All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Read Online Free PDF

imposed on women, it did not assume (or even consider) that marriage itself was the problematic element, or that it might ever be optional for women. Friedan’s vision of female empowerment entailed the expansion of activity outside the domestic sphere, but it did not question the primacy of that sphere itself.
    Friedan’s reflexive connections between male attention and female fulfillment—as well as the rather dim regard in which she held most single women—are evident throughout her book. 11 “Strangely, a number of psychiatrists state that, in their experience, unmarried women patients were happier than married ones,” writes Friedan with obvious perplexity. Elsewhere, she cites Susan B. Anthony as the early feminist who most closely resembled the myth of the “embittered shrew,” conceding (generously, she must have thought) that while Anthony “felt betrayed when the other [suffragists] started to marry and have babies,” she did not end up some “bitter spinster with a cat.”
    When Friedan, who would co-found and become the first president of the National Organization for Women in 1966, was asked about NOW’s mission in a television interview, she replied that the group’s message was about revising the “conditions that prevent women from easily combining marriage and motherhood and work.” 12 The group’s mission statement amplified this intention, noting that NOW did “not accept the traditional assumption that a woman has to choose between marriage and motherhood, on the one hand, and a serious participation in industry or the professions on the other . . . We believe that a true partnership between the sexes demands a different concept of marriage, an equitable sharing of the responsibilities 13  . . .” It was (and remains!) a revolutionary vision, but the organization was not the National Organization of Married Women, and yet there was no hint of recognition that not every woman’s life would (or should) include marriage and children, in that order.
    This was only one way in which Friedan’s vision was blinkered.
    In addition to her inability to conceive of middle-class white women who might not want the youthful unions into which they were being nudged, Friedan also didn’t consider the population of American women who were already altering marriage patterns, who had in recent years been marrying at declining rates and at later ages, who had been working outside the home for longer than that, supporting themselves and sometimes their children, both alongside, and independent of, husbands. Friedan did not include black women in her vision.
    Black women, who experienced both gender and racial wage discrimination, who were less likely than their white peers to have college educations or economic power, and whose families and potential husbandswere also less likely to have college educations or economic power, were also far less likely than white women to have the choice of not working outside their homes. They were therefore far less likely to experience the kind of domestic disenchantments from which Friedan’s readers suffered.
    Black women had in fact already made some of the very points for which Friedan was being hailed. Philadelphia lawyer Sadie Alexander had argued in the 1930s that women yearned to “place themselves again among the producers of the world” by involving themselves in work “that resulted in the production of goods that have a price value.” 14 Not only would this increase women’s status and security in the world, Alexander argued, in advance of Friedan, but “the satisfaction which comes to the woman in realizing that she is a producer makes for peace and happiness, the chief requisites in any home.”
    Even worse was that at practically the same moment that Friedan was being credited with jump starting the women’s movement by advocating