All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (7 page)

For most women, there were simply not other routes, besides marriage, to economic stability, to a socially sanctioned sexual and reproductive life, to standing within communities. But it was simultaneously true that to have a husband (and, in turn, children, sometimes scads of them) was to be subsumed by wifeliness and maternity. More than that, it was a way to lose autonomy, legal rights, and the capacity for public achievement. Of the few women who managed to leave a historical trace, usually from wealthier castes, a great number turn out to have been single, or, at the very least, single for the period during which they carved out space for themselves in the remembered world.

Writers and artists, including painter Mary Cassatt, poets Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, novelists Anne and Emily Brontë, Willa Cather, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and prolific African-American writer Pauline Hopkins, never married. Many of the women who broke barriers in medicine, including doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell and nurses Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton, and Dorothea Dix, remained single. Social reformers including Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, Alice Paul, Mary Grew, and Dorothy Height, and educators like Catharine Beecher and Mary Lyon—none had husbands.

That doesn't mean that many of these women didn't have sexual or domestic entanglements, or long-term, loving commitments to men or to other women, though some of them did not. It's that they did not match society's expectations by entering an institution built around male authority and female obeisance.

As Anthony would tell the journalist Nellie Bly, “I've been in love a thousand times! . . . But I never loved any one so much that I thought it would last. . . . I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealth, she became a pet and
a doll. Just think, had I married at twenty, I would have been a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years.”
³

Of course, some married women also enjoyed successes unusual for their gender and their time: writers Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriett Beecher Stowe were not only married; they were great proselytizers of the institution's benefits for women. But many married women could, and did, acknowledge that wedlock, in its traditional form, took women out of the public world. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, nineteenth-century women's rights reformer and married mother of seven, was wry about the tolls of home life; she joked in a letter after not having heard from Anthony for a while: “Where are you, Susan, and what are you doing? Your silence is truly appalling. Are you dead or married?”
⁴

Common amongst prominent women who did wed, including activists such as Ida B. Wells, Angelina Grimké and Pauli Murray; writers including George Elliot, Margaret Fuller, and Zora Neale Hurston; artists Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keefe; actress Sarah Bernhard; and aviator Brave Bessie Coleman were alliances that were unconventional for their times: open, childless, brief, or entered into late, after the women had established themselves economically or professionally, and thus could find partners more willing to accept them as peers, not appendages.

However, creative paths to evading the onerous limitations of traditional wifedom were not plentiful. Marriage, in the varied ways in which it has been legally constructed over centuries, has been extremely useful in containing women and limiting their power. That usefulness has meant that social, political, medical, and cultural forces have often worked to make life
outside
marriage difficult. So, while women who have remained single, on purpose or by accident, may have retained some power and self-determination, they rarely, in the past, escaped social censure or enjoyed economic independence.

To trace their difficult paths through the history of the United States is to recognize challenges and resistance to single female life that will be uncannily familiar to today's single women: Women, it turns out, have been fighting their own battle for independence, against politicians, preachers, and the popular press, since our founding. Not only that: Women living singly in America over the past two centuries have been
partly responsible for the social and economic upheavals that have made the possibility of independent life for
today's
single women so much more plausible.

In the early colonial United States, an absence of established European government led to a preoccupation with the family as the locus of social control. In Plymouth, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Connecticut, and New Haven during the seventeenth century, unmarried people were required to live with families that were “well governed” by a church-going, land-owning man. New Haven decreed in the 1650s that persons “who live not in service, nor in any Family Relation” could become a source of “inconvenience, and disorder” and that each family's “Governor” would be licensed to “duly observe the course, carriage, and behaviour, of every such single person.” Unmarried women were expected to maintain a servile domestic identity and never enter the world in a way that might convey independence.
⁵

In Salem, town fathers very briefly allowed unmarried women their own property until the governor amended the oversight by noting that in the future, it would be best to avoid “all presedents & evil events of graunting lotts unto single maidens not disposed of.”
⁶
Because, as historian Alice Kessler-Harris has observed, the possibility of land ownership created a path to existence outside of marriage, other colonies “began to recognize that giving land to women undermined their dependent role” and thus took measures to curtail the option. In 1634, a bill was introduced to the House of Delegates in Maryland proposing that land owned by a spinster must be forfeited, should she fail to marry within seven years.
⁷

Almost the only kind of woman who might assert individual power was the wealthy widow, afforded social standing since she'd
been
married and was a legal inheritor of money or property, but left without master. This was rare. Most widows were poor, with no means to support themselves or their dependents, and lived at the mercy of their communities for help in feeding and housing themselves and their families.

Mostly, unmarried women were considered a drain on society and on the families with whom they were forced to find refuge.

The term
spinster
was derived from the word
spinner
, which, since the thirteenth century in Europe, had been used to refer to women, often the widows and orphans of the Crusades, who spun cotton, wool, and silk. By the sixteenth century, spinster referred to unmarried women, many of whom made themselves valuable in households by taking on the ceaseless, thankless work of textile manufacture into old age.
⁸

In the New World, “spinster” gained a more precise meaning: in colonial parlance, it indicated an unmarried woman over the age of twenty-three and under the age of twenty-six. At twenty-six, women without spouses became
thornbacks
, a reference to a sea-skate with sharp spines covering its back and tail. It was not a compliment.

