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W 6. Choices for Remaining Single: “She’s Gonna Make It after All” I want to teach my daughters that you have to please yourself first. It’s the most important lesson you can give them. —country singer Faith Hill, explaining what she learned from her divorce, to Parade Magazine, January 20, 2000 When discussing their lives when they were in their twenties and thirties, the women who I interviewed spent a lot of time telling me how different they were from their parents and grandparents at their age. Usually that difference was marriage: “My grandmother says to me, ‘I can’t believe you’re not married yet,’” said Dionne, a student at Fullerton Junior College in California , with ambitions of becoming a lawyer. “Every time my grandfather comes to see me, ‘When are you getting married?’ I’m only 23. There’s school. There’s a lot I want to do before I get married and have babies.” When Lynn, 26, raised in an upper-middle-class Chicago suburban home, accidentally became pregnant during her last year of college at Illinois State University, she decided to keep the baby. Although she recognized the tremendous hardships that decision would bring, she was grateful to have had a wider range of choices than her mother did at her age, including the option to raise a child alone. “I’m not going to be like my mother and depend on somebody. . . . She’s still dependent on my father. She doesn’t have a lot of her own resources. I guess I don’t want to end up like her.” Karen’s parents were married early, in their late teens. So when she told her father, a fireman, that she was moving in with her boyfriend but not marrying him, “he did not react well at all,” said Karen, 26, an accounting clerk at a hospital outside Los Angeles. “He said, ‘When this doesn’t work out, nobody is going to want to go out with you.’ He has that very fifties mentality . It’s like, ‘Your reputation is going to be shot.’” 131 Media commentaries about the status of the American family that cite social phenomena such as single motherhood and divorce use common terms such as “crumbling,” “decay,” and “breakdown.” And indeed, these words often do describe the devastating effects of economic pressures and a general devaluation of commitment by society. However, the media often fail to discuss the positive advancements for women behind many of these individualistic shifts, mainly for those women who have the power to control their lives. Many changes, such as divorce, have coincided directly with women’s obtaining more education and independent means of support. As women acquire more power in society and marriage becomes more egalitarian, their ability and desire to live without any commitment at all has become more prevalent. Whether by choice or circumstance, more women of the postboomer generation are remaining single without shame and often with enthusiasm , even if they are living with a man or have children. They see living without marriage as a positive choice, or the best choice possible under the current conditions. Although some of these living situations, especially single motherhood and divorce, are often far from a woman’s ideal, they are preferable to the old and even more limited alternatives, including being shipped off secretly to an unwed mothers’ home or being forced to stay in an abusive or empty marriage. Permission to Remain Single Remaining single, even in one’s thirties and beyond, has become so common that young women assume that it is a right; they have forgotten about the strong social stigma attached to being single that was prevalent just thirty years ago. By the late 1970s, only a third of Americans disapproved; 15 percent actually thought it was preferable; and the rest felt it was up to the individual (Bellah et al. 1996, 110). Since then, remaining single has become even more acceptable. Again, as with most of the sexual changes described in this book, the greatest changes have been with women, and women have gone even further than men to legitimize remaining single. For them, the stigma has always been worse, as exemplified by the negative terms of the past describing a single older woman, such as “spinster” or “old maid,” which sharply contrast with the equivalent terms for a single older man like “bachelor” and “playboy .” The growing number of single women is testimony to this new permission...

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