Never Married Women

Preface

Preface Never Married Women explores the lives of 50 women who have in common an uncommon marital status. I have written this book about them because I want others to learn, as I have, about the diversity of their experiences and perspectives. It is only by immersion in this variety that one can begin to comprehend the discrepancy between popular images of "old maids" and the actualities of single women's daily lives. I have also written this book because I think that minority groups in any culture occupy a vantage point that permits them, indeed, requires them, to inspect dominant norms and expectations with particular acuity. These 50 women serve as important informants not only about their own lives, but also about the general socialization of women in the United States in their age groups, from sixty-six to one hundred and one years old. Because all the women are now in partial or full retirement, they are able to offer insights about many parts of the life cycle and about the transitions between those parts. They are also able to teach us about subcultural variations in the treatment of women since they come from a x / Preface range of ethnic and religious groups. Their long employment histories and many decades of relations with families and friends constitute a particularly rich source of information about work, kinship, and intimacy across time. Unprecedented numbers and proportions of women in the United States in the 1980s are delaying marriage until their mid and late thirties. Many demographers predict that the percentage of American women now between the ages of twenty and forty-five who will remain single throughout their lives will far exceed the rates of never-married women recorded at any time during the past century. Given these changing patterns and projections, we should do well to turn to the reflections of women who have lived among us for at least six decades as single women in a society that expected its women to marry and bear children. Though women who have never married have often been judged, they have seldom been studied. This book is an early contribution to a wider inquiry that, I hope, will expand exponentially over the next few decades. ...