All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Read Free

confused. We go to parties and occasionally fall into bed with people we don’t know well, but we also have well-read paperbacks of Austen’s Mansfield Park or Emma lying open on our night tables: the dream of a more orderly world.
    The unmarried state that Roiphe viewed as a kind of disorder was in fact a new order, or at least a new normal, in which women’s lots in life were not cast based on a single binary (husbands versus cats). Instead, women’s paths were increasingly marked with options, off-ramps, variations on what had historically been a very constrained theme.
    While Roiphe may have felt herself in a prolonged period of adolescence because marriage had not yet come along to mark its end, she was in fact leading a very adult life, with a romantic history, an undergraduate education at Harvard, and a thriving career. The liberating point was that Roiphe’s status and that of her cohort didn’t hinge on the question of whether they had husbands or cats. It didn’t have to, because they had jobs. They had sex lives. They had each other. They inhabited a universe that Jane Austen, for whose “orderly world” Roiphe claimed to pine, could never have imagined: Austen’s novels had been as much ambivalent cries against the economic and moral strictures of enforced marital identity for women than they were any kind of reassuring blueprint for it.
    Contemporary, unmarried life may have felt—to Roiphe and to many single women who continue to come after her—a lot more complicated, confusing and scary than the simpler single option on offer to women of previous generations. But the wholesale revision of what female life might entail is also, by many measures, the invention of independent female adulthood.
The Single Ladies
    This independence can be punishing. Many single women are poor or struggling. Almost 50 percent of the 3.3 million Americans now earning minimum wage or below are unmarried women. 8 Many of them live, often with children, in communities where unemployment, racial andclass discrimination, and a drug war that puts many young men in prison combine to make the possibilities of stable marriages scarce, making singlehood less of a freeing choice than a socially conscripted necessity. More than half of unmarried young mothers with children under the age of six are likely to live below the poverty line, a rate that is five times the rate of the corresponding population of married women. 9
    Yes, many single women, across classes and races, would like to marry, or at least form loving, reciprocal, long-term partnerships, but have not found mates who want the same thing, or who can sustain it. Some are lonely.
    Many women, unmarried into their thirties, living in geographic, religious, and socio-economic corners of the country where early marriage remains a norm, as well as many women who remain single less by choice than by circumstance, into their forties, fifties, and sixties, do not feel as though they are living in a new, singles-dominated world. They feel ostracized, pressured; they are challenged by family and peers.
    However, statistically, across the country, these women are not alone. Their numbers are growing by the year. There were 3.9 million more single adult women in 2014 than there were in 2010. 10 Between 2008 and 2011, the rate of new marriage fell by 14 percent for those who had not completed high school and by 10 percent for those with at least a bachelor’s degree. 11
    In the course of researching this book, I spoke to scores of American women from different backgrounds and classes and faiths and races about their experiences of living singly.
    â€œWe all expected to be married at twenty-six,” said Kitty Curtis, a New Jersey hairstylist who is, at twenty-six, not married. “I don’t really know anyone who is married,” she said. “And the ones I do know, there’s a sense that it’s weird, strange. It’s a