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

foreign idea to be married before thirty.” Meaghan Ritchie, a fundamentalist Christian college student from Kentucky, told me that she will not marry before she’s at least twenty-two, because she believes that dropping out of college—as her mother did to marry her father—would not be an economically sound idea. Amanda Neville, a thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, flew to Russia to adopt a daughter, who is deaf, within a year of opening a wine store andbeginning a new relationship with a boyfriend. Ada Li, a manicurist from China living in Brooklyn, told me that her decision to wait until her late thirties to marry and have a child was what made her life in the United States happy and free.
    Some women actively decided against early marriage, in part out of fear that matrimony would put a stop to their ambitions. “The moment I saw that ring,” wrote Jessica Bennett, a journalist who turned down a proposal at twenty-four, “I saw dirty dishes and suburbia . . . I saw the career I had hardly started as suddenly out of reach . . . the independence I had barely gained felt stifled. I couldn’t breathe.” Some are sad to not yet have found mates, like Elliott Holt, a forty-year-old novelist who told me, “I guess I just had no idea, could never have predicted, how intense the loneliness would be at this juncture of my life.” And others, including Susana Morris, a thirty-two-year-old English professor in Alabama, are less worried about themselves than they are about how concerned everyone else is about them. “What’s anxiety provoking is that every time you open a magazine or a book or turn on the television, there’s someone telling you there’s something wrong with you as a black woman—you’re too fat, too loud, don’t nobody want to marry you. That is anxiety producing!”
    These women are not waiting for their real lives to start; they are living their lives, and those lives include as many variations as there are women.
    To be clear, the vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom. The revolution is in the expansion of options, the lifting of the imperative that for centuries hustled nearly all (non-enslaved) women, regardless of their individual desires, ambitions, circumstances, or the quality of available matches, down a single highway toward early heterosexual marriage and motherhood. There are now an infinite number of alternate routes open; they wind around combinations of love, sex, partnership, parenthood, work, and friendship, at different speeds.
    Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.
    This liberation is at the heart of our national promise, but that promise of freedom has often been elusive for many of this country’s residents.This makes it all the more important to acknowledge that while the victories of independent life are often emblematized by the country’s most privileged women, the war was fought by many Americans who have always had far fewer options to live free: women of color, poor, and working-class women.
The Epoch of Single Women
    When I began writing, I intended this to be a book of mostly contemporary journalism, an account of how generations of single women living at the turn of the twenty-first century were, by delaying or abstaining from marriage, reshaping the nation’s politics and families. In short, while I understood it to be built on political gains made in previous eras, I believed that I was chronicling a mass behavioral revolution staged by women of my era.
    What I learned, as I began my research, is that while this moment is unprecedented in terms of its size, thanks to women’s contemporary ability to live more economically and sexually autonomous lives than ever before, it is certainly not without historical precedent. Today’s