I read some where this past week (I can’t recall where) about isolation as a potential form of liberation—that in a world that insists on bullying us into certain roles, well-worn grooves, isolating ourselves at times can be liberating—an act of release from constraint through refusal.
While I don’t necessarily want the individualist tropes of being alone, isolated from society, I do feel the stress or low hum of anxiety draining away when I can be at home, alone, mute the noise of the world. Is that liberation? Maybe instead it’s more that being alone can lead to a deeper sense of being aware and connected to parts of the world and of life that are not just human.
We are so human-obsessed. What if we were more home-obsessed—giving space for attention to a quietening, to noticing incremental, small things—like the thousands of waxwings that have migrated through our backyard this week, their connection to each other clear in the scrim of their calls as they flit backlit in the cottonwood branches, newly bare and outlined in snow.
I tried to stay away from the prophecies, prognostications, and polls that modern elections insist on this past week. But I was struck when I came across a clip of a Fox news anchor meltdown over the polling data of how single women vote democrat, and his whine that obviously more women need to get married1—because then they will vote republican.
Why I am still so shocked by such rhetoric, or about the quiet part being said out loud, I never really understand. I think I want to believe that as bad as the history is, the linear idea of progress has been so embedded in my psyche I can’t escape a stubborn belief in hope. Or just a disbelief that anyone could continue to go through life comfortably inflicting cruelty on others for their own success. I don’t know.
But because of that outburst, I’ve been thinking about what marriage means for women, does to women, has done to women in history—of how beneath all of the romantic comedies and beautiful ideals of love, marriage is fundamentally an institution that upholds patriarchy. Of how much of a social control it is and has always been over women.
And this plays out in how women identify with other women and social issues in politics. Because married white women are more likely to vote with their husband, i.e., republican. Married white women essentially become more ‘traditional’ through marriage, and tend to identify more with men than with the fate of other women. Black women, regardless of being married or single, find solidarity and identify with other women full stop. Single white women find solidarity and identify with other women. But married white women begin to identify more with their husband the longer they live together, and less as a woman in solidarity with other women.
It’s wild to me, but I can see it—of how women who are married could begin to identify more with white men than with other women. Proximity to power is a heady brew. The nuclear family is insular, steeped in regressive ideals that still rely on women’s labor to uphold the economy, and social fabric, despite the work of so many women over centuries to claim a life otherwise. It’s still insane to me though that white women are so blind—so able to be blind, comfortable in being blind—to what oppresses themselves and other women.
In an essay on the rising trend of single women before the 2016 election, Rebecca Traister wrote:
The practicalities of female life independent of marriage give rise to demands for pay equity, paid family leave, a higher minimum wage, universal pre-K, lowered college costs, more affordable health care, and broadly accessible reproductive rights; many of these are issues that have, for years, been considered too risky to be central to mainstream Democratic conversation, yet they are policies today supported by both Democratic candidates for president.
What’s interesting is that while the number of single, unmarried women has increased as parity in pay and education becomes a closer reality, there have been many times in history where women increasingly rejected marriage for an independent life—and similarly, it was at those times that progressive causes and social reform were fueled and achieved.
In a study of diaries, letters, and other writings of women, the scholar Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller found evidence for what she goes as far as to call a “cult of single blessedness” in generations from 1780 to 1840. She writes that in the fifty years following the Revolution, many women “upheld the single life as both a socially and personally valuable state…[that] articulated the values of female independence.”
Traister also emphasizes the alignment of single women with progressive causes, writing:
In the 19th century, when the casualties of the Civil War and the drain of men to the American West upset the gender ratio, marriage rates for middle-class white women on the East Coast plunged and marriage ages rose. Unburdened of the responsibilities of wifeliness and motherhood, many of these women did what women have long been trained to do: throw themselves into service to community, in this case reform movements. Many, though by no means all, of those who led the fights for abolition and suffrage and against lynching, who founded and ran the new colleges for women (Mount Holyoke, Smith, Spelman), who were pioneers in new fields including nursing and medicine, were unmarried. Susan B. Anthony; Sarah Grimké; Jane Addams; Alice Paul; Catharine Beecher; Elizabeth Blackwell: None of these women had husbands. Many more activists had marriages that were unconventional for the time — brief, open, or entered into late, after the women had established themselves economically or professionally. These women had a hand in rewriting the Constitution via the 14th, 15th, 18th, 19th, and 21st Amendments.
