It’s Time to Stand Up for the Single Ladies

The working woman gets a lot of marriage advice. There’s Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s manifesto for high achievers, which advises readers to find a supportive husband; Marry Smart has words of wisdom from Susan Patton, aka the Princeton Mom, on meeting your mate in college; and Spinster, a memoir by Kate Bolick, offers a road map for how to avoid the ball and chain. All the Single Ladies doesn’t belong on this list, even though it takes its name from a Beyoncé song that tells men to “put a ring on it.” The book from New York magazine writer Rebecca Traister avoids defining single women as women who aren’t married. Rather, she sees them as a distinct group with their own agenda—which, of course, isn’t news to them. It’s just taken this long for society to start catching up.

The world is difficult to navigate as a single woman; it’s made for married people. Today only 20 percent of Americans wed by age 29, and yet our workplace practices have remained essentially unchanged since about 1960, when 60 percent of young people tied the knot. “By simply living independently,” Traister writes, single women “face an additional set of challenges.” Until the mid-20th century, wives mostly stayed home. The workplace didn’t have to account for what we now call work-life balance: Men made money, and women took care of everything else. But as of 2011 there were more than 30 million unmarried female workers in the U.S. (Not because they’re getting divorced, either. The proportion of women younger than 34 who’ve never gotten hitched is up to almost 50 percent, 12 percentage points higher than it was a decade ago.) These trends are concentrated in cities, but they span classes, races, religions, and regions. Add in the gender wage gap, and the single lady’s position becomes precarious.