JESSE POWELL writes:

The November 2011 Atlantic cover story is an article titled “All the Single Ladies” by Kate Bolick, a 39-year-old woman who is childless and never married. It’s a sad, highly personal story about her life and, despite the evident unhappiness of Bolick, an endorsement of the single woman.  Traditional marriage is no longer a workable ideal, Bolick writes. She suggests we look to the matriarchal networks of black single mothers and primitive tribes for guidance. 

Bolick begins: 

 In 2001, when I was 28, I broke up with my boyfriend. Allan and I had been together for three years, and there was no good reason to end things. He was (and remains) an exceptional person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind. My friends, many of whom were married or in marriage-track relationships, were bewildered. I was bewildered. To account for my behavior, all I had were two intangible yet undeniable convictions: something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down.

From there, Bolick muses on cultural deviations from the Western norm of marriage. The Mosuo, an “uncle society” in southwest China where the man’s family responsibilities are directed towards his sisters’ children as opposed to the more common “father society” where the man focuses on his own biological children, have much to teach us.  Among the Mosuo men and women do not form long-term committed sexual relationships, an alluring possibility in Bolick’s eyes.  

Bolick talks about a trip she made to Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania to visit with Denean, a 34-year-old black nurse with four children, no two of whom sharing the same biological father.  Denean laments, after learning from Facebook that her daughter Ronicka was pregnant at age 15; “I had done everything I could to make sure she didn’t end up like me, and now this.”  Bolick, describing her time spent with Denean, says, “It was a clear, warm day, and we were clustered on the front porch—Denean, Ronicka, and I, along with Denean’s niece, Keira, 18, and Denean’s friend Chantal, 28, a single mother whose daughter goes to day care with Denean’s youngest. The affection between these four high-spirited women was light and infectious, and they spoke knowingly about the stigmas they’re up against. ‘That’s right,’ Denean laughed, ‘we’re your standard bunch of single black moms!’” 

After mentioning how the single black mothers in Wilkinsburg “derived so much happiness from each other’s company” and adding in a disclaimer about how she is not trying to discourage marriage, Bolicklater says “But we would do well to study, and to endorse, alternative family arrangements that might provide strength and stability to children as they grow up. I am curious to know what could happen if these de facto female support systems of the sort I saw in Wilkinsburg were recognized as an adaptive response, even an evolutionary stage, that women could be proud to build and maintain.” 

In Wilkinsburg 82% of black children are either the biological child or step-child or adopted child of the householder and of these only 19% live with married parents.

Bolick even makes the bold claim that married couples may be bad for communities. “Unlike singles, married couples spend less time keeping in touch withand visiting their friends and extended family, and are less likely to provide them with emotional and practical support.”  Such couples are condemned for their “greedy marriages.”

In the distant past, before the dawn of civilization, “the hunters and gatherers evolved in egalitarian groups, with men and women sharing the labor equally. Both left the camp in the morning; both returned at day’s end with their bounty. Children were raised collaboratively. As a result, women and men were sexually and socially more or less equals; divorce (or its institution-of-marriage-preceding equivalent) was common.”  On this basis the claim is made that the modern feminism of the past couple of decades is us “moving forward into deep history” as Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist, puts it. 

In other words, we should look to the black single mother, the Mosuo in China, and the supposedly feminist lifestyles of our ancient hunter-gatherer forebears raher than our mothers or grandmothers who lived in the 1950s.

Why did Bolick’s life turn out the way it has?  Her mother was an ardent feminist.  As Bolickrelates, “I was her first and only recruit, marching off to third grade in tiny green or blue T-shirts declaring: A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle, or: A Woman’s Place Is in the House—and the Senate”.  According to the vision of her mother “my future was to be one of limitless possibilities, where getting married was something I’d do when I was ready, to a man who was in every way my equal, and she didn’t want me to get tied down just yet.” 

When Bolick was 36 she had a dream involving her mother: 

“’Mom,’ I said. ‘Things aren’t working out. I’m breaking up with him tomorrow.’

 ‘Oh, honey,’ she said. ‘I am so sorry. We were rooting for this one, weren’t we? When something doesn’t work, though, what can you do?’

 This, I found irritating. ‘Mom. I am getting old.’

 ‘Pwhah!’ she scoffed. ‘You’re fine. You’ve got six more years.’”

 The “six more years” in the dream refers to Bolick’s biological clock, her capacity to have children. So Bolickfacing the dreaded truth that she might never have children after all and might not even get married decides that traditional marriage is dead – for everyone.