And yet. There is always the inevitable backlash and rants from politicians about such trends. Putting as fine a point on it as a modern Fox news pundit, Teddy Roosevelt in campaigns to avoid ‘race suicide’ ranted at single middle-class white women, blaming them for low birth rates, saying
A race is worthless if women cease to breed freely.
While women have gained independence and financial security outside of marriage, politicians and social ideals are always more about how women can best serve men.
What’s rather glorious about the single women of the past, is those that wrote and gave evidence that despite what history would have us believe, women have been questioning this for centuries. You can see these ideas even reflected in writing by poet Jane Barker in the 17th century, who wrote a poem called “The Virgin Life,” writing:
...Suffer me not, to fall into the power, Of mans, allmost omnipotent amour. But in this happy state, let me remain, And in chast verse, my chaster thoughts explain. Fearless of twenty-five and all its rage, When Time and beauty endless wars ingage, And Fearless of the antiquated name, Which oft makes happy maid turn helpless dame, The scorn fix'd to that name our sex betray, And often makes us fling our selves away. Like harmless kids which are pursu'd by men, For safty run into a Lyons den...
And Louisa May Alcott, famously wrote: “liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.”
Much later, there was another woman writer who became famous for praising the single life: Marjorie Hillis, an editor at Vogue who went on to write a book called Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman.
The book was a bestseller in 1936, and extolled the glamour and charms of living alone, breezily writing about the best place to eat breakfast is in bed, how many pajamas one should have, what kind of liquor to always keep on hand—in short, how to entertain, live, and love life on one’s own.
Hillis includes case studies in each chapter. examples of women who have mostly made the most of living alone, with quips like “Miss H., of Wilmington, is as rich as a bootlegger and as smart as paint and that is all we have to say for her.” In another she writes:
Most of the town is intrigued rather than irritated, believing that Mrs. C. is not putting them in their place, but merely living as she enjoys living…She has become a Character and will some day become a Legend. And since Mrs. C. loves popularity and adores fame, and would have had little of either in Chicago, we salute her as a lady who knew what she wanted and got it.
Hillis’ book is smart, chatty, and witty, dispelling the notions of spinsterhood and legacies of old maids that still held sway in the thoughts of society on single women. In one section she writes:
If you are in the habit of thinking of yourself as a widow or a spinster, this, too, is something to get over as speedily as possible. Both words are rapidly becoming extinct—or, at least, being relegated to another period, like bustle and reticule. A woman is now a woman, just as a man is a man, and expected to stand on her own fee, as he (supposedly) stands on his.
There are so many great quotes, but just a few more:
Do have some evening clothes with swish, and—very specially—do have at least one nice seductive tea-gown to wear when you’re alone (or when you’re not, if you feel like it).
If you haven’t any contacts, put your hat right on and go out and start making them. You probably have, at least, a fourth cousin to look up or a few letters to present. If not, there are always business women’s organizations, dancing classes, literary courses, political clubs, churches, Y.W.C.A’s, poetry groups, bridge lessons, musical circles, skating clubs, riding-classes, college-extension courses, and what-not. Be a Communist, a stamp collector, or a Ladies’ Aid worker if you must, but for heaven’s sake, be something.
Last winter, Mrs. de W. went to Palm Beach and toaster herself under the sun. This year she plans to go to Palm Springs for the same purpose. Her skin looks younger and more blooming than it has in forty years, and she has lost most of her hips and her tummy. At a tea recently, she enteratined the guests be standing on her head.
Mrs. de W. is having an elegant time.
and finally, this:
From dusk until dawn, you can do exactly as you please, which, after all, is a pretty good allotment in this world where a lot of conforming is expected of everyone.
Tellingly, as Joanna Scutts writes in her book on Hillis, The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It, twenty years after the popularity of Live Alone and Like It, the book fell into obscurity—because the return of the domestic cult was in full force ye again by the mid-1950s. Women were rapidly dropping out of college. Marriage rates rose and the age of marriage fell dramatically. The rise of the suburban nuclear family ideal made living alone once again seem sad and spinsterish, as Constance Grady writes.
M and I hadn’t planned on getting married. We were drawn into it when he was going to grad school in Norway and as we had been living together for nearly five years, we didn’t want to live apart. But if I was to go with him, we’d have to be married, or prove we’d been living together with tax records and all other kinds of bureaucracy made to kill any sense of romance left in being committed. So we did the simpler thing and married.
