Single Lives: Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film

By Jorie Lagerwey, Andreá N. Williams, Jennifer S. Clark and 8 more

Single Lives is a collection of singleness studies essays from the interdisciplinary humanities that explores the last two hundred years of literature and popular media by, about, and for single women in the US and the UK. Independent women have always been a center around which social anxieties and excitement coalesced. Moving between the family home and domestic independence, between household and public labor, and between celibacy and a range of sexual relations, the single woman remains a literary and cultural focus, as she has been from the 19th to the 21st centuries. This collection offers readers the opportunity to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural connections between the "singly blessed" women and "bachelor girls" of the 19th and early 20th century and "all the single ladies" of the 21st century. Essays read singleness across genre and field, offering new approaches to studying modern and contemporary single women in literature, film, and history. Authors engage scholarship from wide ranging fields of social history, women's studies, queer theory, and Black feminism. The collection reads familiar texts against the grain, rethinking archival resources, revisiting familiar figures, and exploring new sources: cookbooks, ephemera, personal documents, recovered film histories, and forms of domestic space and labor.This is a book for scholars of gender and sexuality, social history, feminist film and media scholars, and literary historians, and reflects the urgent contemporary interest in single women as a political, economic, and cultural force. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: May 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978828537

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Cover: Single Lives, Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film by Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey

Single Lives

Single Lives

Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film

EDITED BY

KATHERINE FAMA

JORIE LAGERWEY

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, CAMDEN, AND NEWARK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

LCCN 2021031487

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2022 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright © 2022 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

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References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Hannah

Contents

Introduction: Situating Single Lives

Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey

PART I

Singles Studies: Archives and Methods

1 Searching for Singles: Archival Approaches for Singleness Studies and Black Women’s Collections

Andreá N. Williams

2 Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: Gender, Melodrama, and the Processes of Adaptation in The Best of Everything

