Free All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister Page A

perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night. These same women might have greeted entry into the same institution, had they been pressured to enter it earlier, with the indignation of a child being made to go to bed early as the party raged on downstairs.
    And, if marriage never happens, or before it happens, what’s also true is that some women simply want to stay and keep playing. As Doll wrote, “We don’t know what we want. And so we want a little bit of everything, over and over again.” In Doll’s formulation, “our status as single, independent, financially solvent New York women. . . . has us sitting on a mountain of unprecedented options. Options: Those are exciting. So we want all the options, bigger and better and faster and shinier, or taller or sexier or stronger or smarter, and yet somehow also different and completely our own. We want the tippy-top of what we can get—Why shouldn’t we?”
Infrastructure and Community
    Letisha Marrero’s parents had grown up in New York City. They were Puerto Ricans who were determined to give their children an American identity; they moved their family to a California suburb. Letisha came back to New York as soon as she could, working her way up at celebrity magazines, buying herself an apartment on the city’s Upper West Side, dating but never finding anyone to whom she connected. When she was thirty-five, she became pregnant with a man she was about to break up with and decided to have the baby on her own.
    Suddenly, the city to which she had been so driven became inhospitable. Seeking financial security, she sold her small Manhattan apartment, using the money to pay cheaper rent in a gentrifying neighborhood in Brooklyn. However, when she had her daughter, with no partner and a job that didn’t allow her the flexibility she needed to raise her child, she found herself pushed into increasingly underdeveloped areas, trying to find the combination of community she loved and the safety she sought as a single mother. “I didn’t want to be a pioneer,” said Letisha. “Gunshots did not have any appeal to me whatsoever. I decided we had to get out somehow.”
    When Letisha was laid off from a job in 2009, she realized that she had to move. She and her daughter Lola went to Virginia, closer to family and to Lola’s father. Some of the relief she’s felt since leaving the city, she said, has felt like “leaving an abusive relationship. It’s like ‘Oh! Not everything has to be a struggle! I don’t have to lug my groceries up five flights of stairs!’ ” Getting her daughter into good New York City schools, and into the gifted programs in the public system was, she said, “a fight every single term. I didn’t have the money and wouldn’t want to pay $25,000 for my kid to go to elementary school, and here I don’t have to fight to get her a good education.” She and Lola live in an apartment complex in Virginia, and Letisha now finds herself considering the appeals of yards and grills that prompted her parents to put down suburban roots.
    Letisha also misses New York, and what it offered her as a single mother, even at the same time that it made it impossible for her to stay. “In New York, everybody on the corner knew who I was,” she said. “Oh, that’sthe brown woman with the baby and the dog.” This sense of community was comforting, and felt safe, even in the neighborhoods that she understood to be unsafe. One of her apartments, Letisha recalled, was “right next to a shady bodega,” but she said, “Never once did I feel unsafe in there.” She said she was never harassed on the