|
|
 |
|
 |
|
| GOING IT ALONE | |
 October 25, 2000 
|
|
|
|
|
ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: It was a Saturday treat: My father would bring my sister and me to a lumberyard or a hardware store like this one to gather his nails and boards for the weekend project at hand. We were being let into his manly domain, a place where strong men strode the aisles to gather their supplies. Well, fast forward 40-odd years and whom do I see in these aisles now but women? WOMAN: I need it... I need it matte. SALESMAN: Matte finish. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: No doubt a number of them are married, but a lot are not. They're out here buying things to fix the Houses they own by themselves. That's what's under here, a vast, growing pool of women who are going it alone as divorcees, widows, or never-marrieds. Forty-three million American women are currently single, more than 40% of all adult females, up from about 30% in 1960. We exalt marriage, swooning over brides. We talk family values-- certainly all of our politicians all do. Who can forget the usually reserved Al Gore and his wife engaging in that lengthy convention-capping smooch? Even feminist icon Gloria Steinem has, in her 60s, finally taken the marital plunge. But the trend is clearly in the other direction, as more and more women of every economic group make good on Steinem's old message: Get your own life, stand on your own two feet. In 1963, 83% of women 25-55 were married. By 1997, that number had dropped to 65%. Part of this obviously is about divorce. A lot of women have now lived through their parents' divorces, or domestic discord or abuse, or for that matter their own, and are now understandably marriage-skittery. Part of it is about the fact that spinstership is no longer the stigma it once was. And a huge part, of course, is about economics. In fact, the very nature of economic survival is fundamentally different than at any other point in history. Individuals, women included, can now make it on their own. Is this good, inculcating a healthy individualism, or are we just going to end up more isolated from each other than ever? These are the profound questions underlying the numbers. Certainly a lot of women-- those that I know and those on television-- are drawing great sustenance from their female friendships. Think of the young women on "Friends" or "Sex and the City." ACTRESS: Samantha was judging the crowd at a new hotspot on the lower west side. It was a typical downtown male mix: 10% wall street, 10% real estate, 10% she'd already slept with. ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: They flirt and cavort with men, but their true intimate connections are with other women. In the younger women, there is often an undercurrent of longing still for the bridal gown and the groom, a hope that it will still happen; while in the older women, there is an often palpable bitterness at men left from earlier marriages or romances that went bad. And maybe for both women and men there is some sense of consumer culture entitlement, a sense that they should have the perfect mate or none at all; and some emotional laziness, a reluctance to sign on, dig in, and do the hard work of sustaining a real commitment, a long marriage, of getting to know someone inside out, and letting them know you. For women, this can often mean having children alone, through adoption agencies or sperm banks. In fact, while the birthrate has fallen among teenagers, it has gone up 15% among unmarried thirty-somethings since 1990. Some deride this trend as high selfishness, but clearly it is part of the new self-determining world in which we now live. And if much of this trend toward singlehood is positive, I, for one, love all those women with all those nails and switch plates. Some of it is lonesome feeling-- risky, brave, but a little lonesome. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming. |
 |
        |
|
| Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station. | ||
| ||
| PBS Online Privacy Policy Copyright ©1996- MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved. | ||
| ||