Boston bookseller John Dunton wrote in 1686 that “an old (or Superannuated) Maid, in Boston, is thought such a curse as nothing can exceed it, and look'd on as a dismal spectacle.”
⁹
But in fact, the “dismal spectacle” of unmarried womanhood was quite rare in the colonies. Many more men than women were settlers, creating a high sex ratio, in which men outnumber women, a dynamic that usually results in high marriage rates and low marriage ages. As Benjamin Franklin noted in 1755, “Hence, marriages in America are more general, and more generally early, than in Europe.”

The early American attitude toward marriage, and men's and women's roles within it, corresponded to a doctrine of English common law known as
coverture
. Coverture meant that a woman's legal, economic, and social identity was “covered” by the legal, economic, and social identity of the man she married. A married woman was a
feme covert
and a single woman was a
feme sole.
William Blackstone's
Commentaries on the Laws of England
interpreted coverture as meaning that “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing. . . . A man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself.”

Coverture encompassed what legal historian Ariela Dubler has called
“a stunning array of status-defining legal restrictions” that prevented wives from keeping their own wages, entering contracts or bringing legal action.
¹⁰
“In its strictly economic aspect the traditional marriage contract resembled an indenture between master and servant,” writes historian Nancy Cott.
¹¹
And while scholars have shown that many women in Europe and the New World found ways to exert agency, both within their homes and in the outside world, the foundational inequities of marital law made it a battle.

For those
feme soles
who escaped coverture, there were other impediments to thriving. Puritan women enjoyed no sexual liberty; the legendary preacher Cotton Mather railed against those who displayed “sensual lusts, wantonness and impurity, boldness and rudeness, in Look, Word or Gesture.”
¹²
There were a few poorly paid professions at which they could earn a subsistence; they might be midwives, seamstresses, caretakers, governesses, or tutors, all jobs that mirrored broader ideas about women's nature.

The colonies' violent break from England, the American Revolution, on which the nation was officially founded and its rules encoded, complicated gender relations. For one thing, it drained households of their able-bodied men, who fought the British in the 1770s, the 1780s, and in the War of 1812. These conflicts, followed by an era defined by the idea of Manifest Destiny, which would draw men west and leave tens of thousands of women back east, upended sex ratios across the country.

But the rethinking of women's relationship to marriage wasn't just about numbers. The end of the eighteenth century was a time of political instability; the War of American Independence was followed by the French Revolution, which helped spawn the Saint Domingue revolution that freed slaves and established the Republic of Haiti in 1804. Power structures were crumbling under the weight of Enlightenment-era notions about liberty, personal freedom, and representation. In England, author Mary Wollstonecraft (who would herself marry late and have one child out of wedlock) challenged the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's vision of women as submissive to their husbands, declaring war in 1792's
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
on “the sensibility that led [Rousseau] to degrade woman by making her the slave of love” and instead pushing for female education and independence.

“The egalitarian rhetoric of the Revolution provided the women's rights movement with its earliest vocabulary,” historian Mary Beth Norton argues,
¹³
while Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller describes how, “beginning in about 1780 women in the middle and upper classes . . . manifested a dramatic new form of female independence. In increasing numbers, the daughters of northeastern manufacturers, merchants, farmers, and ‘poor professionals' rejected the ‘tie that binds.' ”
¹⁴

The language of individual liberty was sharply at odds with the limitations put on some of America's inhabitants not just by marriage, but by the other institution that ensured the new nation's economic stability and white men's power within it: slavery.

Marriage and slavery were not equivalent practices. Slaves were chattel, counted in the Constitution as three-fifths human; they could be purchased and sold and had no rights over their own bodies. Marriage, while a contract by which one party
lost
rights and identities, was one that free women, acknowledged as human beings, officially entered into of their own accord (though any number of economic, familial, or community pressures may have been brought to bear). Through marriage, wives gained economic advantage, the rights of inheritance; they also enjoyed social and religious ratification and an increase in status.

But the intersections of slave and marital law illustrate the ways in which political, social, and sexual power over a population can be enforced by both pressing marriage and by forbidding it, as well as how systems of racism and sexism doubly oppressed black women. In the antebellum United States, marriages between slaves were not legally sanctioned, which both prevented the formation of respectable unions and allowed owners to have sexual relations with slaves without violating a marital bond.
¹⁵
Conversely, some slave owners pushed slaves into unwanted marriages, perhaps to produce more enslaved children or to concretize family ties that might discourage escape. “[W]hen they could not marry whom they chose under circumstances of their own choosing, some enslaved people chose not to marry at all,” historian Frances Smith-Foster writes, citing Harriet Jacobs, a slave who, prevented from marrying the free man she loved and told to choose a husband from among her owner's other slaves asked, “Don't you suppose, sir, that a slave can have some preference about marrying?”
¹⁶

Of course, enslaved women and men fell in love, married on their own terms, and created loving families all the time. But those families were often separated by sale; women and children were raped and bore children by their owners and their owners' sons. Control over women's marital and reproductive lives was one of the surest ways to suppress their power.