Never Married Women

Two: Being Single

TWO / Being Single They are not halves, needing complements, as are the masses of women; but evenly balanced well rounded characters; therefore are they models to be reached by the average women we everyday meet. -SUSAN B. ANTHONY, 18771 30 / Being Single Clifford Geertz, a leading scholar/explorer of peoples and cultures different from his own, has set as a goal for himself and his discipline of anthropology the determination of "how . . . people . . . define themselves as persons, [and] what goes into the idea they have . . . of what a self . . . is." He proposes not only an aim but also a method with which to achieve a faithful understanding of individuals' conceptions of themselves and of what it means to be a person in a particular culture and time. Geertz obtains this "local knowledge" of informants' notions of themselves and of selfhood by alternating between two perspectives: one derived from immersion in the intimate daily details of informants' actions, thoughts, feelings, and imaginings; the other drawn from synoptic generalizations that a trained observer makes in contextualizing and interpreting the meaning and significance of informants' definitions of reality.2 The former spotlights the minutiae of impressions that actors themselves identify as salient; the latter attends to the contours of meaning of a given people or individual, identified through comparison , contrast, and overview by an empathic outsider. To make the method of discerning a "local knowledge" of people's definitions of selfhood more explicit, Geertz borrows two concepts from psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, who made a distinction between "experience-near" and "experience-distant" concepts. Experience-near concepts are those that a patient or informant uses easily, indeed effortlessly, in defining her or his feelings, thoughts, hopes, and fears. Experience-distant concepts, by contrast , are those that specialists or theorists have developed in the process of analyzing the overarching characteristics of an individual , a group, a phenomenon, or a subculture. For example, "fear and hunger" felt by a welfare mother responsible for three children is a far more "experience-near" concept than the "feminization of Being Single / 31 poverty:' Or the "love" an adolescent student feels for a teacher is experience-near, compared with the concept of "identifying a role model." Geertz suggests that a researcher's mission is "to grasp concepts that, for another people, are experience-near, and to do so well enough to place them in illuminating connection with experience-distant concepts theorists have fashioned to capture the general features of sociallife."3 This chapter attempts to interweave the insights gained in both the near and distant approaches to understanding the lives and views of SO single women born in the United States between 1884 and 1918. The woman who will not be ruled must live without marriage. -SUSAN B. ANTHONY, 18774 Many of the women I interviewed (34 of SO) initiated comments that sounded this same note. In many different words and with varying emphases, these women stressed the importance of autonomy in their existence. Some saw in the institution of marriage chiefly the subordination that accompanies the "wifely role": Men? Men have been important to me all my life. I have had friendships and love and sex with men since I was a young thing in Detroit before what we used to call the "Great War." Long relationships and short ones, they have kept me alive and kicking. Why, Joe and I dated every Wednesday and Saturday from 1959, when his wife passed away, until two years ago, when Joe's stroke took his mind away. How I miss those evenings! You see, dear, it's marriage I avoid, not men. Why would I ever want to be a wife? People expect you to be 32 / Being Single under your husband's thumb or to be his good right arm when you get married, regardless of what you or he wants. Who needs that load on their shoulders when life is hard enough already? A wife is someone's servant. A woman is someone's friend. Guly 1983] Others specifically valued freedom from a husband's rule. One woman expressed this vigorously: The closer we got to the wedding day, the more Peter began to act like a bully. He had cooked for himself for nine years. All of a sudden, when we got engaged, he wanted me to do all the cooking. In public places, he started to act like my boss. Now, one boss, the one I had at work at the time, was enough for me. So I...