Joan Smith:BODY LANGUAGE
Spinster, old maid, maiden aunt: the single woman has never had a good press. Whether she is perceived to be in search of a man, or too late to find one, the single woman’s state has long been regarded as a misfortune or a threat. Yet any woman who has been single knows this is not the full story.
Far from it, according to Marcelle Clements, whose new book, The Improvised Woman, challenges almost everything that has been written, said or thought about the subject.
“The culture has no fix on single women,” she argues, suggesting that most unattached women today have thrown away the old rule book. “They’re improvising their living arrangements and their financial arrangements, their sexual relationships, their friendships, their sense of social place.”
Clements is a journalist and the interviewees in her book are American, but her claim that the word “single” is too narrow and pejorative will strike a chord with women worldwide.
The complaint which is likely to have most resonance is about the inability of the wider culture to “see” single women as they really are. Depending on your point of view, they’re a frustrated bunch who cannot get a man and turn to good works and cats; or they’re impossibly glamorous, flitting from lover to lover while holding down powerful jobs.
What this overlooks is the sheer diversity of the group; these days, “single” covers women who by choice have never married, serial cohabitees who happen to be between relationships, women who take lovers but prefer to live alone, mothers bringing up children on their own, divorcees and widows.
“Single” certainly isn’t synonymous with celibate, or desperate, and there’s no evidence that single women are unhappier or unhealthier than their married counterparts. And that is what makes The Improvised Woman so significant. Clements has put her finger on an enormous social change which has not yet been fully acknowledged. In the United States, there are nearly 43-million single women; in Britain, by the early Nineties, 40% of adult women were living without a partner. Unattached women are not freaks, but a sizeable chunk of the population.
Indeed, single and married are no longer fixed states, but descriptions of a woman’s current status – which is very much open to change. This is certainly true of my own adult life, which has included periods of living alone as well as living with men. I wouldn’t claim categorically that one state is more fulfilling than the other, but I am keenly aware of the pleasures of independence.
“Delayed marriage, divorce rates, low remarriage rates and longer life spans have created a world in which most women can expect to be married for only half of their adult lives,” Clements points out. It is hard to read those words without seeing them as a riposte to the “smug marrieds” – the couples, and especially wives, who behave as though marriage has secured for them a permanent state of grace.
This smugness is often a cover for unresolved doubts about the wife’s own marriage. Or it is an anxious defence against the envy that traditional wives sometimes feel for women who manage their own finances, choose not to stay in bad relationships and value their independence. This is not to say that single life, whatever form it takes, is easy. Many women who end up single have not consciously chosen it, nor do they necessarily see it as a continuing state.
“It’s still true that very few of my female contemporaries would have made staying single their first choice,” says Clements. “But, at the very least, it has become an option that seems preferable to others and, at best, it’s an opportunity for a life that is in a number of ways richer.” Sceptics will respond that this is simply making the best of a bad job – that, secretly, any woman would rather be part of a couple. Yet the faults in this argument are obvious.
Single life embraces the pleasures of autonomy, of remaining open to experience. Single life requires guts and self- confidence, often the very traits which are sapped in a conventional marriage. When single women complain to each other that “there are no men”, they are not really suggesting they cannot find a boyfriend. They are saying that their self-esteem is too high to settle for any old relationship, and that they have more choices than either getting a man or enduring polite social ostracism.
What they still have to contend with is earning a living in a world which continues to reward men. Single women are more likely to face financial difficulties, especially in old age and when raising children alone. But this is a problem of poverty, not the fact of being single. When Clements’s interviewees complain that they are automatically expected to take responsibility for elderly relatives, or cover for married people at work, the situation will be wearily familiar to many readers.
Responsibilities to friends, even the right to a social life, are often disregarded by a world which still reacts to single women with hostility and fear. This points to a potentially explosive conflict which could divide women against each other in new ways; sooner or later, we are going to have to address the question of whether parental leave discriminates against single parents and should be replaced by a system of sabbaticals. This cannot happen until single women come to be regarded as having rights.
“Even the most glamorous ones, even the toughest ones, have felt hurt by the gratuitous and bristling resentment with which they are sometimes treated,” Clements protests.
It may come as a surprise to anyone who assumes that every woman still longs for marriage to discover that her interviewees dream about a lover who visits a couple of nights a week, not a husband. I know from my own experience that this is a common fantasy and it explains why we are such a scary bunch. The trouble with single women is not that we are sad and celibate, but that we want men on our own terms.
The Improvised Woman: Single Women Reinventing Single Life, by Marcelle Clements (Norton) was published on May 3