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

unmarried and late married women are walking a road toward independence that was paved by generations of American women who lived singly when it was far harder to do so than it is today. Crucially, many of those radically single and late-married women were the ones who were able to devote their unmarried, nonmaternal lives to changing the nation’s power structures in ways that might better support today’s army of free women.
    In 1877, the never-married suffragist, abolitionist, and labor activist Susan B. Anthony gave a speech called “The Homes of Single Women.” In it, she prophesied that the journey toward gender equality would necessarily include a period in which women stopped marrying. “In woman’s transition from the position of subject to sovereign, there must needs be an era of self-sustained, self-supported, homes,” said Anthony. 12
    She continued, clairvoyantly:
    As young women become educated in the industries of the world, thereby learning the sweetness of independent bread, it will be moreand more impossible for them to accept the . . . marriage limitation that “husband and wife are one, and that one the husband. . . .” Even when man’s intellectual convictions shall be sincerely and fully on the side of Freedom and equality to woman, the force of long existing customs and laws will impel him to exert authority over her, which will be distasteful to the self-sustained, self-respectful woman. . . . Not even amended constitutions and laws can revolutionize the practical relations of men and women, immediately, any more than did the Constitutional freedom and franchise of Black men transform white men into practical recognition of the civil and political rights of those who were but yesterday their legal slaves.
    And so, Anthony predicted, logic would lead us, “inevitably, to an epoch of single women .”
    Here we are.
    Smack in the middle of Anthony’s imagined epoch, an era in which—like the one in which Anthony herself lived—the independence of women is a crucial tool in their long struggle toward a more just and equitable position in the world.

CHAPTER ONE
Watch Out for That Woman: The Political and Social Power of an Unmarried Nation
    The contemporary wave of single women was building in the very same years that I was heading off to college, though I hadn’t realized it. The early 1990s was the period in which reverberations of the social and political revolutions of my mother’s generation were manifesting as swiftly changing marriage and reproductive patterns, which, in turn, would create a current of political possibility for independent women in America.
    On October 11, 1991, a thirty-five-year-old law professor, Anita Faye Hill, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify about the sexual harassment she’d experienced while working for Clarence Thomas, a D.C. Circuit Judge nominated by President George H. W. Bush to fill the Supreme Court seat of the retiring civil rights hero, Thurgood Marshall. A native of rural Lone Tree, Oklahoma, Hill was the youngest of thirteen children raised by Baptist farmers; her grandfather and great-grandparents had been slaves in Arkansas. She was valedictorian of her high-school class and attended Yale Law School, worked for Thomas at both the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and taught contract law at the University of Oklahoma. She was not married.
    As cameras recorded every second, broadcasting to a rapt and tense nation, Hill sat before the all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Panel and told them in a careful, clear voice of the sexually crude ways in which Thomas had spoken to her during the years she worked for him; shedetailed her former boss’s references to pornographic movie stars, penis size, and pubic hair in professional contexts. In turn, she was pilloried by the conservative press, spoken to with