All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (18 page)

And what we know today—when gay and lesbian identities are far more recognized than in earlier eras—is that women still form intensely emotional, often physical bonds that might easily be understood from a distance as homosexuality, but which aren't necessarily sexual.

When I was in junior high, I had Judy, with whom, a century before, I would have been said to have been “smashed.” And while we never went in much for hugging, hair-braiding, or any of the other fleshy communions common to budding girlfriendships, we certainly experienced a chaste version of puppy love.

Neither of us had boyfriends (or girlfriends), and there's a compelling argument that we didn't precisely
because
we poured so much of ourselves into each other, but I think the reverse was true: We were adolescents, full of energy and self-interest and the incandescent urge for human connection. When no well-matched romantic interests came along to light us up, we focused our teenaged high beams on one another, composing volumes on our affections in birthday cards and yearbook messages and notebooks traded between classes. We shared inside jokes and argued about the war in the Persian Gulf and watched
When Harry Met Sally
and nursed jealousies, of interloping friends and even of changing tastes that might lead us to cease to perfectly mirror each other.

What criteria do we apply to properly designate the nature of “real” partnership? Do two people have to have regular sexual contact and be driven by physical desire in order to rate as a couple? Must they bring each other regular mutual sexual satisfaction? Are they faithful to each other? By those measures, many heterosexual marriages wouldn't qualify.

Marriage and its ancillary, committed dating, are simply not the only relationships that sustain and help to give shape, direction, and passion to female life, at least not for all women.

If there are broad distinctions to be made between the nature of same-sex female pairs versus heterosexual ones, it's that the same-sex unions have not entailed one of their members being automatically accorded more power, status, or economic worth based entirely on gender.

Bettina Chen and Alice Brooks met at Stanford, where they were both getting master's degrees in engineering after having been undergraduates at Caltech and at MIT, respectively. “There weren't many girls around,” said Chen, of how they first came to notice each other. “We had a lot of things in common and we connected, being girls from tech schools. And we wanted to try to make more room for women around us.”

The women became close and talked a lot about their experiences in male-dominated engineering circles, wondering what they might do about pulling more young women into their field. They began comparing notes about the factors that led them to engineering. Bettina had played with the hand-me-down Legos and Lincoln Logs of her older brothers, boys to whom those building and architectural toys were marketed. Alice, meanwhile, recalled having asked for a Barbie one Christmas, and having received instead, a saw, which she used to make her own toys, including a doll and a dinosaur.

As their friendship deepened, Brooks said, they vacationed together and realized that they spent time easily in each other's company; they figured that that meant they could work together. The two women have since created their own company, producing a set of engineering toys,
Roominate, marketed directly to young girls. It's a company born not only out of a collaboration between women, but intended to bring more women into the male-led world in which its founders encountered each other.

Historically, women have pushed each other into, and supported each other within, intellectual and public realms to which men rarely extended invitations, let alone any promise of equality. It was, after all, pairs of women who tended to found settlement houses and colleges together, who partnered around activism and academia. Female protesters, scholars, scientists, and artists found each other, compared notes, exchanged ideas, and collaborated to become the backbone of the suffrage and temperance movements, and key to abolition. The shared, as opposed to individual, experience of workplace danger and injustice led to women's collective labor actions and the formations of the earliest women's unions.

The power of collaboration and closeness between women has caused no end of anxiety. Nineteenth century antifeminist journalist Eliza Lynn Linton referred to groups of women, especially participants in the suffrage movement, as “shrieking sisterhoods.”

Perhaps nervousness about the disruptive power of female association is partly why, a couple of decades into the twentieth century—after the massive political and sexual upheavals of the progressive era—the efforts to re-center women's lives around marriage included a new level of public suspicion and aspersion cast upon female friendships.

In the 1920s, perhaps not coincidentally, around the time of the passage of the 19th Amendment, the term “lesbian” began to be used popularly to indicate a class of single women with close bonds to each other. By the end of the 1920s, American psychoanalysts “were warning that one of the most common ‘perversions of the libido' was the tendency of teenage girls to fix their ‘affections on members of the same sex,' ” writes Stephanie Coontz. “Such perversions, they claimed, were a serious threat to normal development and to marriage.” The fix, Coontz writes, was to discourage social unions between women, and to encourage instead more free-wheeling experimentation between the sexes: Dating.
¹¹

Instead of pairing off with each other and causing trouble, women were prodded, from a young age, to pursue men. Men had their own responsibility in securing the exclusive attentions of young women: Beaus
were increasingly supposed to provide not just money and status, but companionship and sociability that women had in previous decades found with female friends, friends with whom they were now in competition for the attentions of these men.

Caricatures of young women's relationships with each other began to change: No longer sentimental sweethearts who might collude and commiserate dangerously, they were portrayed in popular culture as being in perpetual Betty-and-Veronica hair-pulls with each other over coveted male attention. This view of women as competitors has extended beyond the prize of romantic affirmation. As new, but too few, public avenues for professional advancement began to open later in the twentieth century, the idea of factory workers laboring shoulder to shoulder gave way to popular visions of shoulder-padded professional dragon ladies eager to get in good with male bosses and dispatch with the female colleagues or underlings who might challenge them for the meager crumbs of power on offer. And backstabbing stereotypes weren't always so far removed from reality: Power structures have long been built, in part, on the energies of disempowered people vying with each other for the scant chance of advancement.

