uf200singleproject

[uf200singleproject]

The Impact of the Stigma: Internal

While the external social climate shifts over time, the internal impact of being labeled as “deviant” isn’t guaranteed to reflect positive change in real time. These internalized perceptions of deviance take time and reinforcement to form, and the resulting internal script of who we “should” be takes time and effort to break down.

Elizabeth Sharp and Lawrence Ganong’s journal article “’I’m a Loser, I’m Not Married, Let’s Just All Look at Me’: Ever-Single Women’s Perceptions of Their Social Environment” (yes, that’s the full title) explores these self-perceptions of deviance by interviewing single women in their late 20s to mid-30s.

I noticed that, as a fairly consistent result of the frequent pressure, pity, and questioning over their marital status, these women “felt they had to explain and justify being never-married at their ages.”1 One woman admitted that she usually responded with the fact that she had been engaged before so people would know that she was not “a total loser” and that there was proof that “someone used to like [her].”2 And I felt that to my core.

These women’s responses reminded me of my own fears and Michelle’s words. When it seems like romance is valued above all else at a certain age, whether that’s true or not, you feel the need to show others that you are at the very least capable of such a thing—to prove that you aren’t “broken.” Even as people shift towards acceptance, that muscle memory doesn’t simply disappear.  

In the article “Dealing with the Pressure of Being Almost 30 and Not Married,” Amanda Swanson reflects on the internalized expectations of herself she’d held throughout her life. She says, “Up until a few years ago, I would have thought I’d be married by now and maybe even have kids. I never really questioned the American Dream, or pictured my life any other way other than married and having a family. […] Because you head towards 30 trips around the sun and you find someone to marry and you pop out kids. That’s just what you do, right?”3

Right?

I think that alongside the shame that can come from deviating from the norm, and alongside the idea that your differences mean you don’t “measure up” to everyone else, for many women raised believing that marriage and children was the direction their life was headed, there was an identity tied to that future.

And when things aren’t the way you’d been told they would be, that identity can get positively scrambled.

I know all of these self-perceptions are difficult to quantify, to justify, to accept, and to grow alongside. I know all of these self-perceptions are even harder to extricate from the perceptions of others that hit hard enough to stick.

But as long as our culture continues to shift, and as long as women like Susan B. Anthony and Emma Watson and even Disney princesses like Elsa and Merida continue to elevate the richness of women’s lives without need for romance—and to elevate the definition of the self by what we choose—then there will be space for all the “spinsters” of today and tomorrow to exist in the open, to pursue all manner of connection, and to cultivate identity without shame.

1-2. Sharp, Elizabeth A., and Lawrence Ganong. “I’m a Loser, I’m Not Married, Let’s Just All Look at Me”: Ever-Single Women’s Perceptions of Their Social Environment. Journal of Family Issues, 2011, p. 967. doi-org.libproxy.boisestate.edu/10.1177/0192513X10392537.

3. Swanson, Amanda. "Dealing with the Pressure of Being Almost 30 and Not Married.” Life Goals Magazine, 2019, lifegoalsmag.com/pressure-almost-30/.

[uf200singleproject]

The Impact of the Stigma: Societal

Progress for any social or political movement will naturally fluctuate, and that is certainly true of the single positivity movement. Between “spinsters” coming into the public eye as an undesirable group and the efforts of women like Susan B. Anthony, there was resistance and advocacy. Between the definition of the “New Woman” and the release of Disney’s Brave, there was resistance and advocacy.

We have seen positive change, but there is still resistance on the ground, and single women continue to experience it on scales from societal to internal.

In Lisa Lynn Hancock’s dissertation “How Women Experience and Respond to Singlism: Stereotyping and Discrimination of Singles,” for unmarried individuals, there are tangible repercussions to being single, as supported by a range of literature on the subject: “discrimination has been demonstrated to manifest in inequities in pay, housing rights in the military, promotions at work, subsidized employee benefits, Social Security benefits, estate taxes, capital gains taxes, insurance, housing, in vitro fertilization, adoption, family care leave, travel packages and experiences, club memberships, and even expectations for longer work hours.”1

As long of a list as this is, it wasn’t at all difficult to visualize how each category is impacted for those unmarried. Many of these programs were set up with the nuclear family in mind, and the societal expectations that come with marriage and parenthood have room to bleed through in spaces that weren’t.

