Table for One: Awakening to the Single American Woman

There has been a surge in recent years of books that focus on the female lived experience, or perhaps the feminist experience. Journalists are synthesizing for a popular audience what historians have long known: Free women make their way in the world, availing themselves of new technologies and economic opportunities as they go. Girls—they’re just like us!

Rebecca Traister’s new book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, is the best of the bunch. Taken in the aggregate, it is a political, legal, economic, social, sexual, and cultural history of the unattached American woman. The book comes at an opportune time; in 2016, for the first time in history, a majority of female voters are projected to be unmarried. This is because, as of 2009, single women—here taken to mean never married, as well as separated, divorced, or widowed—outnumber married women. Twenty-seven is now the median age of first marriage for women (even higher in cities); this is up from the reliably stable twenty to twenty-two that held from 1890 to 1980. “Even more striking,” Traister notes, is the twelve-percentage-point rise in less than a decade of never-married adults under thirty-four: 46 percent. There were 3.9 million more single adult women in 2014 than there were in 2010. Single Ladies is chock-full of such statistics, many of them mind-blowing.

And yet, single women are nothing new. As Traister painstakingly shows, unmarried women have always been a part of, and indeed integral to, the fabric of society. They are newly visible, no longer sequestered or protected by male family members, confined to lives of domesticity. “Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.”

A short list of Traister’s early female activists, abolitionists, reformers, artists, suffragettes, even politicians who never married includes: Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, Jane Addams, Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale, Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Pauline Hopkins, Willa Cather, Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister Emily, Dorothea Dix, Louisa May Alcott, Catharine Beecher, Mary Lyon, and of course Elizabeth I, England’s “virgin queen.” Not all of these women were truly unattached; but Traister is quick to note “they did not match society’s expectations by entering an institution built around male authority and female obeisance.” Others equally engaged in nation building and public lives, such as Margaret Fuller, Ida B. Wells, Zora Neale Hurston, Angelina Grimké, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sarah Bernhardt, Charlotte Brontë, and Frida Kahlo, enjoyed nontraditional arrangements—“open, childless, brief, or entered into late, after the women had established themselves economically or professionally, and thus could find partners more willing to accept them as peers, not appendages.” And of course there is Gloria Steinem, who, along with Letty Cottin Pogrebin, would found Ms. magazine and introduce the world to the concept of a woman who was neither married nor not-yet-married. (Steinem herself did marry, for a brief period, at the age of sixty-six.) Consciously or not, the single women of today are able to turn to these trailblazers as examples of lives lived well, out of the shadows.

The independent women of Traister’s book go to the gym and to yoga. They dine out, in groups and alone. They go to college, in greater numbers than ever before. They vote—oh, boy, do they vote; in 2012, “almost a quarter of votes were cast by women without husbands.” They live in cities and rural areas, moving as it fits their lifestyles and budgets. They work, sometimes two or three jobs to pay the bills. They’re lonely and exhausted. They get sick; they care for an extended network of friends and family who get sick, too. They date, they marry, they divorce. They have sex, or not. They become parents, by themselves or with...