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Article about single women vs married women:
| Women | The Guardian
The word ‘,spinster’, is still freighted with pity and misogyny, yet the number of women living this way is growing. Emma John says it’,s time to reconsider what it means to be ‘,never-married’,
Why are increasing numbers of women choosing to be single? I remember the moment my sister told me she was having a baby.
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I was spending the evening with a group of friends and, halfway through, Kate said she needed a word. We ducked into a bedroom, where she looked at me so solemnly that I ransacked my brain for anything I could possibly have done wrong in the past half-hour. The seriousness of her announcement made me giggle out loud. I had a flashback to the pair of us as kids, when a secret meeting like this meant we’d broken something in the house and were working out how to present the news to our parents. Plus, the thought of my little sister being a mum was innately funny. Not that Kate wasn’t ready for the role – she was in her mid-30s and keen to get on with it. I just couldn’t see myself as anyone’s aunt. My own path to such “conventional” adulthood stalled somewhere in my 30s, not through choice or any dramatic event, but through an invisible winnowing of opportunities. I was – am – still single. I didn’t – don’t – regret my own lack of children. But becoming an aunt brought with it a phantom modifier, one that echoed across my empty flat, even though no one had spoken it out loud. There are many reasons we no longer use that term: its misogynist undertones of sour dessication, or bumbling hopelessness, to start with. The label went out of official usage in 2005 when the government dropped it from the marriage register, thanks to the Civil Partnership Act and, in an age when becoming a wife is no longer necessary or definitive, it seems almost redundant. But it hasn’t gone. Nor has it been replaced by anything better. So what else are we formerly-known-as-spinsters supposed to call ourselves: free women? Rather insulting to everyone else, I imagine. Lifelong singles? Sounds like a packet of cheese slices that’ll last for ever in the back of your fridge. Cheek to cheek: (left) Emma John and her sister Kate. It’s important we find an identity, because our number is swelling. The Office for National Statistics shows that women not living in a couple, who have never married, is rising in every age range under 70. In the decade-and-a-half between 2002 and 2018, the figure for those aged 40 to 70 rose by half a million. The percentage of never- married singletons in their 40s doubled. And it’s not just a western phenomenon. In South Korea, the rather pathetic figure of the “old miss” has become the single-and-affluent “gold miss”. In Japan, unmarried women over the age of 25 are known as “Christmas cake” (yes, it’s because they were past their sell-by date). Shosh Shlam’s 2019 documentary on China’s sheng nu explores these “Leftover Women” and the social anxiety they cause as traditional marriage models are upended. Singleness is no longer to be sneered at. Never marrying or taking a long-term partner is a valid choice. For a brief spurt, it even appeared that the single-positivity movement was the latest Hollywood cause, with A-listers such as Rashida Jones, Mindy Kaling and Chelsea Handler going proudly on the record about how they had come to embrace their single lives. Jones and Kaling have since found love, Handler announced on her chatshow last year that she’d changed her mind and really wanted a relationship. And when Emma Watson (also not single) announced to Vogue she was “self-partnered” I found myself suppressing a gag reflex. Give it another 10 years, I wanted to say. Then tell me how empowering it is going to parties/dinner/bed alone. But there I go, living down to the spinster stereotype of envy and bitterness. How is it possible that, despite being raised by a feminist mother and enjoying a life rich with friendships and meaningful employment, I still feel the stigma of that word? Or fear that, even in middle age, I haven’t achieved the status of a true adult woman?
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