And Hancock’s research didn’t end there—as of 2005, “researchers were still finding participants more likely to describe singles as lonely, shy, unhappy, insecure, and inflexible.”2 And as of 2013, “Narrative research revealed that single women were generally perceived as less happy, having fewer social skills, being less successful, being flawed, and having less life satisfaction than married women.”3

While a decade has passed, when it comes to a cultural mindset, I think it would be overly optimistic to believe that these perceptions have fizzled out so quickly. I wanted to hear firsthand what it was like to be on the other end of these assumptions over time, so I reached out to a family friend for an interview. Michelle is in her late 40s and unmarried, though she had been engaged in the past. No matter what question I asked, the most prominent topic in our conversation turned out to be religion, and for good reason. We were both raised Christian, and I was unsurprised to find that she one of the primary struggles she encountered—both in getting engaged and breaking it off—was religious pressure to marry from both her family and community.

In the West, I can imagine that this brand of religious pressure and traditional obligation is common for single women to experience. But Michelle and I agree that certain perspectives surrounding gender roles along our religious lines have noticeably lightened over time. She told me that in her community, around the time she got engaged, “people started to figure out that women could help out without a husband, and that women could preach, and that nothing had caught on fire since they started, so it would be fine.” It's a great thing to see this kind of change in real time, but Michelle made sure to tell me that even as certain people grow and change, "when something is taught for so long, there's plenty of judgement left over." That line was especially impactful to me because, though I'm not sure she meant it this way, that leftover judgement can often come from yourself. 1. Hancock, Lisa Lynn. How Women Experience and Respond to Singlism: Stereotyping and Discrimination of Singles. Walden University, 2017, p. 8. scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/3994/.

2-3. Hancock, Lisa Lynn. How Women Experience and Respond to Singlism: Stereotyping and Discrimination of Singles. Walden University, 2017, p. 33. scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/3994/.

[uf200singleproject]

The Single Positivity Movement

As we work our way up to the present, let’s continue the conversation on the history of the stigma surrounding single women. We’ve already established that, as far as we know, the Western beginning of widespread social awareness and othering of single women in particular can be traced back to around the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries—it is recent, in the grand scheme of things, but simultaneously considered to be a newer “problem” than it is.

As it turns out, the idea of the liberated “New Woman” and one of the largest early waves of resistance to marriage in the West came in around the late nineteenth century and, like the concept of the “spinster,” is often thought to have cropped up far more recently than it really did. The female “single positivity” movement is probably considered a product of just the last decade by some—including myself, before this project—and that assumption is likely based on the recent influx of popular media coverage on the topic.

In reality, the rise of historical figures like feminist author Sarah Grand (pictured above) and women’s rights advocate Susan B. Anthony in the late 1800s represents the roots of the movement. Rachel Thompson’s article on the history of the single positivity movement describes Susan B. Anthony’s prediction in 1877 that there would soon be “an epoch of single women” with the reasoning that “if women will not accept marriage with subjugation, nor men proffer it without, there is, there can be, no alternative.”1 Thompson then reveals that in 1894—not even 20 years later—the term “New Woman” was coined by Sarah Grand.2

And in the 20th century, the movement was spurred on by author Marjorie Hillis. Thompson explains that her book Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman gave advice on just that: living alone. Joanna Scutts, interviewed by Thompson, sums up the intention behind Hillis’ writing in a beautifully profound way; Hillis “urged women to call themselves 'Live Aloners' rather than spinsters or single” because “she wanted them to define themselves by what they’d chosen, rather than what they lacked."3

And this powerful message is one that I have been proud to see come through in popular culture throughout my lifetime. From children’s media with plots far beyond the pursuit of a “prince charming,” like Disney’s Brave and Moana, to the confidence of celebrity role models like Emma Watson, who publicly described her romantic status at 32 as “self-partnered,”4 it seems that we as a culture are working to make room for women to make that choice without shame.

But, as we know, real life and pop culture don’t always perfectly align, and there is still work to be done.

1-3. Thompson, Rachel. “The History of the Single Positivity Movement Goes Back Further than You Think.” Mashable, 29 Oct. 2021, mashable.com/article/single-positivity-movement-history.

4. Lees, Paris. “From the Archive: Emma Watson on Transcending Child Stardom.” Vogue, 15 Apr. 2022, vogue.co.uk/news/article/emma-watson-on-fame-activism-little-women.

[uf200singleproject]

Looking into the Early History of Single Women in the West

I know, it's kind of a big jump, but let’s try to get an idea of when the stigma might have started by exploring gender roles in early foraging societies. The kind of foraging societies I'm referring to are the ones historians believe were some of the earliest forms of human society, but it's important to note that foraging societies exist in many places today and are in no way "behind" for it.

