The Single American Woman via NY Magazine
Pretty long article, but very interesting.
Please use this link I’m giving you if you’d like to read the entire page (it’s a little bit farther below).
I am a right winger, have been a Republican my whole life (though the GOP has been annoying me more and more the last few years, but no, I am not fine with the Democrats), and I am a single woman who was raised in a Christian home.
My parents were Christians who had very traditional values.
The one thing I dread when reading articles like this one I am linking to in this post is imagining how my fellow right wingers will react to what it discusses.
Typically, rather than help single women where they are (which is what they should be doing), they will more likely, instead, complain and yell about singleness, about what a shame it is people aren’t marrying as much or not as young as they did decades ago, and yell at single women to run right out and get married immediately.
(One thing these types of idiots overlook is that marrying is not that easy. I’ve always wanted to be married, but I never met the right guy. I am not going to marry just any guy with a pulse just for the sake of being married.)
Anyway, following that initial reaction of my fellow right wingers, they will then, at that point – by “they,” I refer more specifically to the conservative marriage concern trolls among the secular right wingers and the conservative Christians – will write fear-mongering articles (like (Link): this one) to scare single women into marrying the first man they meet who has a pulse.
The fear mongering and pressure by conservatives to scare or cajole women to marry has gotten so bad with right wing marriage concern trolls, that some of them are even directing Christian women to marry (Link): known pornography addicts.
The majority of my fellow conservatives don’t give a rat’s ass about doing anything to assist single women so long as those women are single.
Many conservatives would prefer to sit back in their rocking chair on the front porch, sipping on lemonade, smoking on their pipes, complaining about how times have changed for the worst, and how the nation was so much better back in 1952. They would rather pine away for the so-called “good old days” than to help people in practical ways in 2016 where ever they find themselves in life.
Though I am right wing, I think this author makes a few good arguments against conservative views about singleness and marriage and the roles of women.
(Link): The Single American Woman via NY Magazine
Excerpts:
- The most powerful voter this year, who in her rapidly increasing numbers has become an entirely new category of citizen, is THE SingleAmerican Woman
- By REBECCA TRAISTER
- ….In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent. In other words, for the first time in American history, single women (including those who were never married, widowed, divorced, or separated) outnumbered married women.
- Perhaps even more strikingly, the number of adults younger than 34 who had never married was up to 46 percent, rising 12 percentage points in less than a decade. For women under 30, the likelihood of being married has become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans ages 18–29 are wed, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1960.
- It is a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications. Across classes, and races, we are seeing a wholesale revision of what female life might entail.
- We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration, and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.
- This reorganization of our citizenry, unlike the social movements that preceded it and made it possible — from abolition and suffrage and labor fights of the 19th and early-20th centuries to the civil-rights, women’s, and gay-rights movements of the mid-20th century — is not a self-consciously politicized event. Today’s women are, for the most part, not abstaining from or delaying marriage to prove a point about equality.
- They are doing it because they have internalized assumptions that just a half-century ago would have seemed radical: that it’s okay for them not to be married; that they are whole people able to live full professional, economic, social, sexual, and parental lives on their own if they don’t happen to meet a person to whom they want to legally bind themselves.
- The most radical of feminist ideas—the disestablishment of marriage — has been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent but ever-more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life.
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