Jennifer S. Clark

3 Recovering Single Biography: Jane Armstrong Tucker, Illness, and the Single Life

Elizabeth DeWolfe

PART II

Familiar Figures: Representing and Reforming the Single Woman

4 Becoming Single: Gidget Betwixt and Between

Pamela Robertson Wojcik

5 F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony: The Unmarried Flapper in Literature and on Screen

Martina Mastandrea

6 Neither Betwixt nor Between: Divorced Mothers in the United States, 1920–1965

Kristin Celello

7 Serves One: Exploring Representations of Female Singleness in American Cookbooks

Ursula Kania

PART III

Singles at Home: Domestic Labors

8 Feeling Like a Queen: Later-Life Single Women at Home in Modern American Short Fiction

Katherine Fama

9 Spinsters’ Rest? The Discomforts of Home in British Women’s Short Stories of the 1920s to the 1940s

Emma Liggins

10 All the Single Nannies: Reforming Elite Domesticity and the Cultural Imaginary

Ann Mattis

Afterword

Benjamin Kahan

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

Single Lives

Introduction

SITUATING SINGLE LIVES

Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey

In December 2019, actor and United Nations women goodwill ambassador, Emma Watson, claimed a new identity for herself in British Vogue. In response to the ubiquitous celebrity profile question about her dating life, Watson proclaimed herself not single but self-partnered.¹ Young, White, conventionally beautiful, wealthy, famous, and Ivy League–educated, Watson has faced criticism for her version of celebrity feminism, particularly for bodily commodification and for centering men’s concerns about feminism in announcing the UN’s supposedly inclusive feminist campaign HeForShe (a campaign that she, of course, was not responsible for designing).² In the context of her celebrity, this declaration of being self-partnered represented a coming-of-age from child star to self-actualized adult feminist and simultaneously expressed the narcissism of coining a new, allegedly more empowering term to describe the now familiar state of youthful eligibility without monogamous or marital goals. Yet if we follow singles studies or singleness studies and contemporary popular culture scholar Anthea Taylor’s exhortation to read representations of the single woman diagnostically, to help illuminate broader ideological tendencies and tensions around women and feminism, we see, in the popular press’s eye rolling over Watson’s new label, a contemporary iteration of historical anxieties about single women.³ Watson’s hypervisibility reveals the dominance of White, heterosexual, culturally powerful models of singleness that have captured the public eye in the twenty-first century. Even so, the backlash to Watson’s self-identification reveals a rejection of single women’s political power, public position, economic clout, and disruption of the still-overwhelmingly dominant norm of nuclear families within patriarchal, heterosexist capitalism. This collection is, in part, a reaction to the twenty-first-century public fascination with single women.⁴ The essays collected here address that fascination by analyzing a broader range of texts than have previously been collected by singleness studies. They examine the ways films, cookbooks, archives, popular literature, and other British and American texts express norms, ideals, and challenges for single women and their relationship to dominant ideals of marriage and the family. This volume looks backward to constellate existing scholarship, constituent fields, and unrecognized single voices; and forward to consider new methods for interdisciplinary singles studies.⁵

Confident statements of singlehood like Watson’s, and the backlash they engender, illustrate the vast contemporary interest in and anxiety about singleness. Furthermore, they draw critical attention to the prominence of the premarital mode of single representation in contemporary culture. To offer just one example, reality television, one of the medium’s most prolific genres, remains intent on (mostly) heterosexual coupling: The Bachelor (ABC, 2002–present), Love Island (ITV2, 2015–present; franchised in at least a dozen nations), 90 Day Fiancé (TLC, 2014–present), and brief 2020 pandemic-lockdown hit Love Is Blind (Netflix, 2020) represent a conservative, insistently premarital version of singleness. Late 1990s and early twenty-first-century TV and movies offered many hugely popular, markedly eligible single-women protagonists, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001–2003), Ally McBeal (Fox, 1997–2002), Bridget Jones in three films (2001, 2004, 2016) based on the best-selling novels, Girlfriends (UPN, 2000–2006; the CW, 2006–2008)—the only non-White single women to gain hit status on American TV in this period—and those icons of consumerist postfeminism, the Sex and the City ladies (HBO, 1998–2004). In contrast, post-2008 recession-era British and American prestige television struck a darker tone. From the advent of Girls on HBO in 2012, a slew of despondent White women aged from their twenties through their forties navigate not romance but broken, disillusioning relationships and life on their own.⁶

Outside film and television, contemporary interest in single women is evident in the cluster of nonfiction writing engaging single history, culture, and identity politics. That work participates in re-emerging feminisms that reveal unequal access to housing, income inequality, and the promise of single political power. This writing also documents broad cultural anxieties about single women’s sexuality, physical and economic vulnerability, reproductive agency, threats to the nuclear family, and potential political power. Popular singleness texts include serial press coverage and long-form articles in the Atlantic and the New Yorker, as well as Rebecca Traister’s 2016 best-selling history of uncoupled American women as an influential voting bloc, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, and Beyoncé’s 2008 smash-hit song that lent the book its name. There is also a large collection of White women’s memoirs, interviews, and literary nonfiction about single life, including Kate Bolick’s Spinster (2015) and Briallen Hopper’s Hard to Love (2019), and nonfiction focused on the earlier modern era: Betsy Israel’s Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century (2002), Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived without Men after the First World War (2007), and Joanna Scutts’s The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It (2017). Such enormous public attention feels familiar to scholars of modernity, who work with a set of texts captivated by the late nineteenth-century rise of the never-married woman. The contemporary reappearance of an anxious public fascination with a growing generation of single women is the jumping-off point for this collection of essays exploring the voices and representations of single lives in the intervening years. This volume—which gathers cultural representations from the modern and contemporary eras—is jointly edited by a scholar of contemporary celebrity, television, and gender, and a literary scholar of modern U.S. fiction and single women. The similarities and through lines between the examples just mentioned—as well as our separate research areas, our leisure consumption, and our own lived experiences—inspired and shaped this collection. The essays here make visible the pathways traveled by single women across disciplines, genres, and eras as they gather singleness scholarship across literature and film, and focus on the modern and contemporary cultural representations and voices of single women.

