Read Online All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister - Free Book Online Page B
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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stands, and soda dispensers vied for customers.â 10 Working women had to traverse streets to get to jobs, early morning and late-night shifts. As the sight of them became more common, less freighted with sexual hang-ups and musty expectations of propriety, the more acceptable the notion of women as part of the urban fabric became.
In an 1896 interview with Nellie Bly, Susan B. Anthony kvelled about the habit of women bicycling. âI think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,â she said, âI stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent.â 11
Women began promenading without shame, publicly socializing and visiting the parks erected to be the lungs of industrialized cities. The outdoors offered opportunities to push social and sexual boundaries, and young people, writes Peiss, âused the streets as a place to meet the other sex, to explore nascent sexual feelings, and carry on flirtations, all outside the watchful eyes and admonitions of parents.â 12 So liberating was a life lived in the urban wild that the YWCA worried, Peiss reports, about how âyoung girls . . . in this unconventional out-of-door life, are so apt to grow noisy and bold.â
By the turn of the twentieth century, writes Betsy Israel in her book Bachelor Girl , âso many single girls were visibly out thereâworking, eating in restaurants, dancingâthat it became harder to immediately categorize them.â 13 This inability to immediately affix women with rigid class identity or expectation meant an increased potential for personal reinvention and flexibility amidst crowds of new people.
Urban Drawbacks
Alison Turkos was born in 1988 in Underhill, Vermont, a town with fewer than 3,000 residents and zero traffic lights. In high school and college, she said, she didnât have much of a romantic life; she was working throughquestions about her identity and sexuality. When she moved to New York City to work in reproductive health activism, she said, âI discovered this incredible community of queer men and women and this whole genderqueer population.â It was so freeing, she said, that it allowed her to feel more confident about who she was, and to come out as queer, first to her family, then to the people in her hometown.
Of course, the endless appeal of a city life has drawbacks, as Alison observed, noting that as much as she loves living independently in New York, thereâs an insatiability that she finds discomfiting. âEveryone always feels that they can do better appearance-wise, or find someone who makes more money or is more intellectually stimulating. Thereâs always going to be someone or something whoâs more enticing, more interesting.â
The madding crowds of people and of possible diversions can be overwhelming. From many urban interviewees, I heard repeated complaints of how hard it is to meet appealing mates, especially (for hetero women) as historic migration patterns hold and many cities remain home to more women than men.
Typically, single men outnumber single women where they always have: in many Western cities that once drew homesteaders and are now home to the tech industry. Eastern cities, including Boston and Atlanta, still have bigger populations of women. There are around 150,000 more single women living in New York City than there are single men, 14 while the dearth of women in Alaska has long been so pronounced that Oprah Winfrey did a handful of shows about Alaskan bachelors throughout the 1990s.
For those heterosexual women who hope to find partners, these numbers are often cited as the grim dead end of youthful urban jollity. As a twenty-two-year-old in my first steady job out of college, a divorced colleague in her forties regularly made me swear, as we chain-smoked in our office and gossiped
In an 1896 interview with Nellie Bly, Susan B. Anthony kvelled about the habit of women bicycling. âI think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,â she said, âI stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent.â 11
Women began promenading without shame, publicly socializing and visiting the parks erected to be the lungs of industrialized cities. The outdoors offered opportunities to push social and sexual boundaries, and young people, writes Peiss, âused the streets as a place to meet the other sex, to explore nascent sexual feelings, and carry on flirtations, all outside the watchful eyes and admonitions of parents.â 12 So liberating was a life lived in the urban wild that the YWCA worried, Peiss reports, about how âyoung girls . . . in this unconventional out-of-door life, are so apt to grow noisy and bold.â
By the turn of the twentieth century, writes Betsy Israel in her book Bachelor Girl , âso many single girls were visibly out thereâworking, eating in restaurants, dancingâthat it became harder to immediately categorize them.â 13 This inability to immediately affix women with rigid class identity or expectation meant an increased potential for personal reinvention and flexibility amidst crowds of new people.
Urban Drawbacks
Alison Turkos was born in 1988 in Underhill, Vermont, a town with fewer than 3,000 residents and zero traffic lights. In high school and college, she said, she didnât have much of a romantic life; she was working throughquestions about her identity and sexuality. When she moved to New York City to work in reproductive health activism, she said, âI discovered this incredible community of queer men and women and this whole genderqueer population.â It was so freeing, she said, that it allowed her to feel more confident about who she was, and to come out as queer, first to her family, then to the people in her hometown.
Of course, the endless appeal of a city life has drawbacks, as Alison observed, noting that as much as she loves living independently in New York, thereâs an insatiability that she finds discomfiting. âEveryone always feels that they can do better appearance-wise, or find someone who makes more money or is more intellectually stimulating. Thereâs always going to be someone or something whoâs more enticing, more interesting.â
The madding crowds of people and of possible diversions can be overwhelming. From many urban interviewees, I heard repeated complaints of how hard it is to meet appealing mates, especially (for hetero women) as historic migration patterns hold and many cities remain home to more women than men.
Typically, single men outnumber single women where they always have: in many Western cities that once drew homesteaders and are now home to the tech industry. Eastern cities, including Boston and Atlanta, still have bigger populations of women. There are around 150,000 more single women living in New York City than there are single men, 14 while the dearth of women in Alaska has long been so pronounced that Oprah Winfrey did a handful of shows about Alaskan bachelors throughout the 1990s.
For those heterosexual women who hope to find partners, these numbers are often cited as the grim dead end of youthful urban jollity. As a twenty-two-year-old in my first steady job out of college, a divorced colleague in her forties regularly made me swear, as we chain-smoked in our office and gossiped
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