According to Stephanie Coontz’s journal article “Historical Perspectives on Family Studies,” in foraging communities, “women traditionally contributed 60% to 90% of calories, and they were often in charge of household food distribution."1 That level of access to resources would, as we might guess, generally put single women in a more advantageous position than single men. And another key feature of this social organization—the significance of kinship—had similar benefits for people outside of explicitly recognized coupledom. Coontz explains that, in these foraging societies, “Often a woman has more call on her brother’s resources than on her husband’s and higher status as a sister than as a wife.”2

Huh. So what changed?

Enter the agricultural society. With the rise of permanent settlements, clear lines supposedly began to emerge between households, separating extended family and spacing out communities. Coontz explains that “Most historians, anthropologists, and economists agree that the eclipse of extended kinship as the main mechanism of production and distribution limited the claims of individuals on resources beyond the household, whereas the development of plow agriculture, along with increased militarization, made women more dependent on men’s productive activities.”3 And it makes sense, doesn't it? Suddenly, a woman without a husband would be at a disadvantage, as the clusters of people working directly together to survive morphed from entire communities into something more closely resembling the nuclear family—our new normal. Right?

But it's pretty clear that both the transition from foraging to agricultural and the phasing out of extended kinship didn’t just happen in the blink of an eye. Some societies would hold on to certain features more than others, and no two communities would be identical in values. Glossing over that nuance, in my mind, calls into question whether the oversimplification of that progression (in certain accounts of history) might have paved the way for a retrospective overemphasis on the nuclear family earlier than was strictly accurate. After all, just how recent is the stigma towards unmarried women? Was it a slippery slope once towns popped up, or did it take more than the new concept of houses to sever extended family ties?

As it turns out, Amy M. Froide’s research in the fantastic book “Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England” helps answer that question. She explains that “Modern historians have had a tendency to write as if ‘spinsters’ were a new ‘problem’ in the nineteenth century.”4 That means that up until that point, historical research was probably zoomed in on those who fit the nuclear family bill rather than those in other arrangements. The work of Froide and the book’s many contributing researchers has only highlighted that historical tunnel vision, as it’s become clear that “spinsters” as a minority group “emerged into the popular consciousness as early as the second half of the seventeenth century," with negative perceptions following behind.5

Let’s pause for a moment and address the phrasing here. If you are of the opinion that “spinsters” were a nineteenth century epidemic, then the seventeenth century is certainly “early” for this brand of social stigma to have taken root. But when we scoot all the way back to the emergence of Western agricultural societies, that is very, very late. This stigma is new—and single women are not.

1-3. Coontz, Stephanie. “Historical Perspectives on Family Studies.” Journal of Marriage and Family, vol. 62, no. 2, 2000, p. 286. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/1566740.

4-5. Froide, Amy M. Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England. Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 8. Oxford Academic, doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199270606.001.0001.

[uf200singleproject]

The aim of this blog is to examine Western social perspectives on single women—particularly those who are unmarried.

This is a topic that’s close to my heart, but it’s incredibly important to point out that I am still young. I’m only 19 years old—but that’s the same age my mother married at. That’s just a year younger than the age my sister married at. And here I am, never having dated, save the two-day adventure that was a mutual crush in third grade. (He moved away later that week, but I plucked a flower from a bush on the walk home and told everyone it was his parting gift to me.)

In my life, where the most prominent of many of my peers’ concerns stem from our grades, romance doesn’t come up particularly often. (Yes, it’s obvious, I am still young.) But when it does, and if I’m asked about my own experiences, the response is usually disbelief. My sister insisted for a time that I must be hiding a secret boyfriend, because I was “cool and played games and stuff,” which were naturally irresistible traits. A friend of mine told me just last week that the fact I’d never been gone out with someone before was “probably the most surprising thing [he’d] ever heard.”

Looking at these reactions, they’re tame. The explanations for their surprise are flattering, even. But they all come from the assumption that romance is a goal I’m actively working towards.

I can only imagine how assumptions like these stretch and sour when someone gets to their 30s, their 40s, their 50s… going so “long” without experiencing or sustaining what we seem to think of as a staple of the human experience will undoubtedly lead to less kind curiosities. And I often worry about the thoughts crossing my friends’ minds after these conversations: “If she seems so cool, but she’s never been with someone, is there something terribly wrong with her that I can’t see?”

So, let’s explore. On a societal scale, are my fears unfounded? If baseless now, what ground might they have stood on in years past? In the future? What can we point to to explain it all?