BRITISH AND AMERICAN SINGLENESS STUDIES

The emerging academic field of singleness or singles studies borrows heavily from women’s and gender studies, social history, queer theory, and Black feminism.⁷ Significant scholarly coverage of single topics can be found across humanities and social science disciplines, though many studies lack explicit identification with singleness as a subfield. The foundations for singleness studies as a stand-alone field intent on correcting negative images of unmarried women without male partners⁸ and as an interdisciplinary project were laid in the first decade of the twenty-first century by Rudolph Bell and Virginia Yans’s Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis Project, Gendered Passages in Historical Perspective: Single Women (2003–2005). That project generated both an online Singleness Studies Bibliography and Women on Their Own: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Being Single, an essay collection that collated comparative historical and sociological approaches to recovering, rehabilitating, and analyzing unmarried women. Other field-germinating studies came around the same time in social psychology work that established single women as a separable demographic category with its own identity politics. Bella DePaulo’s Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored and Still Live Happily Ever After (2006) identified singlism, or the construction of legal, health, and dominant social structures around heterosexual marriage, to the exclusion and often active detriment of single people, whom, she illustrates, are not necessarily fleeting, transitory, or defined by their relationship to family (see also DePaulo 2017). Singleness studies work in sociology includes that of Naomi Braun Rosenthal (2001), Anne Byrne (2009), Anne Byrne and Deborah Carr (2005), and Eric Klinenberg (2012); in social psychology, Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox (2005) and Kinneret Lahad (2017); and in law, Rachel F. Moran (2004). In the last two decades, literary scholars have focused on representations of iconic single figures in fiction, including work by Michael Cobb (2012), Laura Doan (1990), Martha Patterson (2005), and Katherine Snyder (1999). Recent work on British fiction has begun to explore the interrelations between such single figures.⁹ Historical scholarship contributes significantly to the idea of singleness as an object of study with works by Amy Froide (1999 [coedited with Judith M. Bennett], 2005), Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller (1984), Jane Dabel (2006), Sarah Deutsch (2000), Katherine Holden (2007), Sheila Jeffreys (1985), Joanne Meyerowitz (1988), Martha Vicinus (2004), and Karin Wulf (2010) adding immeasurably to the portrait of women outside of marriage. In media studies, large bodies of scholarship on postfeminism and girlhood studies take unmarried women as their object of study,¹⁰ though Anthea Taylor is perhaps the first to put the singleness of the women in the texts she studies at the forefront of her interrogations and in the title of her book, Single Women in Popular Culture: The Limits of Postfeminism (2012). She thus explicitly places her work within the burgeoning field of singleness studies, alongside its place in feminist media studies. In addition to the selected publications just cited is earlier work from contributors here, Fama (2016, 2017), Lagerwey (with Taylor Nygaard 2020), Emma Liggins (2007, 2014), Andreá N. Williams (two works from 2014), and Pamela Wojcik (2010), all of whom focus on representations of single women, whether or not they explicitly position themselves within singleness studies; Benjamin Kahan’s Celibacies: American Modernism and Single Life (2013) focuses on celibacy as a radically political sexual identity.

Ten years on from Bell and Yans’s, DePaulo’s, and other foundational works establishing the field, Single Lives shifts focus, from joining the work of historians and sociologists, to building on comparative approaches to cultural representations and expressions of the single woman. This collection emphasizes textuality and textual analysis in multiple media and genres, and across more than a century of British and U.S. history. Single Lives incorporates film and literary analyses into conversation, recovering the structures, limits, and narratives through which single women are imagined and understood in cultural products. Together, these essays operate, as Taylor insists, diagnostically, to trace anxieties around race, class, age, sexuality, domesticity, and labor written on the bodies of single women creators, consumers, and fictional characters. Essays also find single women writing back in complaint, resistance, and celebration. As a counter to the overwhelming dominance of the heterosexual, reproductive, patriarchal, nuclear family, single women—whether never married, separated, queer, divorced, or widowed—find ways to exist outside that powerful framework of control. The challenges to, escapes from, and reconsiderations of that durable mechanism of control are ultimately the subject of this collection.