 Is our future the dystopian paradise Kate Bolick suggests or will sanity and patriarchy become fashionable again?

                                                   — Comments —

Laura writes:

Bolick writes:

For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives’ steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.[emphasis added.]

Not until the 18th century did labor begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. Coontz notes that as recently as the late 17th century, women’s contributions to the family economy were openly recognized, and advice books urged husbands and wives to share domestic tasks. But as labor became separated, so did our spheres of experience—the marketplace versus the home—one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the post-war gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.

This is feminist mythology.

It is a stunning lie, the intention of which is to convince people that the traditional family is such an historical anomaly that it is a lost cause. In fact, never in history before the feminist revolution did women in large numbers voluntarily leave the physical company of their children to earn money. Two-income families never existed in the sense we now know. Domestics and factory workers sometimes left their children out of dire necessity but that was never considered ideal. That was considered a misfortune. Women earned extra money as an aside to their main role, which was rearing children and tending the home. They helped take care of the farm and doing so was fully compatible with their domestic role.

Bolick writes:

Foremost among the reasons for all these changes in family structure are the gains of the women’s movement. Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.

She writes:

As Hanna Rosin laid out in these pages last year (“The End of Men,” July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.

[The following paragraph was edited slightly since it was first posted.]

Yes, and women overwhelmingly outnumber men in lower-status, part-time jobs and they always will. These so-called gains in the status of women have meant power for the few and drudgery for the many, including the many women who can no longer count on a man to support them because married men must compete with women for jobs and because feminists have created an unstable world of easy divorce. Even if 90 percent of college graduates were women, it wouldn’t change the fact that men are more driven, more focused, more competitive, and more numerous at the higher levels of intelligence, all of which our economy needs in order to prosper. Women cannot give the same focused attention throughout the course of their careers. Men naturally differentiate themselves from women and are less inclined toward fields where women predominate.

Has Bolick noticed how the more women dominate higher education, the more dumbed down it has become? That’s not to say that women are dumb, or that the one causes the other, but that having a college degree is not the sole measure of success. Does Bolick want a world of part-time physicians? Has she notice how very few women are partners in law firms despite the immense sacrifices they must make to earn law degrees? Has Bolick noticed the huge number of women who have gone into the field of professional psychology to provide therapy and medication to the many children neglected at home?

Like so many other feminist women writing on the ravages of feminism, Bolick shows stunning denial and self-absorption. She is willing to see all of society revert to chaos in order to make sense of the feminist creed. Her anthropological arguments are just plain stupid. There is no society in history in which men were not in positions of high status and leadership and in which childrearing was egalitarian. None of that has changed.

She also shows an utter incapacity to look beyond herself. How did her actions affect other people? Who were the men she rejected earlier in her life and what pain did it cause them? What jobs and opportunities has she taken from married men? What of her failure to rear children for the good of society?

Jeff W. writes:

It is worth noting that this whole discussion completely ignores Christian teaching and tradition. Before Europe was Christianized, pagans did get married, but they also, and without guilt, had sexual relations with slaves. Islam has polygamy. Africans and Chinese have other traditions that are discussed. But American traditions of monogamy did not come out of nowhere; they are Christian in origin.

Traditional Christian America had the ideal of a marriage consisting of one man and one woman. Post-Christian America has what? Chaos, confusion, loneliness, betrayal and disappointment as I see it, as well as dysfunctional environments for child-rearing.

Yani writes:

It’s bad enough reading Bolick’s rewriting of her own personal history of romantic disappointment. What’s worse is that she paints such a glowing picture of single parenthood! ‘We’re all just sitting on the porch, laughing and raising our babies together…” I’m not a single parent, but several of the women in my family are or have been. It is sheer hard work and there is no time off for sickness, depression, boredom, or generally not feeling like it. Women in this position are generally poorer, live in homes that they don’t own, and face a daily struggle against resentment and deprivation. Let’s not kid ourselves – it is incredibly hard work raising a child on your own. This is why fathers are so important. Another grownup for support, time out, and someone who is as interested in the daily decision-making required for child-rearing. This is not to say that fathers are perfect, nor are mothers. Maybe Bolick needs to spend more time with single parents, not sitting in the sun, but washing, cooking, making beds etc etc. Then I might be more prepared to entertain her uninformed and wildly utopian opinions. 

Keep up the good work exposing these fraudsters and interlopers, Laura!

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