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

extramarital wage-earning that black women had been doing for generations, black women were being blamed for a different sort of social disruption. Two years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique , women whose experiences had foregrounded its philosophies were at the center of a national conversation about the devolution of the black family unit and the social and economic blight it was presumed to have precipitated.
    In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor and future New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan released a report called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” It was, in some ways, a thoughtful account of the systemic racial inequality that had plagued the nation since its founding, with Moynihan arguing that “the American Republic, which at birth was flawed by the institution of Negro slavery, and which throughout its history has been marred by the unequal treatment of Negro citizens” long had fallen short of “the full promise of the Declaration of Independence.” Moynihan rightly acknowledged the development of middle-class white suburbs and abandonment of poor cities to African-Americans as having created a class chasm between the races, noting that “because of this new housing pattern—most of which has been financially assisted by the Federal government—it is probable that the American school system has become more , rather than less segregated in the past two decades.”
    Yet, despite these insights into the unequal histories and prospects of America’sblack and white populations, Moynihan boiled his argument down to one, punishing point: that the root of black poverty lay with the breakdown of marital norms for which nonconforming women were responsible. The “deterioration of the Negro family,” Moynihan argued, was tied to the high number of dissolved marriages, illegitimate births and the fact that “almost one-fourth of Negro families are headed by women.”
    There was some logic here: In economically unstable communities, raising children on single, low incomes is an inherently unstable proposition. But there was no consideration that those single incomes were a result as much as a cause, that reduced economic opportunity made marriage a less beneficial option for women, that women’s work outside the home was, rather than a detriment, key to keeping disadvantaged black communities and families afloat. Instead, Moynihan positioned female independence from men and dominance within the family at the center of a “tangle of pathology” that created “a matriarchal structure which, because it is out of line with the rest of American society,” and its patriarchal structure, “seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.”
Comfort to the Singles
    In the burgeoning feminist movement, the voices of figures more radical than Friedan began to get more notice for their arguments that women should not simply move toward the workforce, but away from marriage as the ratifying stamp of female worth.
    In 1969, University of Chicago sociology professor Marlene Dixon wrote that “the institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women . . . In a very real way the role of wife has been the genesis of women’s rebellion throughout history.” The next year, feminist Sheila Cronan wrote, “Since marriage constitutes slavery for women . . . Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.” Radical feminist writer Andrea Dworkin famously commented that “Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.”
    In 1970, the median age of first marriage for women remained under twenty-one,and 69.4 percent of Americans over the age of eighteen were married. 15 This is remarkable, in part, because of other social and political upheavals already well underway: In 1960, the FDA had approved the birth