Too often, investigations of single representation focus on the never married as premarried. Feminist film and media studies, for example, include bodies of work on romance and makeover narratives that constitute single visibility within the field but do not necessarily focus on the singleness of women in those texts as an identity category, choice, or primary site of analysis. Definitions, experiences, and realities of singleness are much broader than young women waiting on marriage. They include widowed, separated, and divorced women as well as people of all genders escaped, exempted, or exiled from the often-presumed opposite to singleness: heterosexual marriage. Single Lives argues for the structural parallel and phenomenological correspondences between such diverse single experiences, from the midcentury divorcée in Kristin Celello’s essay to the fin de siècle widows in Katherine Fama’s, or the never-married nineteenth-century correspondent in Elizabeth DeWolfe’s. In other words, many structural inequalities faced by never-married women are shared by other singles. Where single women from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been understood as spinsters, New Women, or widows, for example, this collection considers parallels and relations between formerly distinct identity categories.

The essays reveal numerous continuities, from single labor performed for the family to battles for independence and pervasive singlism. Ann Mattis and Pamela Wojcik, for example, explore challenges to the inevitability of the heteronuclear family structure by analyzing childcare workers living in someone else’s home, and teenagers navigating the choice between adult autonomy and premarital heterosexuality, respectively. In both essays, it is the key character’s singleness that makes visible her relation and challenge to dominant structures of gender, class, and family—and, indeed, what makes the power of those structures themselves visible. This collection thus reclaims singleness as a flexible and varied state re-emerging throughout an individual’s life span, including the never-married and the widowed, separated, and divorced. Celello, for example, demands new visibility for the singleness of divorced women in America between 1920 and 1960, interrogating how they, like the other single figures examined throughout this book, challenge or threaten dominant constructions of gender and family. Throughout Single Lives, essays recover structural affinities where diverse women did not claim identity with one another, or even identify as explicitly single, yet nonetheless share cultural experiences because of that singleness. By bringing these interdisciplinary essays together, Single Lives presents singleness as a newly visible, expansive identity category. This collection hails even scholars already working with diverse feminist methods, providing new ways to study women creators and characters who just happen to be single. In so doing, it re-exposes the persistence and dominance of the class, age, racial, gender, and familial structures against which independent women form such a stark and often disruptive contrast.

