All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (34 page)

The difference is that wealthier women have other avenues in which to direct their ambitions, have more hope of attaining economic independence, have the luxury of time and flexibility to delay childbearing and marriage while they pursue interests that, ironically, will put them in closer proximity to potential mates who share those interests and who themselves enjoy some stability. Thus, privilege replicates itself; the likelihood that better-off women will remain better-off on their own increases, as does the reality that many of them will eventually marry, and that, in turn, the marriages they enter into will further enhance their social, economic, and emotional lives.

But, critically, while they may be benefitting most publicly from the deferment of marriage, it's crucial to remember that privileged women no more invented liberation from marriage than they invented the idea of working to earn wages. These were all behaviors developed, out of economic necessity, by poor working women. When imitated by richer women who have more power to start with, they can be understood as beneficial; they can be seen as social progress and perhaps part of a movement, or at least a glamorized trend.

But in the disadvantaged communities in which they were born, these same shifts in behavior are read as vulnerability and victimhood and, yes, as pathology; they are cast as immoral, irresponsible, dangerous to communities and families, and as burdensome to the state. So, while it is true that we must address the cycle of poverty faced by single women and single mothers in low-income communities, it must begin with an understanding and acknowledgment that the high rates of singlehood in low-income communities are not accidental, and more crucially, that they do not signal a flaw in reasoning or morality.

As journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has sensibly observed, “human beings are pretty logical and generally savvy about identifying their interests. Despite what we've heard, women tend to be human beings and if they are less likely to marry today, it is probably that they have decided that marriage doesn't advance their interests as much as it once did.”
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Kristina, a lawyer and archeologist who works in Bismarck, North Dakota, is a brassy, open thirty-five-year-old who refers to herself as an “archaeological crime-fighting machine.” Kristina was raised by liberal parents whose loving marriage was the second for each of them. They were very open with her about the unhappinesses of their first unions, and encouraged her to remain independent. When Kristina was in college and told her mother that she was going to move to Texas to be with a man, her mother was horrified. “You can't do that; you haven't had enough sex yet,” Kristina remembered her saying.

Ultimately, Kristina agreed: She hadn't had enough sex yet. In her twenties, she said, she paid no attention to married culture and instead just enjoyed her single life. Her goal was “to make it to thirty single.” Thus, she moved in and out of a series of monogamous relationships, and enjoyed a thriving casual sex life in between partners. Kristina said that she had sex with people who were interesting to her; “anyone who twirls me on a dance floor usually gets me going,” she said. For her, sexual appetite was just one facet of what she called her “super passionate” personality. “I have a love for dogs,” she said, “a love for my job, a love of running, a love of kids, and a love of physical contact. I love sex.”

Kristina was shocked, she said, when she saw so many of her law-school classmates pair off, seemingly at random, “Men and women I never saw partying together or hanging out just got together and got married out of the blue,” she said. This hasty coupling didn't appeal to her.

But, as she got older, she knew that she wanted children, and became increasingly interested in finding a partner with whom she might have some. She moved in with one boyfriend who turned out to have problems with alcohol and unreliability. She loved him, she said, “But there was no way I was making babies with him, because if I sent him out for milk and he didn't show up for two days, there was no way I was dealing with that.” She moved to New Mexico and lived on the border of a Navajo reservation where poverty, racism, and lack of opportunity commingled to create an explosive, often unhealthy, social and sexual atmosphere.

“I entered a scene with people far younger and wilder than I am,” she said. “I'd thought my twenties were wild, but my early thirties were the wildest time of my life sexually. There were orgies, multiple partners, threesomes, women, men.”

Kristina enjoyed this sybaritic period, but realized, in retrospect, that it was accompanied by regular migraines and physical signs of overindulgence. Her father, with whom she maintains a very frank relationship, told her that he was glad she was having fun, but that she should perhaps consider that “running around with twenty-four-year-old death-metal musicians” wasn't making her very happy. Her next stop was Missoula, Montana, where she got a master's degree in archaeology, and where she fell in love with a man who was a devout Southern Baptist. Uncomfortable, having never lived with a woman before, Kristina's boyfriend turned more deeply to his faith. “This was a guy who said, ‘Let's get married and make babies,' ” said Kristina. “And I loved him and quickly jumped on board. But, suddenly, Jesus kept coming up. And I'm really not comfortable with Jesus.”

Now in Bismarck, Kristina is single and, for the first time in her life, consciously trying to have
less
sex, instead of more. She says that it has to do with the sadness she's felt since breaking up with the Baptist, and a little bit with her increasing desire to have kids soon. “For one or all of those reasons,” she told me, “today I choose not to have as much casual sex.” She paused.

“I do sometimes,” she went on, “because I can't help it if a pretty man approaches me. But a one-night stand is about all I'll do.”

Kristina's only regret about her life of promiscuity is the people she
may have hurt along the way. When she was younger, she considered herself “more of a muscle-myself-through-life kind of lady,” she said. “Now, I'm a little bit more gentle, more thoughtful.” She turned situations to her benefit in a style that popular culture mostly associates with men. “I'd say to a guy, ‘Just so you know, I'm not looking for a relationship now, in fact I'm seeing someone else,' ” she recalled. “And because they were guys, they were like ‘Great! I don't like commitment!' ” But then, they'd have a good time. Such a good time that it would continue to happen. “And then the guys would begin to make an assumption that I wasn't doing it with anyone else. But I was.”

“I used to think that getting laid was the goal, and now it's not the goal anymore,” said Kristina. “But I firmly believe everything I did put me where I am right now and I really, really love my life.” She has noticed that both her sponsor at Al-Anon, where she goes to address issues of family alcohol dependence, and her therapist are sure that her youthful excesses were motivated by a lack of self-respect. But she strenuously disagrees. “I had a fucking blast,” she said. “My whole life was a reckless, fun party. And I wasn't drunk driving or shooting heroin, I just always enjoyed myself.”

