Read Online All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister - Free Book Online
Authors: Rebecca Traister
Tags: United States, History, Politics & Social Sciences, womens studies, World, 21st Century, Historical Study & Educational Resources, Social History, Americas, Gay & Gender Studies, Women in History
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students, but is not wholly explained by it. The median age for first marriage for Bostonâs women is around thirty, among the highest in the country. 4
The correlation between cities and comparatively high numbers of single female residents is long-standing and worldwide. As historians Judith Bennett and Amy Froide have written, approximately twenty percent of the women in Florence in the early fifteenth century were single women and, in Zurich by the end of the fifteenth century, ânearly half of all women had never taken a husband.â 5
Why are there, why have there always been, so many single people in cities? Mostly because, throughout history, cities have meant jobs.
In early modern Europe, as soon as any kind of nonagriculturalopportunity materialized, women would decamp from the countryside to villages and towns where they could find jobs lace-making or spinning. In these more populated areas, there was the possibility of socializing with other women, earning wages, meeting a wider variety of potential mates, and living, even briefly, outside the power of a husband or a father.
In turn, these migrations of women would precipitate a rise in the marriage age, an increase in the percentage of women who never married at all, and a drop in reproduction. Higher concentrations of women skewed the gender ratio and made husbands harder to find. However, it was also true that by leaving the rural areas where they were more closely watched by fathers and local clergy, women gained a minuscule whiff of liberation: the chance to postpone, if often only for a short time, their inevitable futures as economically dependent wives and mothers. Historian Maryanne Kowaleski cites scholars who report that, in early modern Europe, even women working apparently thankless jobs as servants in cities including Rotterdam and London âmay actually have preferred to remain single because of the security and independence a life in service offered them.â 6
These patterns of migration and behavior were repeated on larger scales as agrarian economies gave way to industrialized ones. In the nineteenth century United States, new mills and factories, especially in New England, actively recruited young women as cheap labor. Improvements in infrastructureâbetter roads, canals, and the railroad boomâmade it easier for women to leave rural homes and head to growing cities to work as seamstresses and milliners, governesses and laundresses. Many of the poorest women, including free blacks in the north and south, worked in domestic service for the growing class of urban industrialists.
These female laborers were far from carefree. Poorly remunerated and overworked, their behaviors were monitored by bosses, neighbors, clergy, and boardinghouse mistresses. But the concentration of them within cities, where they could encounter a wider variety of potential partners and friends and earn even scant wages, meant that for the first time in the United States, single women were taking up space in economic, public spheres.
The work that drew women was often unrewarding and physically difficult. In City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789â1860 , historianChristine Stansell looks at the 1805 New York census and finds a few women working as grocers, fruit sellers, tavern and shopkeepers; many more held jobs as seamstresses. Laundering, Stansell writes, was always needed in a filthy city, but was work often left to black women, since it involved physically demanding, scalding, freezing labor. 7
Still, hundreds of unmarried women and girls arrived 8 in New York every week in the mid-nineteenth century, as immigrants from the countryside and from across oceans. Both white and black women experienced the professional shifts into urban spaces, but their circumstances differed. In her 1925 essay âThe Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,â writer Elise McDougald focused on women in Harlem
The correlation between cities and comparatively high numbers of single female residents is long-standing and worldwide. As historians Judith Bennett and Amy Froide have written, approximately twenty percent of the women in Florence in the early fifteenth century were single women and, in Zurich by the end of the fifteenth century, ânearly half of all women had never taken a husband.â 5
Why are there, why have there always been, so many single people in cities? Mostly because, throughout history, cities have meant jobs.
In early modern Europe, as soon as any kind of nonagriculturalopportunity materialized, women would decamp from the countryside to villages and towns where they could find jobs lace-making or spinning. In these more populated areas, there was the possibility of socializing with other women, earning wages, meeting a wider variety of potential mates, and living, even briefly, outside the power of a husband or a father.
In turn, these migrations of women would precipitate a rise in the marriage age, an increase in the percentage of women who never married at all, and a drop in reproduction. Higher concentrations of women skewed the gender ratio and made husbands harder to find. However, it was also true that by leaving the rural areas where they were more closely watched by fathers and local clergy, women gained a minuscule whiff of liberation: the chance to postpone, if often only for a short time, their inevitable futures as economically dependent wives and mothers. Historian Maryanne Kowaleski cites scholars who report that, in early modern Europe, even women working apparently thankless jobs as servants in cities including Rotterdam and London âmay actually have preferred to remain single because of the security and independence a life in service offered them.â 6
These patterns of migration and behavior were repeated on larger scales as agrarian economies gave way to industrialized ones. In the nineteenth century United States, new mills and factories, especially in New England, actively recruited young women as cheap labor. Improvements in infrastructureâbetter roads, canals, and the railroad boomâmade it easier for women to leave rural homes and head to growing cities to work as seamstresses and milliners, governesses and laundresses. Many of the poorest women, including free blacks in the north and south, worked in domestic service for the growing class of urban industrialists.
These female laborers were far from carefree. Poorly remunerated and overworked, their behaviors were monitored by bosses, neighbors, clergy, and boardinghouse mistresses. But the concentration of them within cities, where they could encounter a wider variety of potential partners and friends and earn even scant wages, meant that for the first time in the United States, single women were taking up space in economic, public spheres.
The work that drew women was often unrewarding and physically difficult. In City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789â1860 , historianChristine Stansell looks at the 1805 New York census and finds a few women working as grocers, fruit sellers, tavern and shopkeepers; many more held jobs as seamstresses. Laundering, Stansell writes, was always needed in a filthy city, but was work often left to black women, since it involved physically demanding, scalding, freezing labor. 7
Still, hundreds of unmarried women and girls arrived 8 in New York every week in the mid-nineteenth century, as immigrants from the countryside and from across oceans. Both white and black women experienced the professional shifts into urban spaces, but their circumstances differed. In her 1925 essay âThe Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,â writer Elise McDougald focused on women in Harlem
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