GEOGRAPHIC AND TEMPORAL BOUNDARIES

This book operates within the geographic boundaries of a shared British-American cultural economy and the temporal borders from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, linking one conspicuous demographic surge and cultural shift to another. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw dramatic changes in women’s education, working lives, and prescribed gender roles. As their numbers rose in the late 1800s, British and American single women captured public interest and cultural production and came to be seen as both superfluous, anomalous, incomplete, odd and ‘new,’ modern.¹¹ The then-largest-ever generation of never-married women in the United States was born between 1860 and 1880. War casualties, women’s education, immigration, internal migration, racialized violence, westward expansion, industrialization, urbanization, and changes in women’s labor opportunities all contributed to delayed or indefinitely deferred marriage in the modern era. This generation of women came of age in the fin de siècle, which witnessed a transition from the singly blessed family women of the nineteenth century to the urban working women of the twentieth. British culture, which fretted over single women from the mid-nineteenth century onward, witnessed a pronounced spike in anxiety about surplus women and low national birth rates after the First World War.¹² About a hundred years later, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries experienced a parallel demographic spike in single women,¹³ and a hypervisibility or luminosity of young single women in what Taylor refers to as Western popular culture beginning in the mid-1990s.¹⁴ Given the demographic peaks in British and American single women nearly a hundred years earlier, this single visibility represents a reiteration of the anxious, excited cultural focus of the fin de siècle and First World War eras. Essays in this collection put these demographic peaks in conversation, reclaiming the relationships among diverse single women and tracing the swells and troughs of feminist visibility in the 100 years in between. If the temporal boundaries of this collection stretch from one demographic peak to the next, the geographic borders are bounded by the robust, durable circuits of cultural exchange between the United Kingdom and the United States. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the allies’ so-called special relationship is evident in politics, economics, and shared culture industries. Broadcast historian Michele Hilmes argues that "British and American broadcasting together constitute a unified system, a powerful symbiotic machine of cultural influence that has spread long tentacles around the globe and affected the ways that culture is practiced and understood far outside the boundaries of these two nations alone: what I call the transnational cultural economy of British and American broadcasting.¹⁵ Hilmes argues for a shared cultural economy born of broadcasting, with a clear lineage in contemporary film and TV production and distribution, including the films analyzed in this collection. But, as she implies, it is a much broader cultural economy, by no means limited to moving-image media. This cultural circulation is also reflected in the established scholarship of transatlantic studies. Julia Straub describes recent transatlantic scholarship as locating the Atlantic world rather than the nation as the site of cultural production, justifying scholarly attention to the Anglo-American literary market and its production, distribution, reception, and criticism.¹⁶ Writing of the nineteenth century, Brigitte Bailey notes an extensive web of professional, affective, political, religious, and literary relations" across the Atlantic.¹⁷ Certainly, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British and American writing and writers circulated in a system of transatlantic literary and cultural exchange, as single women experienced new forms of personal mobility. This book explores the specific regional, temporal, racial, and class contours of single bodies and texts, but neither British nor American cultural production can be understood in isolation. Liggins’s essay is the only one here that focuses on British literature, but it is in direct conversation with Fama’s U.S. examples, highlighting the shared cultural economy between the two nations. The films analyzed by Mattis, Jennifer S. Clark, and Wojcik are Hollywood productions intent on a transatlantic, and indeed global, audience, and Martina Mastandrea reconstructs American film productions with the aid of promotional materials and production ephemera from imported European versions of the films in question. Like the affinities in characterization and lived experience between single women in the temporally disparate late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, the essays collected here find similar shared cultural knowledge and experience in circulation across the Atlantic.

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR SINGLENESS STUDIES

Single Lives brings together humanities disciplines and methods, reconsiderations of iconic and emerging single figures, and an exploration of domestic space and labor in the British-American cultural circuit between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. The collection celebrates the productive potential of placing media studies in conversation with historical and literary scholarship to contextualize and trace the lineages of specific single figures across modes of popular culture, and to reveal the structural conditions that connect single lives in a given moment. Tying analyses of high and low culture, from mass commercial products like cookbooks, journalism, fictions, and cinema, to the private documents uncovered in archives, reveals the broad cultural impact of the many unrecognized forms and experiences of single womanhood.

As an interdisciplinary collection, Single Lives reads across genre and field, and offers new approaches to its constituent disciplines. The essays by Celello, Mastandrea, Clark, and Mattis actively combine the two central disciplinary lineages collected here, by discussing short stories or novels in relation to film and television, offering specific examples of how studies of media (literary and the audiovisual), often kept academically separate, build on one another through a shared focus on careful textual analysis of single representation. DeWolfe and Williams leverage archival discoveries in their reconsiderations of published texts. The parallel analyses and methodological insights visible within those essays reverberate across the literary and film analyses throughout the book.

