So, what do ‘All the Single Ladies’ want?
Originally written for AEIdeas, October 2016.
The premise of Rebecca Traister’s ‘All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation’ can be neatly summed up in the pages of the 2014 New York Times: “The decline of marriage over the last generation has helped create an emerging voting bloc of unmarried women that is profoundly shaping the American electorate.”
This is true, and essentially non-ideological.
That said, her book brought to mind something Mary Katharine Ham said:
I think my biggest issue with modern feminism (whatever wave we’re on now) is that in all of its claims to liberate us, what it really does is require us to be a VERY SPECIFIC kind of left-leaning woman who ascribes to a very specific and ever-changing litany of policy preferences.
Though Traister is very attentive to intersectionality — class, race, education, geography, sexually-active or committed to abstinence — and compiles a wealth of data, Traister writes as if American women are an anti-conservative monolith.[1] Don’t get me wrong; her book is strong for thinking broadly about the different challenges different women face. She should be cheered for it. That makes it doubly disappointing she acts like the War on Women carried off conservative women, and lucky survivors went crawling to the left.
Traister includes an appendix of 13 policy proposals she believes would help unmarried American women. [2] It mostly reads like a left party platform rather than a considerate set of ideas about how government and intermediary institutions can help women thrive. Her pages on 20th century women’s history star Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Anita Hill, Sandra Fluke, and other Democrats who appear as the singular heirs of Mary Wollstonecraft or Elizabeth Tudor. And she writes that the 2016 Republican candidates for president were “campaigning on the denigration of single women”, particularly in regard to health, sexuality, and abortion access. (34). Ouch. A little strong there, lacking nuance or broad consideration?
What are you supposed to do if your sister, with the same “intersectional” experience as you, disagrees because she has a different idea?
But Traister has a good deal to offer readers who get beyond her politics. I genuinely enjoyed the book. It’s well-written, full of humor, and at times full of pathos. But this clearly makes one wonder about what important policy lessons are overshadowed by narrowly focusing on liberal “intersections.”
Now, intersectionality can lead to a philosophical conundrum. Women of the world must unite, but we must acknowledge all our differences; in sympathy with our sisters’ unique challenges, we unite in an ideologically-cohesive front, arguing for what the sisterhood as a whole needs and for what individual groups within need. But what are you supposed to do if your sister, with the same “intersectional” experience as you, disagrees because she has a different idea? As Christina Hoff Sommers notes, intersectionality theory tends to separate rather than unite. Introducing the problem of “ideas” into this Marxist paradigm breaks it.
An April national poll by ABC offers a fascinating picture of the millennial female population — a stunning 1 in 6 or 40 million Americans. First, it is hardly an ideological monolith, though millennial women do lean left. Across all respondents, 11% each ranked “equal pay” and “abortion access” as their primary voting issue. Gun rights? Also 11%. Even more interesting? 9% of self-described conservatives ranked equal pay as their top issue, while 11% of moderates and 13% of liberals did. (Compare to abortion which ranked top for 5% conservatives, 9% moderates, and 16% liberals. Much more variation, probably a signal of greater controversy.)
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A second conclusion we can draw from the data? Equal pay and sexual/reproductive rights might be the pillars of former candidate Bernie Sanders’ women’s rights platform, but most women, across the ideological spectrum, don’t care so much. What interested all groups overwhelmingly? Income inequality and student loans. Perhaps that explains Bernie getting 35% of respondents’ support. But what if it actually speaks to something greater? Something like the dual pressures of a so-so economy and a cultural zeitgeist instructing women to battle to “have it all”?
Now, income inequality and student loans impact men too. I get that. But in the words of Tyler Cowen,
Someone must be working more. The answer, overwhelmingly, is women, who have taken on an Atlaslike role in supporting American economic growth.
Women are suspending “traditional” adulthood — independent living, marriage to a now “shrinking pool of men”, and children — to pay off loans and save for a future, with or without a family.
Traister’s book is a great work for young women and policy makers to think with and think through.
Where do we see this? To provide one powerful example: The number of young women returning to live at home has risen to 1940s levels. 1940s levels, i.e. over a third of women 18–34 living as singles with their parents. A third today lives as independent singles; in 1940s America, that was 5% or fewer. 60% of young women in 1940s America were married; that’s less than 30% today. (In a vast improvement over 1940s America, there are 5 times more women in college today. But remember all that debt!)
So, women are working harder, marrying later, and building lives under less than “traditional” midcentury circumstances. But, as my boss often says, who would want to return to the fifties or sixties? Obviously, we have to make the 21st century economy work for women as hard as they work for it. Some of those 40 million millennial ladies will need help, from the public or private sectors, to grow the economy and, if they choose, families the economy needs. We need some more ideas.
Traister’s book is a great work for young women and policy makers to think with and think through. This post is a case-in-point. It’s just too bad she didn’t seem to realize that, if we leverage public policy and private sector innovation across the left/right ideas spectrum, we might find the idea that breaks the mold. And if it can’t bring us all to the same intersection, maybe it would bring us to the same part of the grid.
Sarah Gustafson is the Managing Editor of AEIdeas, a contributing writer to The Phi Beta Kappa Society’s The Key Reporter, and holds a MA in Intellectual History from University College London. This was originally published on AEIdeas.
[1] In the first pages alone, she takes aim at Ronald Reagan and his “commitment to religious righteousness and reversing the victories of twentieth-century social progressives,” and also lambasts Phyllis Schlafly, Jonathan Last, Dan Quayle, Ross Douthat, AEI’s own Brad Wilcox at the National Marriage Project and much later also Dr. Charles Murray via a review of his Coming Apart (191). This is just in the introduction, and it is not exhaustive.
[2]“Stronger equal pay protections… a higher federally mandated minimum wage… a national healthcare system that encourages all women, across classes to better monitor and care for their reproductive systems… a system that covers reproductive intervention… mandating insurance companies cover IVF and other assisted reproductive procedures… create more housing for single people… government-subsidized or fully funded day care programs that allow more families of every structure to thrive and that create well-paying jobs for childcare workers… Government must mandate and subsidize paid family leave for women and men… universal sick day compensation… increase, rather than continue to decrease welfare benefits for all Americans, acknowledging that government assistance has always been fundamental to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in America… We need a system of economically supported leave time for Americans… We must protect reproductive rights, access to birth control, and sex education…we need shorter workdays…” Others, such as “There must be adjustments in the American attitude toward work, leisure, and compensation,” are certainly less unique to the left.