Finding a balance between camaraderie, support, and self-interest has remained challenging, especially when we find ourselves, today, working alongside, and becoming close to, women who are also competing with us for raises, for better shifts, for promotions. One woman told me, while I was writing this book, about a falling-out with a close friend in the same field in the wake of a professional triumph; her friend had difficulty containing her jealousy. As this woman observed, sadly, “We have years of practice with women competing over men, but now we find ourselves competing with our girlfriends over jobs.”

It's not just jobs and men. As more things become available to more women, whether those things are luxuries like travel or nice homes, or too-scarce necessities like education or reliable childcare, the variety of things that women may find to resent about their lots, compared to the lots of their female peers, has only expanded.

Ann and Amina have developed what they call “Shine Theory,” as an attempt to redress the now-entrenched model of women as meowing competitors.
“When we meet other women who seem happier, more successful, and more confident than we are, it's all too easy to hate them for it,” Ann has written, because we understand it to mean that “There's less for us.” The solution, she advises, is, “when you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn't make you look worse by comparison. It makes you look better.”

Before the Skyping and texting and shared Tumblring that provide today's female friends their expressive channels, there were letters. In fact, epistolary communications provide the skeleton of much of what we know not only about specific friendships between women and also about the circumstances and perspectives of women whose lives might otherwise have slipped out of public view. They also offer us one of the best windows we have on how women have viewed their marriages and their friendships, and the struggle to make space for both.

A faithful and prolific correspondent,
Jane Eyre
novelist Charlotte Brontë accepted the proposal of her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom she did not love, when she was thirty-eight. She understood that marrying Bell would, as she wrote to a friend, secure her father “good aid in his old age.” In this admission and others, Brontë was frank with her female confidantes.

“What I taste of happiness is of the soberest order,” Brontë wrote to one friend in 1854, of her decision to marry. “My destiny will not be brilliant, certainly, but Mr. Nicholls is conscientious, affectionate, pure in heart and life . . . I am very grateful to him.” She went on, in another missive, to explain that her betrothal had cemented many previous suspicions about marriage. “I know more of the realities of life than I once did,” wrote Brontë. “I think many false ideas are propagated . . . those married women who indiscriminately urge their acquaintances to marry [are] much to blame. For my part I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance—what I always said in theory—Wait.”

It was clear that Brontë felt the loss of freedom palpably after her marriage. “[T]he fact is my time is not my own now;” she wrote. “Somebody else wants a good portion of it—and says we must do so and so. We do ‘so and so' accordingly, and it generally seems the right thing—only I sometimes wish that I could have written the letter as well as taken the walk.”

Several weeks later, Brontë wrote to her best friend, Ellen (Nell) Nussey, that her husband “has just been glancing over this note—He thinks I have written too freely . . . I'm sure I don't think I have said anything rash—however you must burn [triple underlined] it when read. Arthur says such letters as mine . . . are dangerous as Lucifer matches—so be sure to follow a recommendation he has just given [to] ‘fire them'—or ‘there will be no more.' . . . I can't help laughing—this seems to me so funny, Arthur however says he is quite serious and looks it, I assure you—he is bending over the desk with his eyes full of concern.”

That concern only became fiercer as the weeks went on. “Dear Ellen,” Brontë wrote a week later, “Arthur complains that you do not distinctly promise to burn my letters . . . He says you must give him a plain pledge to that effect—or he will read every line I write and elect himself censor of our correspondence. . . . You must give the promise—I believe—at least he says so, with his best regards—or else you will get such notes as he writes . . . plain, brief statements of facts without the adornment of a single flourish.”

Nussey finally responded to Brontë's husband, “My dear Mr. Nicholls, As you seem to hold in great horror the
ardentia verba
[burning words] of feminine epistles, I pledge myself to the destruction of Charlotte's ‘epistles' henceforth, if You pledge yourself to no censorship in the matter communicated.”

Nicholls agreed. Nussey, much to her personal credit and to history's benefit, never burned the letters. Less than a year later, Brontë, who had written to Nussey that “it is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife,” became an embodiment of one of the literal perils of wifeliness; she died, likely while pregnant, at thirty-eight.
¹²

Marriage, in one manner or another, can have a deleterious impact on female friendship.

Sarah Steadman is a twenty-nine-year-old middle-school teacher in Vernal, Utah. She spoke of her mixed feelings at having seen so many of her friends, especially in early-marrying Utah, where those who share her Mormon faith wed early, driving the state's marriage age as low as anywhere in the nation. When Sarah's best friend from high school married in her early twenties, Sarah was happy for her. “I loved the guy,” she said. “I had actually set them up.” And yet, she said, “it was kind of devastating. I felt like I had lost her in my life, even though we're still good friends. It's never the same way that it was, completely, because they have their new life.”

One of the most gutting moments of my thirty-third year came during the period in which two of my dearest, most beloved friends were getting married months apart. At one of the events to celebrate them, I was passed a message book in which I espied one of my best friends writing to the other about how grateful she was that they were “taking this step together.” When I saw it, I felt as if I'd been punched in the stomach.

We were all friends together, a triad, equals. We had varied careers, ambitions, styles, impulses, sexual tastes. It was true that both of these women happened to be getting married and I happened to be single, but I hadn't, until that moment, conceived of their experiences as particularly parallel; their relationships were so different, their partners so different, even their weddings different. But this expression made me see the world in a new way. I may have still been their age, their confidant, their social peer, their neighbor, their friend, but here was an evocation of a shared step that perhaps they saw—and I suddenly felt—as a step away from me.