Essays in this volume reflect on the origins of singleness studies by engaging tools and scholarship from wide-ranging fields of social history, women’s studies, queer theory, and Black feminism. Essays likewise identify emerging intersections with age studies, the histories of emotion and labor, and the medical and architectural humanities. A number of essays engage with age studies: Williams, DeWolfe, and Fama discuss old age, illness, and ability; Mastandrea and Wojcik discuss young women in transition from childhood to singleness as they experience complex possibilities beyond heterosexual union. The collection also engages the specificity of media, genre, and style in single representation. Williams and DeWolfe rethink the form and function of single biography, highlighting respectability, performance, health, and other issues of single self-fashioning. Clark, Mastandrea, and Celello find broadened audiences and expanding single possibilities in adaptation. Wojcik explores the filmic middle that denaturalizes heterosexual coupling, while Fama reads fin de siècle short fictions as key for the emergence of the modern single identity and community. Essays highlight the importance of both new modes of single analysis—reading familiar texts against the grain, rethinking archival resources, tracing and reading across familiar figures—and new sources: cookbooks, ephemera, personal documents, recovered production histories, and forms of domestic space and labor.

The collection works within and beyond established scholarly focus on familiar historical figures of singleness—spinsters, women adrift, and the New Woman. Mastandrea challenges critical and cultural portraits of the shallow, sexualized flapper; in revisiting literary and filmic representations, she recovers F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stubbornly single flappers. Mattis revisits the figure of the beloved nanny, exploring the racial, cultural, and class conventions that undergird representations of her single domestic heroism. Essays also expand beyond re-examinations of familiar figures by analyzing single home cooks, normatively single girls, and women returning to singleness as widows and divorcées. Essays by DeWolfe, Clark, and Williams recover the voices and perspectives of individual women rather than representing categories of womanhood. Finally, in the third part, focused on domestic occupancy and labor, Fama, Liggins, and Mattis propose new methods for understanding the structural relations between diverse single women. Fama reclaims a continuity between single generations, Liggins argues for the interrelation of odd women, and Mattis uses a comparative lens to interrogate single privilege. This final section rethinks the ways in which otherwise useful historical categories have obscured explicit relations and structural parallels between diverse single lives. Such expansions within the field acknowledge the productive, established use of the single figure while working to address its exclusions, stereotypes, and oversimplifications.

Contributors explore the interdependence and intermingling of single women’s lives, answering Williams’s insistence that we interrogate the critically celebrated state of single independence. DeWolfe traces tensions between personal independence and intergenerational obligation, in recounting the conflict between emerging professional and personal options for young singles and the older widow’s expectation of familial care. Celello examines the evolving representation and reception of the midcentury single mother, bound to and beyond the family unit, her singleness and maternity often in tension. Both essays trouble any easy celebration of independent singleness, drawing attention to the persistence of competing claims for the bonds of intimacy and single autonomy.

Many scholars have approached singleness as an experience of marginal, lonely contingency, intersecting with racism, poverty, ageism, homophobia, and sexism, and represented through what Heather Love has described as a spinster aesthetic.¹⁸ The costs of age, queerness, motherhood, and life beyond the family are etched painfully across cultural texts. But works in this collection also insist on reading texts for single pleasures: networks and relations, emotional transgressions, alternative domesticities. Contributors recover portraits of single strategies: silence and ambiguity, community building, privacy, respectability, and eccentricity. Their essays also acknowledge the ways in which single women simultaneously—and often uncritically—accept privileged economic, cultural, and embodied positions of power.

SINGLENESS STUDIES TO COME

This collection pushes singleness studies toward textual analysis, expanding and extending scholarship in cultural analysis and interdisciplinary collections in history and social science. It also creates an active dialogue between existing and new work in film, biography, and literature and engages a broad range of theoretical tools from its constituent disciplines. Read together, these media forms make a compelling argument for the centrality of diverse single women to historical trajectories of gender, family, and sexuality. Nonetheless, as both Kahan’s previous work and his afterword note, singleness studies has thus far primarily presumed heterosexuality (despite the engagement of queer theorists with singleness).¹⁹ This collection includes Fama’s consideration of late-life queer domesticities, Liggins’s approach to British single women who threaten the heterosexual economy through alternative occupancy practices, and Wojcik’s queer girlhood potential, but cisgender heterosexuality predominates. While Williams and, to a degree, Mattis, Fama, and Mastandrea engage with issues of race, future singleness scholarship should do more to reveal single representations and experiences across diverse racial and ethnic categories. This collection engages significantly with age studies in Williams’s consideration of the ways in which the single woman might res[ume] her singleness, Fama’s focus on midlife and late-life representation, DeWolfe’s portrait of intergenerational tensions, and Wojcik’s work on the emergence of young singlehood. Single Lives also explores a range of downwardly mobile middle-class women as they contend with the costs of self-support in widowhood, divorce, and life outside the family, but the experiences of single working-class women offer territory for future scholarship. Ethnic and cultural diversity is engaged only by Mattis, who identifies transnational labor as the material counterpoint to a native-born, White nanny trope.

