State of the single woman

Unmarried gals may be the freest people around. But to fully enjoy their lives, they need to stop paying attention to society's instructions.

By Laura Miller

Dec 12, 2002 | By any rational account, a middle-class American single woman with marketable skills is the most fortunate female in the history of humankind. She's certainly the most free. According to Betsy Israel's "Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century," here's what today's single girl can get that she couldn't get 100 years ago (or at least not without a truckload of grief): a decent job, the pleasure of walking down the street by herself without being hassled by the cops, her own rental apartment, credit, effective contraception and, of course, the opportunity to vote. Today, if she wants children she can adopt or bear her own without marrying and without suffering under a crushing stigma. And if she's lucky enough not to want kids, then she has that much more time and money to live as she pleases -- without accounting to or cleaning up after anyone else -- an unimaginable liberty for well over 99 percent of women throughout human history, including most of those alive today.

But I repeat, that's by any rational account, and somehow when the notion of the single woman walks in the door, all common sense flies out the window. An assortment of recent books about or related to single women can't, despite their best efforts, shake a tone of defensiveness and melancholy.

Of course, single women haven't cornered the market on complaint -- not today, when bemoaning one's lot seems to be the favorite sport of middle-class American women. While doing publicity for "The Bitch in the House," an anthology of first-person essays by 26 women, editor Cathi Hanauer and various contributors seemed to be under the startling impression that mothers, especially working mothers, hesitate to publicly discuss their abundant frustration, exhaustion and rage. That will come as a surprise to anyone, mother or not, who's recently picked up a newspaper or surveyed a bookstore display table, where Allison Pearson's "I Don't Know How She Does It" currently reigns. You'd think that the very visible and very vocal unhappiness of contemporary married mothers would burnish the image of the single life a bit, but apparently not, at least not in the minds of many single women: "Believe me," says a woman Israel interviewed, "living in this culture, it is hard not to feel horribly about yourself when you are ... not following the feminine script."

Some of the slights experienced by the uncoupled may be imaginary, if not downright paranoid, it should be said: "Bachelor Girl" contains one woman's rant about everything from "that horrible Hope character bouncing around with a baby in a 40-room house" (on the TV show "thirtysomething") to stroller-wielding moms on urban sidewalks who, she assumes, are thinking, "I obviously have the right of way, and the culture supports that. You are just a woman who does not have children, is not married, and either you move or you will get run over." Never mind the fact that it's pretty hard to assess the marital and maternal status of a complete stranger while trying to maneuver a stroller in a crowd.

"It's hard to believe, but I like my life," another of Israel's subjects says sarcastically, also picturing battalions of sneering moms who "take a perverse pleasure in punishing non-mothers." But given how aggrieved mothers reportedly feel these days, and the fact that one of Hanauer's friends says, "Every woman I know is mad at her husband, just mad mad mad at everything," it's possible those stroller charioteers and "smug marrieds" are brimming with envy, not contempt.

Nevertheless, marriage confers status on a woman in a way no other social institution can, and many if not most single women do feel the absence of that status. In her book "Solitaire: The Intimate Lives of Single Women," Canadian writer Marian Botsford Fraser interviews enough different kinds of unmarried women to make the very idea of generalizing about them silly, and yet plenty of her sources complain of the "pressure" to marry. This pressure comes, they say, from the "culture," meaning not only from family, that immemorial font of bullying, but especially from the media.

This is the point at which I'm supposed to tsk-tsk over "messages" and "role models," to haul out "Ally McBeal," Bridget Jones and "Sex and the City," and ask with furrowed brow, "How are single women supposed to sort out all these contradictory images?" On top of the TV shows there are the articles in newsmagazines and glossies to deplore, the newspaper columns about new trends and panics, from the "Women over 35 are more likely to get killed by a terrorist than to marry" articles of the 1980s decried by Susan Faludi in "Backlash" to the attempt to stir up hysteria about late marriages and infertility tied to the publication last year of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," all the objects of much furious commentary.

Israel's "Bachelor Girl" provides a reasonably lively account of the past 100 years of this sort of thing, with the occasional dash of hard facts by way of counterpoint. But while it doesn't hurt to be reminded of how far we've come since the days when Help Wanted classifieds were divided between jobs for men and women, this is largely familiar stuff and mostly in the realm of smoke and mirrors: mid-20th century doctors with dodgy-sounding credentials making sweeping pseudo-scientific pronouncements about what men and women want and need "by nature" (paging Steven Pinker!).

You can gasp in outrage at sexologists who announced that "frigid" women "refuse to be made happy; they resent the thought that the man has saved them, that they owe him everything" and Teddy Roosevelt preaching against the "race suicide" perpetrated by WASP women who declined to marry and reproduce in sufficient numbers to match the boom in dark-skinned immigrant populations. And it's always fun to revisit those oddball dames who managed, back when a wedding really was like a prison sentence, to escape the altar and to thrive, the pioneer nurses and suffragists who are always wittier than they look in their dour photos. (Mary Barton -- Clara's sister -- wrote of "having viewed from a safe distance the exquisite happiness of marriage.")

But finally, what this breed of cultural history offers up as its solution to the malaise of single women -- or of any woman who doesn't conform to some narrow and presumably obvious "standard," or for that matter the women who do and are still unhappy -- is that the images and articles need to be reformed. If we can only tweak the messages until they're just right, if we can all agree upon a single, righteous standard of successful womanhood that will be uniformly broadcast from all the outlets that previously emitted bad messages, contentment will come within our reach. We will at last know how to live.

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