and fears of everything from rejection to sex disease.”
The professional woman “O.D.ing on Machisma” was just as sad. Older than Alice, this single character had spent years struggling against sexism, suppressing anger, and she was thus in her dealings with the world and men especially a brittle and sarcastic presence. The essential icon in this category was TV journalist Murphy Brown, as played by Candace Bergen on the long-running TV series. Murphy was known for many things, but I remember most the dresses that had openings at the shoulders, as designed specially for the show by Donna Karan. These “cold- shouldered” outfits were the power look of the moment, I always thought, because the metaphorical chips on Murphy’s shoulders were so huge they mandated special tailoring. It seemed that women who’d worked their way to a position like Murphy’s were just as pathetic as the Alices, if in a different way. They were tougher, more accomplished, richer, and had fabulous perquisites, all to cover unsuccessfully for the fact that they had forfeited their ability to do anything “female” in life. The macho career woman was depicted as an update on the harsh 1930s career woman, that intersexual, mannish, possibly lesbian postwar working bitch missing a heart. As it was most often expressed in the late 1980s and ’90s, this woman had some kind of cerebral and/or neurological inability to deal with children. (Other people’s children, of course, for it was presumed that she wouldn’t have any of her own.) For example, if there was a baby in her apartment, how was she, a person with important work to do, supposed to know what it wanted?
Movies, again, form an excellent primer. One precursor to this 1990s archetype is Elizabeth Lane, the Barbara Stanwyck character in
A related example from real life: When the late film executive Dawn Steel had a baby, people in the Hollywood community asked, jokingly, “Who’s the mother?”
But life among single professional women, or any other single women, simply was not all that harsh. In 1986 the government funded a large six-state study of single women’s sex habits. It turned out that a third of all subjects at one point had cohabited because they did not feel “ready” to get married. With more than half of all marriages failing, and a hefty percentage failing during the first two years, some felt no rush to marry. And, for many women, the question was, “Marry who?” (“All the men I meet are either gay, married, crazy, or just plain boring,” went the popular lament; if it could have fit onto coffee mugs and bumper stickers, it would have.)
Research also showed that women in the eighties and nineties were not as depressed or as suicidal as others liked to think. It had long been a truism, for example, that single women were twice as likely to suffer from depression as married women. But a 1992 study of 18,600 professional middle-class white women and men, single and married, showed that the difference in rates of depression was pretty low. Of all the married women interviewed, 3.5 percent had been diagnosed with major depressive disorders, compared with 4.1 percent of the single women; after divorce, the transition back into singlehood, the rate flew up to 9 percent, then dropped down within eighteen months.
But the results of these surveys, and others like them, were lost or entirely unknown to a generation of younger women, born in and around 1970. The image of highly successful single career women dragging all these personal crises through their lives seemed slightly ridiculous. In many ways, this older generation of women seemed to have handled their lives, especially their personal lives, irresponsibly. I read the following two paragraphs to all women I interviewed who were under thirty-two. The first, as reprinted from a major newsweekly, circa 1990:
With a bulk of baby boomers entering the final stages of their fertile years, the sound of several million biological clocks has become as loud as Big Ben on steroids. I alternated this quote with that of an excerpt from
I did a year of unidentified inseminations… that’s “donor-deposit” or “DD,” where the donor remains anonymous. (If it’s “DI,” that means the donor is willing to be identified later.)… I carried my sperm home in a dry ice cooler that’s called a “mini-mate.”
After reading one or sometimes both quotes, almost all of the young women expressed disapproval that ranged from pity to physical disgust.
“No offense to you,” one twenty-three-year-old subject told me firmly, “but I would not want to be your age and not have these ends tied together. That’s really a hopeless way to build a life…. “a mini-mate”? This is so pathetic…. How low can you go?”
It is this generational contempt that gives us the first single archetype of the 1990s and the new century: the young, defiantly post-feminist woman who believes she must take care of the “single situation” in a prompt and businesslike fashion. Before she turns twenty-seven. Or else.
BABY BRIDES AND BABY BOOM BUSTERS
If you suffer, as I do, from a lifelong tendency to listen to three conversations simultaneously in public, “graduate-level eavesdropping” as I think of it, then you must have noticed, circa 1998, a shift in lunchtime conversations and those of women friends out for drinks and dinner. Suddenly they weren’t just discussing men. They were discussing marriage. And they seemed young. I’d gotten married in 1989 at age thirty, and was one of the first of my peers to do so. (Two friends, separately, had spoken to me, asking if I would promise not to have a baby right away; it was too much, too distant and unthinkable; I’d… disappear. And besides, I was too young.)
For the generation below me, all those for whom “women’s lib” is as archaic a term as “abolitionist” or “freedom rider,” postponed marriage and childbearing is a laughable notion. It has been a long, long while since men were legally empowered oppressors and wifery the well-traveled path to madness. The conditions that made marriage so difficult for women—and spurred the protective notion of waiting to develop one’s “full self” before leaping—had disappeared. There were more reasons to marry young, or whenever one could, than to wait. Many young women had lived what Rose, twenty-eight, a book editor, calls
a totally new untraditional life featuring the whole range of experiences starting from a very young age and your parents separating. I mean we had step-siblings on top of step-siblings. We had pot and drinking and sex, even if that was deemphasized because of disease. There was a lot of worry and denial. Oh, I mean, by twenty-one you had done… everything…. And I think everything was too much for that age. I think our view was—I mean, my friends—if the opportunity was there, why not get married?… No, I’m not married, but I would definitely like to be married. A lot of my friends are married…. To be honest, I’m tired of being the odd girl out. It’s a big pain in the butt.
During the early nineties the short-lived
This might have been written in 1953. But to intended readers, the totalitarian marital outlook of the fifties —an all-new “togetherness”—had nothing at all to do with their own lives in the 1990s. They were, to quote many TV commercials and newsmagazine segments, free single women devising creative solutions to their lives and problems, primarily to the unsettling state of “singleness” in such an unsettled world. They were not “slaves to societal custom… and not cruel to our friends who are not married yet,” explains Tara, who did not get engaged