This volume focuses on the productive circuits of cultural exchange between Britain and America, but we have worked within those boundaries with knowledge of a much-needed global singles studies collection also underway, edited by Ketaki Chowkhani and Craig Wynne. Many literary and historical considerations of singleness map a single national or geographic region; significant work remains to be done in comparative singles studies. This collection necessarily reflects the cultural privileges that have shaped single cultural representation; nonetheless, its analyses work to challenge the dominance of those figures. Singleness stretches far beyond the young, middle-class, never-married White woman, but cultural production and reception are often skewed by privilege, excluding accounts marked by age, race, and class. Single Lives continues the crucial work of connecting disciplines, prioritizing unacknowledged voices and single figures, introducing new archival sources and methods, and recovering the specific and shared structural conditions that shape single lives in the modern and contemporary eras.

NOTES

1. Paris Lees, Emma Watson: ‘I’m Very Happy Being Single. I Call It Being Self-Partnered, British Vogue, November 4, 2019.

2. See Travis M. Andrews, ‘Feminism Is Not a Stick with Which to Beat Other Women’: Emma Watson Tells Off Critics of Revealing Photo, Washington Post, March 6, 2017; Emine Saner, Emma Watson and Vanity Fair: Not Everything a Feminist Does Is a Feminist Act, The Guardian, March 6, 2017; Cherry Wilson, Is Emma Watson Anti-feminist for Exposing her Breasts?, BBC.com, March 6, 2017.

3. Anthea Taylor, Single Women in Popular Culture: The Limits of Postfeminism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 4.

4. The collection refers to single women, with the understanding that the term woman is neither stable, agreed upon, nor clear-cut. We intend for the term single woman to contain the broadest possible diversity of woman-identified subjects living outside of or in conflict with heterosexual marriage. Woman is therefore a placeholder in the introduction, a term we understand to contain the many ways in which constructed expectations of gender, the body, desire, sex, and femininity change over these many decades.

5. This collection focuses on single women, in recognition of the gender-specific forms of singlism, economic and social constraints, and temporal and spatial expectations visited on diverse women. There remains ample space—and a real need—for focused comparative work on the gendered contours of singleness.

6. See Taylor Nygaard and Jorie Lagerwey, Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness (New York: New York University Press, 2020).

7. This section includes authors who focus on other regions, like Anne Byrne, Perfidious and Pernicious Singlism, Sex Roles 60, no. 9 (2009): 760–763; and Kinneret Lahad, A Table for One: A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), because their insights have strongly influenced the field of British and American singleness studies.

8. Rudolph M. Bell and Virginia Yans, Women on Their Own: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Being Single (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 1.

9. Emma Liggins, Odd Women: Spinsters, Lesbians and Widows in British Women’s Fiction, 1850s–1930s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); and Emma Sterry, Single Woman, Modernity, and Literary Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

10. See Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage, 2008); Diane Negra, What a Girl Wants: Fantasizing the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (London: Routledge, 2009); Alison Winch, Girlfriends and Postfeminist Sisterhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Sarah Projansky, Spectacular Girls: Media Fascination and Celebrity Culture (New York: New York University Press), 2014.