As I was writing this book, a respected professional mentor advised me to include “lots of juicy stories,” since, he assured me, that would be the principal interest of any man who picked up a book about single women. His take was neither unfriendly nor censorious, but in a funny way, it reminded me of Rush Limbaugh's tirade against Sandra Fluke after her testimony on behalf of contraception coverage, in which he assuredly asserted that Fluke was fighting for her continued ability to have “so much sex.”

What the two men had in common was their absolute certainty that single women must have an enormous amount of sex.

And it's true: Many unmarried women have sex. Some of them, like Kristina, even have “so much” sex. After all, the increased freedom to
have socially sanctioned sex with contraception, with a variety of partners to whom they are not obligated to chain themselves for life, is one of the chief reasons that there
are
so many unmarried women.

When it comes to the stories that women tell (or don't tell) about sex, the interesting part isn't necessarily the fact of the sex; it's the increasing variety of sexual paths open to women, the diversity of choices made by different women, or sometimes by an individual woman, over the course of her adulthood. Some women have multiple partners, some have none. Many, like Kristina, have periods of promiscuity, periods of monogamy, and periods of chastity, all within a span of a decade or two—a decade or two that, a few generations ago, would most likely have been largely given over to married sex with one partner.

And it's not all juicy. Sex, after all, comprises the great and the abysmal: bad sex and violent sex and sex from which you contract a disease. It's a muck of physicality and emotion, of excitement and satisfaction and of betrayal and disappointment: The girlfriend who leaves you for a man. The man who leaves you for another woman. Anyone who leaves you. Or who you cut to the quick by leaving, or cheating on, or lying to.

The waggly-eye-browed (often older male) fantasy of single sex as an erotic wonderland rarely takes female discernment or disenchantment—or stretches of inactivity—into account, any more than it encompasses the comprehension that for many of us, sex is intermittently thrilling, occasionally satisfying, sometimes disappointing, but also not always the driving center of our lives. Even Candace Bushnell, the Grand Dame of Purportedly Sexy Single Sex, stated baldly in her first ever “Sex and the City” column that sex “can be annoying; it can be unsatisfying; most important, sex . . . is only rarely about sex. Most of the time it's about spectacle . . . or the pure terror of Not Being Alone . . .”

The sex lives of single women are studded with stories that can, these days—after centuries in which female desires and sexual predilections were not acknowledged, were a source of shame, and never to be put on public view—finally be told, with bravado or tenderness or humor or regret. Telling them is important, not because it excites the codgers but because, when we take the cover of marriage off the adult erotic lives of women, we learn more about the variety of things that drive and excite
and hurt and engage them. We get a far more honest view of female sexuality and its complications and contradictions, its heat and its chills. And, in doing this, we finally begin to break apart the gender essentialist assumptions about “what women want” that have served often to steer too many women toward fates they've never desired.

For good and bad, our post-pill, sexually revolutionized era is one in which independent women and their sexual preferences and aversions can be put on display. However, it's not as though contemporary women invented sex, or the anxieties around it.

Earlier generations of unwed women had sex, sometimes with the approval of families who presumed that young women and their partners would wed.
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Other single women who had sex before marriage, with lovers or otherwise committed men, managed to pull it off without terrible consequence. And then there were many more who lived by choice or need as prostitutes, or who moved through life degraded and in danger because of their sexual reputations. And, of course, enslaved women rarely had ownership of their own bodies or were able to exert control over their sexuality.

For those never-married women of the middle and upper classes, many of them pious, who left written records of their lives and loves, it was far more common to have lived chastely. However, that doesn't mean that they didn't think about sex or consider the way that sexual impulse and desire played a part in their lives.

Settlement House founder and activist Jane Addams argued in her book,
The Spirit of Youth,
that a redirection of sexual energy could foster engagement with other forms of beauty in the world. “Every high school boy and girl knows the difference between the concentration and the diffusion of this [sexual] impulse,” wrote Addams. “They will declare one of their companions to be ‘in love' if his fancy is occupied by the image of a single person . . . But if the stimulus does not appear as a definite image, and the values evoked are dispensed over the world, the young
person suddenly seems to have discovered a beauty and significance in many things—he responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of nature, he is filled with religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal. Experience, with young people, easily illustrates the possibility and value of diffusion.”
²
Addams's biographer, Louise Knight, described to me how another of her subjects, abolitionist Sarah Grimké, wrote directly about the imagined pleasures and value of sexual congress, as well as about how the ways in which it was practiced by men violated women's equal rights. Grimké wrote that marriage “finds its most natural, most sacred and intense outward expression in that mutual personal embrace.”
³
However, she also argued that women must be afforded “an equality of rights throughout the circle of human relations, before she can be emancipated from that worst of all slaveries—slavery to the passions of man,”
⁴
a signal that while Grimké clearly “believed in marriage's possibilities,” Knight said, she was “skeptical of its realities,” including marital rape.

Many of the women left single, or who chose to remain single, in the wake of the westward migration in the nineteenth century, spent a good deal of time pondering what they had missed. Emily Greene Balch, a never-married economist and pacifist born in 1867, made no bones about the fact that she was sorry that, in electing to live unmarried, she had missed out on the emotional peaks and valleys of falling in love and having a family. Balch, who would win a Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that as an independent woman, “I am happy in my work . . . I have escaped the dangers of unhappy, or only half-happy marriage and the personal sufferings incident to the most successful marriage.” But, she continued, “I have missed the fullness of life which I would prefer to any calm. . . . [I] have been shut out except in imagination and sympathy from the most human and deepest experiences.”
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