Single Women Are Illuminazi Vanguard

During the lead-up to the 2014 midterms, Fox News pundit Jesse Watters opined that single women “depend on government because they’re not depending on their husbands. They need things like contraception, health care, and they love to talk about equal pay.” Conservative pundit Phyllis Schlafly went so far as to claim in 2012 that President Obama was working to keep women unmarried by giving away so many social services to them. “President Obama is simply trying to promote more dependency on government handouts because he knows that is his constituency, ” Schlafly said.

The notion that what the powerful, growing population of unmarried American women needs from the government is a husband (or a gynecologist, as was the case with one horrifying 2013 Koch-funded anti-Obamacare ad that featured a grotesque Uncle Sam popping up leeringly from a pelvic exam) is of course problematic. It reduces all relationships women have to marital, sexual, hetero ones and suggests that they are, by nature, dependent beings, in search of someone–if not a ­husband then an elected official or a set of public policies — to support or care for them.

Whether or not single women are looking for government to create a “hubby state” for them, what is certainly true is that their (white) male counterparts have long enjoyed the fruits of a related “wifey state,” in which the government has supported (white) male independence in a variety of ways. It’s hard for us to recognize this, since it has been the norm for so long — and here, it’s useful to recall Elizabeth Warren’s stirring “You didn’t build that” speech, in which she pointed out that “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody.”

The expansion of the population of unmarried women across classes signals a social and political rupture as profound as the invention of birth control, as the sexual revolution, as the abolition of slavery, as women’s suffrage, and as the women’s-rights, civil-rights, gay-rights, and labor movements that made this reordering of society possible. By their very growing presence, single women are asking for a new deal from their government. The Democratic platform, suddenly more liberal than it has been in a generation, is more liberal largely in response to this new segment of the American population.

Raising the minimum wage? Two-thirds of minimum-wage workers are women. Forty percent of working single mothers would benefit directly from an increase in the minimum wage, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Paid family leave, a third-rail issue for decades, now back in conversation? Well, it would benefit all families, but especially struggling single mothers; so would the government-­subsidized early-education programs touted by both Clinton and Sanders. Paid-sick-day legislation is fundamental to a world in which women are primary earners and no one is home to care for sick children or elderly family members. Promises of free college and lowered student debt likely appeal to the women who now outnumber men on ­college campuses…

In the context of the presidential primary, it’s Sanders who has become emblematic of the leftward inclinations of a changing party and especially its younger members. But the movement that has undergirded much of what we now perceive on the presidential stage as a leftward lurch has been building for more than a decade.

 ”If you were to take a step back and look at what’s going on in American social and labor policy over the past decade where we’ve actually moved forward and made on-the-ground wins, it’s with stuff that addresses changing marriage patterns and attendant work-life conflicts,” says Heather Boushey, chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and author of Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict. But what’s stunning, she adds, is how little we talk about unmarried women as the driving force behind these changes.

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Adapted from All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, by Rebecca Traister, to be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2016 by Rebecca Traister.

*This article appears in the February 22, 2016 issue of New York Magazine..