11. Liggins, Odd Women, 1.

12. See Sterry, Single Woman, Modernity, and Literary Culture.

13. See Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: Penguin, 2012); Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016); and Bella DePaulo, Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006).

14. Taylor, Single Women in Popular Culture, 1; Projansky, Spectacular Girls.

15. Michele Hilmes, Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting (New York: Routledge, 2012), 4 (emphasis in original).

16. Julia Straub, Introduction: Transatlantic North American Studies, in Handbook of Transatlantic American Studies, ed. Julia Straub (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 1.

17. Brigitte Bailey, in Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain, ed. Brigitte Bailey, Beth L. Lueck, and Lucinda Damon-Back (Hanover, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2012), 11.

18. Heather Love, Gyn/Apology: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Spinster Aesthetics, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 55, no. 3–4 (2009): 305–334.

19. See Kathryn Kent, " ‘Single White Female’: The Sexual Politics of Spinsterhood in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Oldtown Folks," American Literature 69, no. 1 (March 1997): 39–65; Eve Sedgwick, "Tales of the Avunculate: Queer Tutelage in The Importance of Being Earnest," in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 52–72; Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Love, "Gyn/Apology; Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Sarah Ensor, Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity, American Literature 84, no. 2 (January 2012): 409–435.

PART I

Singles Studies

ARCHIVES AND METHODS

This book sets out to be the first collection within the burgeoning field of singleness studies to collect scholarship exclusively in the humanities, and to be rooted firmly in texts and textual analysis. Part I explores the richness of textual analysis and the specificity and intricacy of that method across periods, genres, and media. Where established singleness studies work has most often used historical, demographic, statistical, and geographic methods to uncover and understand lost or unrecognized singles, these three essays establish a set of practices for analyzing the experience of being a single woman. To do so, all three expand the definition of text well beyond the borders of a film or piece of literature to material artifacts like photographs, manuscripts and ephemera, correspondence, memos, and personal writing and exemplify how that work productively illuminates single characters within fictional texts as well as the lived experience of singleness outside those texts.

In her essay, Andreá N. Williams argues that the goal of contemporary singleness studies is to productively shift the question from why women are single to how experientially and qualitatively, women were [and are] single, a question answered in different ways throughout this book. Here, Williams demonstrates the archival methods she uses as a literary historian to understand both the texts she studies and the experiences of their writers. In the second essay in this part, Jennifer S. Clark, working in cinematic rather than literary history, uses similar methods to Williams, analyzing the correspondence, production notes, and publicity materials of Rona Jaffe, a consultant on the 1959 film adaptation of her novel The Best of Everything. The finished film, itself about single women working in New York, takes on a much richer and more complex set of meanings as Clark puts it in conversation with the behind-the-scenes arguments and production decisions that were explicitly shaped by Jaffe and her gendered singleness.

All three essays in this part speak to each other about the challenges of locating single women in historical archives of any era or in relation to any cultural practice. In so doing, they highlight advantages of race and class, and access to power via friendships with more visibly powerful White men. Those markers of identity were and are valuable to the how of women’s singleness but also to the ability to find and study single women using the textual and archival methods laid out here. In her essay, Elizabeth DeWolfe reads nineteenth-century writer Jane Tucker through letters preserved in a collection of family papers in a Boston archive. Like Jaffe’s letters and memos, Tucker’s correspondence not only illuminates her own character but also helps readers understand how the single identity and close personal relationships clearly expressed in those letters shaped Tucker’s choices and experiences of life as a single woman. Perhaps tellingly to a twenty-first-century reader, Tucker’s illness came upon her primarily when she was forced to conform to middle-class norms of feminized domesticity, departing again when she reclaimed a measure of independence. DeWolfe thus revises the expected content of biography, as well as text, and through this expansion of the literary text beyond published or commercial work, her essay illustrates how social norms, presumptions about class, and a dominant repudiation of singleness for women become a text in their own right.

Taken together, these essays model a reading of single relations, pleasures, and cultural production that is often obscured by dominant narratives of gender