It was a small wedding. I did not wear a white dress. Our parents were not the happiest about our choice to have only a few people there as we said vows, outside on a nearby mountain where we liked to hike. We had to concede to their wishes to have a bit larger reception afterward. The cake was chocolate. We didn’t even really want one. We toasted with scotch, not champagne. We thought it was about us, not everyone else. We learned slowly that it is not just about us—it’s about an institution, social rules, and legacies so ancient, it’s difficult to untangle them all.
I do get why weddings are such an event—and how beautiful such rituals can be in bringing together the people you love in community. To share a day to celebrate two people in love with one another, committing to one another. But I still find it odd how formal weddings have stayed, how traditional so many still are. Brides wear white dresses to follow the fashion of an English Imperial queen who lived centuries ago and solidified the name of the age—an era when the cult of domesticity was at its height—when the roles of women were being defined by men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote that women should
early learn to submit to injustice and to suffer the wrongs inflicted on her by her husband without complaint.
These stereotypes and social rules are ancient and we still follow along. Single women were still identified as spinsters on census records in Britain until 2005. Single men are bachelors—cool, independent, aloof—and identify with other single white men. And vote republican. Single women are sad spinsters who band together for things like, oh, bodily autonomy, civil rights, and governmental programs that actually help lift people up—and vote democrat.
The conservative pundits want women to get married so that they can be controlled, brainwashed into thinking that aligning with men is the way to hold bodily autonomy, agency, and power.
Rebecca Traister sums it up succinctly, in an essay on the single population of women rising above 50%, where she writes these are single
adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.
How to live in community when the world sucks us into these roles, incentivizes marriage, makes divorce difficult and a potential financial hardship, and makes it difficult for anyone to have a committed partnership recognized without a public record, a white dress, or a big ceremony based on royalty from another century? These are demands to conform to institutions that control and isolate us from one another.
I want to reclaim spinster as a name for women who may be partnered but are also interdependent and in solidarity with all women and the needs of women—and all forms of society that refuses to support others. Spinster means that we see one another through the haze of patriarchy and we are here for everyone who is being exploited and marginalized by the system and demand better.
I’m ok that I’m married, but I find discomfort in identifying as a married woman. I’m a spinster in spirit, who made her own way in the world interdependently and partnered. I chose my partner and he chose me long before the government of Norway made us say it in front of others, and sign our names on a piece of paper at the county courthouse.
When we lived in Norway, we took language classes each day. And I remember our incredulity—and the knowing wink of our teacher—when we learned that the Norwegian word to marry, or be married is gift. But when it’s used as a noun it has a different meaning—poison. O those Norwegians. I think of the norns, the three women spinning the fates of mortals. Immortal spinsters speaking truth.
If only we’d break free of institutions that keep us divided, measured up, knowable in ways that say nothing about who we really are in relationship to others—many others, not just one partner, and not even just kin. Maybe then we could find an interdependent type of liberation in our refusal. A waxwing utopia moving in synchronicity in the cold, in communication with wind and trees and one another.
I want to start by taking the opportunity to say FUCK TEDDY ROOSEVELT because I insist on doing it whenever possible. He is the absolute worst and so many white dudes fall all over themselves insisting on his greatness, which is telling as to the state of white dudes.
I find all of this so maddening. I saw the Fox clip too somewhere. And this just crossed my radar today:
"After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, some people believed that white women would abandon the Republican Party. But the midterm elections made clear that’s not the case. This election, more white women voted Republican than in 2018 (CNN). This was particularly strong in the south; 72% of white women voted for a Republican governor in Georgia, and 64% for a Republican governor in Texas. Also, on a national level, white women in the suburbs flipped to the Republicans after favoring Democrats in the past two elections (WSJ)."
Montana's election results certainly bolster this paragraph though I haven't seen statistics. I've largely given up on white dudes and I'm leaning that way toward white women too. I don't know what to do about it other than wave a flag for an anti-marriage movement.
This is soooooo good, and I have SO many thoughts. (Sidebar, this quote needs no extra vomit but WOWZA is it gross: "A race is worthless if women cease to breed freely." I can't parse all the disgustingness in that one. ) Here for the waxwing utopia, the return to place for all beings, the collapse of imperiling structures by undeniable winds.