicles designed to make a global impact.” Stephanie's mother has suggested, “Honey, maybe you shouldn't tell men all the things you're involved in, because I think it scares them.” At the same time, Stephanie said, there are men who actively pursue her because of her accomplishments. “I think some men love the
idea
of a strong independent woman but they don't want to
marry
a strong independent woman,” said Stephanie. “I hear that from a lot of my friends. Men love the idea of us—strong, independent women traveling the world, changing the world—but we frighten them.”

Female professional success has often come at the cost of the attention of men, or at least the kind of men threatened by high-achieving women.
Television commentator Nancy Giles told me, “To be a black woman, educated, with my own home and my own car . . . whether or not
I
feel like a woman packing a pistol or wearing a cone bra, that's how some men see me.” Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor was reported to have enjoyed her dating life prior to being appointed to the nation's highest court, and to have been dismayed when, upon taking the bench, it crashed and burned around her.
²⁴
And one of the most resonant anecdotes from
Are Men Necessary?
, a 2005 book by
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd, was about the time one of her closest girlfriends, who sounds a lot like
New York Times
book reviewer Michiko Kakutani, called up, upon having been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and announced that she would never be asked on a date again.

But loving and being lauded for one's work is its own kind of protection against another kind of dependency, not the financial sort. For if women really do hang all their hopes, dreams, and energies on love, they come to require not just economic support but fun, validation, and diversion from their mate. Education, work, and money can fill a woman's life, both in the absence of a partner, in addition to a partner, or when a partnership is extinguished. Educator Anna Julia Cooper understood this in the nineteenth century, when she wrote of the learned woman, “Neither is she compelled to look to sexual love as the one sensation capable of giving tone and relish, movement and vim to the life she leads.”

The fact is, being married to your job for some portion or all of your life,
even if it does in some way inhibit romantic prospects
, is not necessarily a terrible fate, provided that you are lucky enough to enjoy your work, or the money you earn at it, or the respect it garners you, or the people you do it with.

In 2013, while putting together statistics for her company, Maneto Mapping & Analysis, researcher Michelle Schmitt came across some figures that surprised her. As she looked at the population of women in Philadelphia who were classified as middle-income (those who make between
60 and 200 percent of the city's median income, which at the time translated to between $41,000 and $123,000) she noted that 48 percent were never married, up from 40 percent in the early seventies.

Never marrying or marrying late, Schmitt knew, was increasingly the pattern of both the very poor and the very privileged; her analysis also showed that while just 22 percent of high-income women were never married in the early seventies, that figure had risen to 40 percent between 2009 and 2011; the percentage of never-married low-income women had climbed from 49 percent to 61 percent in the same time period. But it was clear to her that the rise had now also become the pattern for those women in the middle. “These data make it clear that not marrying is becoming more common for all women, regardless of income level,” said Schmitt.

Remaining unmarried through some portion of early adulthood, especially for college-educated women, has been revealed to be intimately linked with making money. The “Knot Yet Report,” published in 2013, reported that a college educated woman who delays marriage until her thirties will earn $18,000 more per year than an equivalently educated woman who marries in her twenties.
²⁵
Women without college degrees
also
gain a wage premium if they delay marriage into their thirties, though only an average of $4,000 a year.

An even more powerful suggestion of exactly why it's so important for the David Brooks of the world (including his conservative
Times
opinion page colleague, Ross Douthat, who has bemoaned modern woman's “retreat from child rearing”) to convince women that power is in the kitchen: the Knot Yet Report also revealed the exact
opposite
pattern to be true for men.
²⁶
Both college-educated and non-college–educated men earn more money if they marry
early
, and thus conform to the marriage model that has always supported their economic dominance and the resulting dependency of women on them.

Men don't just earn more by tying women down early: They do better at work.

A 2010 survey by the American Historical Association showed that it took, on average, a married female historian 7.8 years to get tenure, compared to the 6.7 years it took a single woman to earn the same promotion. For men, the pattern was reversed: Unmarried men became full professors
in 6.4 years, compared to the 5.9 years
²⁷
it took men with wives at home. For men, marriage, and presumably the domestic support derived from wives, boosted professional focus. For women, the
lack
of marriage and its attendant responsibilities is what allowed them to move ahead at a faster clip.

Maddeningly, having children enhances men's professional standing and has the opposite impact on women's. Sociologist Michelle Budig has been studying the gendered wage gap between parents for years, and in 2014 found—based on data from 1979 to 2006—that, on average, men saw a six percent increase in earnings after becoming fathers; in contrast, women's wages decreased four percent for every child.
²⁸
The gap narrows significantly for women in upper echelon professions—also the population that tends to marry later, after careers have become more established—but another 2014 study of Harvard Business School graduates (as high-flying as it gets) found that even well-remunerated, super-educated wives weren't meeting their professional or economic goals, largely because, despite having comparable educations and ambitions, those women were allowing husband's careers to come before their own. Only seven percent of Generation X HBS graduates (and, less surprisingly, three percent of Baby Boomer women) said that they expected their careers to take precedence over their husbands'. More than 60 percent of Gen X men surveyed said that they expected
their
careers to be the top priority. Eighty-six percent of Gen X and Baby Boomer men said that their wives did most of the childcare.

There is much debate about whether having more women in the workforce—as colleagues and as bosses, slowly advancing to leadership positions—has much of an impact on these deeply entrenched patterns, whether it makes the professional world hospitable for more women or whether, as skeptics claim, it simply benefits those individual women who manage to plough through or around systemic obstacles. The argument made by Linda Hirshman in her manifesto
Get to Work
, is that the professional worlds—artistic, business, legal—would be much more anemic without these women.

But women's presence in the workforce doesn't just make an impact on their colleagues or clients, it also makes an impact on their husbands:
A 2013 study revealed that men whose wives
don't
work are likely to treat female coworkers poorly.
²⁹

When women work less, it reinforces ideas about a gender-divided world that, in turn, encourage and, in fact, force men to turn more of their attention to work.
³⁰
Choices made by individuals have an effect on circumstances beyond individual or familial experience.

According to one study, unmarried, childless women in cities, between the ages of twenty-two and thirty, earned 8 percent more than their male peers in 2008.
³¹
It's a narrow, questionable statistic, but is bolstered by other research suggesting that nationally, childless, unmarried women earn nearly ninety-six cents for every male dollar, compared to seventy-six cents to the dollar earned by married mothers.
³²
Postponing marriage has become a strategy by which women may make economic gains, positioning themselves closer to parity with their male peers.

For the first time in history, some single women are making real money. They're also spending it.