Flying
Solo
More
women are deciding that marriage is not inevitable, that they can lead a fulfilling
life as a single. It's an empowering choice, but for many not an easy one
By
TAMALA M. EDWARDS
Jodie hannaman
grew up in houston, a city as fond of formal weddings as of barbecues and rodeos.
So it was saying something at Duschene Academy, her Roman Catholic girls' school,
that Hannaman was chosen as Most Likely to Be Married First. But her teenage
fantasies of buttercream frosting and silky bridesmaids dresses first began
to crack with her high school sweetheart. He dated her for more than a decade
before she finally got tired of waiting for a marriage proposal that was never
going to come. There were other men after that, but it was Hannaman who repeatedly
decided against a life built for two. Marriage, it began to dawn on her, wasn't
an end in itself but rather something she wanted only if she found the right
guy.
Now Hannaman,
32, spends 60 hours a week in her job as project manager for Chase Bank of Texas
in Houston, in an office decorated with art-museum magnets and Cathy cartoons.
She extends her business trips into the weekends for solo mini-vacations, enjoys
the social whirl of the Junior League volunteer circuit, and has started looking
for a house. While she would love a great romance that would lead to marriage,
she no longer feels she has to apologize for being single. "I've finally matured
enough to acknowledge that there's more to life than being married," she says.
"I'd like to get married and have kids, but something in the past few years
has changed. I'm happier being single."
Hannaman
might seem to have little in common with the four lead characters on TV's Sex
and the City, single women who live the supafly life and discard men quicker
than last season's bag and shoes--and look damn good doing it. Her sex life isn't
nearly as colorful, for one thing. All of them, nevertheless, are part of a
major societal shift: single women, once treated as virtual outcasts, have moved
to the center of our social and cultural life. Unattached females--wisecracking,
gutsy gals, not pathetic saps--are the heroines du jour in fiction, from Melissa
Bank's collection of stories, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, to Helen
Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, the publishing juggernaut that has spawned
one sequel and will soon be a movie. The single woman is TV's It Girl as well,
not just on Sex and the City, the smash hbo series in the midst of its third
buzz-producing season in the U.S., but also on a growing number of American
network shows focused on strong, career-minded single women.
The single
woman has come into her own. Not too long ago, she would live a temporary existence:
a rented apartment shared with a girlfriend or two and a job she could easily
ditch. Adult life--a house, a car, travel, children--only came with a husband.
Well, gone are the days. Forty-three million American women are currently single--more
than 40% of all adult females, up from about 30% in 1960. (The ranks of single
men have grown at roughly the same rate.) If you look at women of the most marriageable
age, the numbers are even more dramatic: in 1963, 83% of women 25 to 55 were
married; by 1997 that figure had dropped to 65%. "Are you kidding? An 18% to
20% change? "This is huge," says Linda Waite, a sociologist at the University
of Chicago.
To be sure,
the rise in single women encompasses some other important trends. An estimated
4 million of these unmarried women are cohabiting with their lovers, and a growing
number are being more open about gay relationships. Nevertheless, single women
as a group are wielding more and more clout. A Young and Rubicam study released
earlier this year labeled single women the yuppies of this decade, the blockbuster
consumer group whose tastes will matter most to retailers and dictate our trends.
The report found that nearly 60% of single women own their own home, buying
them faster than single men; that single women fuel the home-renovation market;
and that unmarried women are giving a big boost to the travel industry, making
up half the adventure travelers and 2 out of 5 business travelers.
Equally important
is the attitudinal change. The dictionary once defined a spinster as an unmarried
woman above a certain age: 30. If you passed that milestone without a partner,
your best hope was to be seen as an eccentric Auntie Mame; your worst fear was
to grow old like Miss Havisham, locked in her cavernous mansion, bitter after
being ditched at the altar. Not any more. "We've ended the spinster era," says
Philadelphia psychotherapist Diana Adile Kirschner, who has made single women
a focus of her practice. "Women used to tell me about isolation, living alone,
low level of activity, feeling different. Now there's family, lots of friends,
they're less isolated and more integrated into social lives."
More confident,
more self-sufficient, and more choosy than ever, women no longer see marriage
as a matter of survival and acceptance. They feel free to start and end relationships
at will--more like, say, men. In a Yankelovich poll for Time and cnn, nearly
80% of men and women said they thought they would eventually find the perfect
mate. But when asked whether, if they didn't find Mr. Perfect, they would marry
someone else, only 34% of women said yes, in contrast to 41% of men. "Let's
face it. You don't just want a man in your life," says author Bank, 39. "You
only want a great man in your life."
Single by
choice--it's an empowering statement for many women. Yet it's not a choice that
all women arrive at easily or without some angst, and it raises a multitude
of questions. Are women too unrealistic about marriage--so picky about men that
they're denying themselves and society the benefits of marriage while they pursue
an impossible ideal? Does the rejection of marriage by more women reflect a
widening gender gap--as daughters of the women's movement discover that men,
all too often, have a far less liberated view of the wife's role in marriage?
Do the burgeoning ranks of single women mean an outbreak of Sex and the City
promiscuity? And what about children? When a woman makes the empowering decision
to rear a child on her own, what are the consequences, for mother and child?
Society,
to be sure, is far more accepting of single women than it was even a few years
ago. When Barbara Baldwin, the director of Planned Parenthood in Tennessee,
divorced her husband in 1981, she needed her father's help before anyone would
give the then 29-year-old single mother a car loan and a credit card. Beverley
DeJulio, a divorced Chicago mother who hosts Handy Ma'am, a weekly home-improvement
show on pbs, says she dreaded the hardware store for years, because salespeople
kept asking, "Where's your husband?" And the Stone Age year when Anne
Elizabeth, a Chicago artist, then 35, had to fight to not be listed as spinster
on the mortgage application for her lakeside home? It was 1984. >>MORE
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September 11,
2000 | NO. 36
C
O V E R
COVER: Why Marry
When You Can Stay Single?
Once, women who were still "on the shelf" at 35 resigned themselves
to a life of bleak solitude. For today's young women, staying single seems
not only bearable but increasingly desirable.
Sex
and the City: The hit series, and why men are dogs
Mom
on her own: Deciding to have a child is one thing. Raising
one is another
A
S I A
THE
PHILIPPINES: Web of Frustration
As one group of hostages nears freedom, a new hostage is taken
E
U R O P E
FRANCE:
Jospin's Minefield
Protests and a walkout put the Prime Minister on the defensive
A
F RI C A
SOUTH
AFRICA:
A Fistful of Troubles
President Thabo Mbeki discusses the continent's challenges
U
S A
CAMPAIGN 2000:
Can Dubya Get Serious?
As Gore surges, Bush has to prove he can compete on the issues
S
PO R T
ATHLETICS:
Meet Mrs. Jones
America's queen of track and field is ready for her close-up
T
H E A R T S
BOOKS:
Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas spins his own version of the story of Bill
and Monica and Ken and Linda
CINEMA:
Richard Corliss goes on a film bender in Toronto
MUSIC:
Elastica ends a five-year silence with The Menace
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
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