By most standards, Lee Reilly is uncommonly successful. She is a freelance author and editor who has taught writing at local colleges and universities. She is a filmmaker who has worked on documentaries and television commercials. Regardless of her accomplishments, Reilly, 41, is still subject to a commonly held belief that her life is somehow incomplete because she has never had a husband.
When she was in her 30s, Reilly said in a recent interview, she felt a gulf between her dreams and what was attainable. She was very unhappy, she said, feeling deserted by her friends who had married.
“I wasn’t desperate to get married,” Reilly said. “I was unhappy because I couldn’t figure out how my life was going to go in the absence of marriage. The 30s are a very difficult time to be unmarried as a woman because all of the life decisions are based on marriage. Women decide when they’re going to work, how they’re going to work, where they’re going to live, where they’re going to spend their vacation, who they’re going to live with. All of this stuff is based on their marriage. (As a single woman) you’re sort of out there, and there are no guideposts. I was really miserable as a result.”
To guide other women like her, Reilly wrote “Women Living Single” (Faber and Faber, $23.95), tracking the experiences of 30 heterosexual women who never married and recording their dreams, accomplishments and defeats. Reilly profiled a group of women who are happier, more accomplished and on the whole more fulfilled than married women.
She wrote about a firefighter from Los Angeles, an artist from Wisconsin, a biochemist from Illinois. These women have found happiness outside of family and children, forming deep and lasting relationships with friends and siblings.
Although flying in the face of the common perception of single women as desperate to find a husband, Reilly’s book has much in common with a thesis by Janice Witzel, therapist with the Family Institute of Northwestern University. In her interviews with 25 white women who never married, Witzel said, they did not express regret and anger, but simply found other outlets, interests and preoccupations as a substitute for a lack of family and children. Many of these women were involved in altruistic and charity programs, Witzel said.
Witzel cited a 1991 study by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin that showed single women attained higher levels of education, income and professional advancement than women of other marital status: married, divorced or widowed. Single men, on the other hand, were the lowest category for males’ socioeconomic performance, she said.
In fact, single women had higher average earnings than single men, she said, adding that U.S. Census Bureau studies have had similar findings.
“What the information does is completely upset the stereotypes of single women as desperate and unhappy and single men as leading this fantastic, carefree bachelor life. This has been the trend for a long time; the media has simply refused to report it and understand what the data means,” Witzel said.
So if single women are better educated, higher paid and generally happier than their married counterparts, why is the opposite so often presumed to be true?
“In our culture, a single man is perceived to be a plus, though a single woman is perceived to be a problem,” said Jane Mattes, a New York therapist, author of “Single Mothers by Choice” (Random House, $15) and the founder of an organization that aids single women who want to have children.
“The culture binds in its expectations. Women are constantly bombarded with this idea: The most important thing they’re going to do in their life is get married. For those who don’t subscribe to that, they pose a lot of threats. The idea of (single women) being liberated, leading stable lives and being accomplished is very difficult for a lot of people to accept,” Mattes said.
“A great many people are not ready to accept the idea that for many women, there are career choices beyond marriage,” Witzel said. “Cultural change happens very slowly. The sad reality is single women on the whole are dismissed in this culture; they are marginalized and made to feel invisible. Talk to people who are married, and they’re likely to say, `We know about (single women). We saw them in “Fatal Attraction,” ‘ ” she said.
Negative images of single American women abound in popular culture, particularly the movies. The most notorious example of the last decade was the deranged book editor Alex Forrest, played by Glenn Close, in filmmaker Adrian Lyne’s popular 1987 film “Fatal Attraction.”
Demi Moore’s corporate villain in “Disclosure,” portrayed as obsessive, harsh and unfeeling, is a familiar single-woman character type, desperate and anti-family.
Television has spawned a different stereotype, what Reilly called “breath mints.” From Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca Howe on “Cheers” to Brooke Shields’ new incarnation on “Suddenly Susan,” these variations of the “dumb blond” caricature are effervescent, non-threatening women who require the guidance and patience of male lover/authority figures.
Reilly said that one of the few positive images of a single woman is Dana Scully, the FBI agent played by Gillian Anderson on “The X-Files.”
“She’s the only fully formed single woman on television. She’s independent, competent, capable, the only woman who’s treated like a man, where the focus is on who she is and what she does rather than concentrating on her marital status,” Reilly said.
Whether created by movies and TV or not, the stereotype of the desperate single woman has a lot of believers, as shown by the success of “The Rules,” by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, a manual on how women should act and behave “to land a man.” By advising women to “play hard to get and basically shut up,” Reilly said, “The Rules” perpetuates outdated social protocols.
There are indications that single men are more interested in marriage than single women are. In 1993, Guido Stempell III, a journalism professor at Ohio University, in conjunction with the Scripps Howard news service, conducted a poll to study men’s and women’s attitudes on marriage. Stempell polled 1,057 respondents.
“The most striking finding we had was that men were far more likely to say they wanted to get married than women,” Stempell said.
And it’s not only women who feel social pressure to get married. As Mattes said: “A lot of my male patients have told me recently they feel pressure to be married, though it’s nowhere near as great as the pressure women experience.”
Reilly found cultural differences in the amount of social pressure on women to get married, but she was wary of generalizations. She especially warned against generalizations about Latinas.
“For instance, one of the women (in the book) is Cuban, and she didn’t find any cultural pressure at all. In fact, she had a spinster aunt. But another one of the respondents (was) a Mexican-American who grew up around a ranch in Wyoming. The rancher’s son wanted to marry her. It would have meant wealth and status, and she turned him down to come to Chicago for her education,” Reilly said. The resulting strain her decision placed on her family was considerable, especially within the family-oriented culture of Mexican-Americans, where women typically marry in their teens.
“Of the percentage of women who have never married, 20 percent are African-American. That’s a pretty high figure,” Reilly said. “I asked one woman if she would consider marrying outside her race, and she said, `Absolutely not.’ “
Reilly said the percentage of women who never marry hasn’t changed through the years, only the degree of contentment.
“The number of women who don’t marry tends to be between 3 and 11 percent,” Reilly said. “That number hasn’t changed. I think what is different is the long-term historical trend in the way we look at marriage. The (marriage) bargain has changed. You can get sex outside of marriage. You can have financial security outside of marriage. You can even have babies outside of marriage. I think what I found and what these other surveys find is what women are really looking for in marriage is intimacy. They’re willing to wait for it.”
NOT A SINGLE THING WRONG WITH IT
– Being unmarried isn’t a recipe for individual unhappiness any more than being married is a recipe for individual bliss.
– There’s evidence that a bad marriage may be worse than no marriage at all.
– Surveys show that married people, except those who rate their marriage as “very happy,” report the lowest overall happiness of any category, including the always-single.
– In 1987, when the Los Angeles Times asked 1,635 women what their primary goals were, only 37 percent said marriage.
– Also in 1987, a survey of 16,000 divorced and always-single New Woman readers said that many women make a distinction between wanting marriage and wanting it at all costs.
— Source: “Women Living Single” by Lee Reilly
