Advertisement
Advertisement
Traister: My initial idea was that the book would be mostly contemporary journalism—mostly the interviews with single women, across ages, backgrounds, races, religions—about their experiences of being single. As I started researching, I became much more interested in the history of single women in America, and how profoundly they'd shaped the set of possibilities now open to today's single women.What were some of the most interesting experiences you had during the research process?
I think that coming across some of the published commentary of the 19th and early 20th centuries—from Susan B. Anthony's Homes of Single Women speech, to a 1904 newspaper column railing against the inequities of marriage, published by a "Bachelor Maid"—opened my eyes about how long these issues and questions and tensions have been in play, and how out in the open they've been. I still think of questioning marriage's primacy as a contemporary and rebellious act, but women have been doing it for centuries in really bold, funny, resonant ways.Also, learning the stories of women who came up with ingenious ways of expressing their ambivalence about marriage, from Amelia Earhart, who wrote this incredibly ambivalent letter to her husband on their wedding day, to Lucy Stone, who published a proclamation of her ambivalence about marriage and its gender inequities and had the pastor at her wedding read it out loud. It's just so bracing and remarkable learning about women who have done remarkable things to evade the traps that marriage historically set for them.
Advertisement
It gets us a lot close to egalitarian marriage. I think the bigger patterns means that men and women live independently in the world, often alongside each other as colleagues, peers, and friends. By the time they join in marriage, you wind up with a far greater likelihood that they both know how to do their laundry and use a drill and have some economic stability. So when they do [get married], the pattern of responsibility won't fall on these old patriarchal lines that cut men off from being domestically involved.But we are constantly fed the narrative that high-achieving, successful women—particularly black women—will have a harder time finding a mate, when in reality, these high-achieving women are most likely to marry. Why is that?
That's a very old trope. We've had women be dependent on men in this country and if there is this shift, it can be destabilizing. As a result, we send a lot of messages that it's a very bad thing. The message that you're going to "independent" your way to singlehood, especially to black women, is designed, consciously or not, to herd women back into more traditional emotional and legal setups. The point is to make you doubt the things you're doing independently, whether it's going to graduate school or having a baby on your own. The message is: get back.
Advertisement
Single women and single mothers, in particular, are much more likely to live at or below the poverty line than their married counterparts and single life in working class and low income communities is intensely hard. We have such a low minimum wage and no kinds of protections like paid leave or high-quality subsidized day care. We have a criminal justice system that incarcerates and kills black men at such higher rates.There are all kinds of systemic things that make life, including married and family life and childfree life, dramatically more challenging and difficult for low-income women and men. The idea that marrying someone, anyone, is going to help—and conservatives push this all the time—is wrong. One of the most economically devastating things in life is divorce. The solution is not marriage. Rather, we should be providing paid leave, a higher minimum wage, subsidized day care, a better health system, and lifting some of the limits on reproductive freedom. Marriage by itself does not address what is so grindingly difficult [about being poor] and may exacerbate it.
The message that you're going to "independent" your way to singlehood is designed to herd women back into more traditional emotional and legal setups…The message is: get back.
Advertisement
I think we're evolving out of it as a norm and an expectation, and evolving into a world in which there are a number of romantic, sexual, and familial configurations, and that hetero marriage will be one among them. I also think we're evolving very, very slowly into an era in which marriage, and hetero partnership in general, becomes more egalitarian. As Susan B. Anthony predicted 150 years ago, part of that evolution is going through a stage in which women stop marrying men in the numbers that they used to.Later marriage means lower divorce rates. After doing the research, how do you feel about your own "late" marriage at 35?
It's so funny that my marriage is 'late' by any historical standard; in New York City, I was amongst the first of my friends to marry. The fact that I fell in love with this guy is the most shocking part of my life, more than that I'm married. I just feel immensely lucky to have been unmarried when I met my husband. I had a lot of opportunities in front of me because I come from a fairly privileged population where I went to college and had the ability to pursue a career that I loved writing about subjects I loved living in a city I loved. This is how privilege accrues and expands for people.
Advertisement
I hope so. Bella DePaulo is absolutely indispensable on the variety of penalties paid by Americans who live outside of marriage. And I would love to see a move toward "single equality," which I think we get closer to by pushing for a lot of social policy fixes like the ones I outline in my appendix [such as stronger equal pay protections, a higher minimum wage, government-subsidized or funded daycare programs, and paid family leave for women and men, among other policies].Do you expect any backlash toward the book? How do you hope the book ages?
I don't think that there's been much controversy yet, but I do expect conservatives to push back at my insistence that marriage is not the cure for poverty. And I expect some backlash from people who see this as a glorification of single life over married life, which it's not meant to be. I hope that the book ages as one of the many documents that chronicles the massive social, economic, sexual shifts women have made over their centuries of living in and pushing toward a more equal set of opportunities in America.In 2012, unmarried women—who are more politically engaged than their married counterparts—made up 23% of the electorate. What role will they play in 2016?
They could play a totally determinate roll if they vote in the numbers that are possible. There are a lot of structural impediments to single women voting whether it's voting times curtailed, the hours polls are open, places to register or having to get special IDs to bring to voting places. These are things that take time that plenty of single parents and women do not have. Finally the Democratic platform is dealing with some of the fixes that single people need. Nobody talked about the Hyde Amendment until Hillary Clinton did in this election; no one has made paid leave central to a campaign—all these things are relatively new. Unmarried women could be determinative this election, but so much depends on their ability and enthusiasm to vote.'All the Single Ladies' is out now on Simon & Schuster. Purchase a copy here.Follow Victoria on Twitter.