Customer Reviews

The New Single Woman

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This book deserves attention because it's way above other books I've read on the single life. The author uses her sociological training to develop a topic that's increasingly relevant: 42 million women over 18 are unmarried, and the numbers are growing.

Cultural stereotypes continue into the 21st century. Margaret Maron's recent novel, Rituals of the Season, has 2 characters joking about the difference between a spinster and an old maid.

On the plus side, Trimberger offers an unusually deep and serious perspective. She rightly notes that our medical, legal and economic infrastructure favors couples, in everything from pricing vacations to limiting visiting rights in a hospital. And while single women turn to friendship networks rather than to relatives, friends often can't get time off to care for a sick friend (or even attend a friend's funeral).

That said, I wish Trimberger had been even more scientific and systematic about her sample. She wanted to include a variety: divorced, never-married, widowed, gay, bisexual. This option means there will only be one or two representatives of each category, so she can't draw conclusions and make comparisons. I'd be curious to compare once-married with never-married women and also single-by-choice with single-by-happenstance women.

I'd also like to see more attention devoted to the frustrations experienced by even the most self-accepting single women. For instance, as a career consultant, I am aware that many small towns are hostile (or at least unaccepting) of single women. One of my married clients, settled happily in a small town, acknowledged, "This is a great place for couples with children, like us. It would be awful to be single here."
At the same time, many careers, including academics, tend to create the most options away from large cities. There's a reason for the term "college town.

And the medical world tends to stereotype singles. I've had first-hand experience with prejudices directed against those who are single and childless. The whole system is based on the assumption that every patient comes with a family.

But one book can't possibly accomplish all these goals. Therefore, I applaud Trimberger for taking a very important first step: acknowledging the need for serious study of the single state and the social and individual factors that contribute to life satisfaction among singles.

I love this book. It is such a refreshing change from all of the usual nonsense you hear in the media about single women. Rather than just assume that single women are home crying in their beer, the author (Kay Trimberger) talked at great length with dozens of single women who were in their 30s or older - some divorced or widow, others single all their life. Then Trimberger talked to them again nearly a decade later. The women who did especially well (most of them) were not frantically pursuing that elusive soul mate. Rather, they had whole networks of people who cared about each other, homes that they loved, jobs that engaged their interests and talents, and a great appreciation for solitude as well as sociability. In short, they were really humans, with lives filled with difficulties and challenges but also plenty of joys and rewards. Trimberger is a sociologist, and her writing is thoughtful and informed. She takes on one big topic after another - relationships (not just romantic ones), sexuality (not just the hyped kind), parenting and not parenting, etc - and talks about each one in ways that are intriguing. The New Single Woman is not about the party line, and that makes it a party well worth celebrating.

Kay Trimberger's excellent volume showcases the lives, the strengths, and the vulnerabilities of women in mid-life as they craft `singular lives' that fulfill them and engage them. The case studies are rich with descriptive detail, but Dr. Trimberger's academic credentials are also in evidence: historical detail, socio-economic data, and sociological theory are also embedded in the text. The narrative is, however, very accessible. Indeed, I could not put the book down.
Six features of a fulfilling single life are outlined by Trimberger. They are: (a) satisfying work, (b) relationships with the next generation, (c) a home or "nest," (d) fulfilling engagement with friends and extended family members, (e) involvement in a community or neighborhood, and (f) an acceptance of one's sensuality/sexuality, whether it is experienced erotically with others or through sensory fulfillment as a celibate individual. (More about this below.) The context in which these six characteristics of a fulfilling life were developed was provided by Trimberger's interviewing 27 middle class, educated women at two different time periods, almost a decade apart. She interweaves their stories through-out the book, and I took away something special from each case. I was personally most touched by the chapter that looked at how death was faced by single women, whether it was their own impending death or the deaths of loved ones.
Trimberger is also adamant that her research and theoretical platform not be construed as somehow demeaning married life or that she is a `champion' of singleness. Her intention is simply to create a "cultural narrative" that emphasizes the resources to be cultivated by women who find themselves single and as well as their own dignity as individuals -- as opposed to being somehow deficient or incomplete because they are not coupled.
A comment is in order about the sixth fulfilling feature noted above, the acceptance of one's sensuality/sexuality whether with others or alone. Trimberger notes that masturbation is just fine, whether coupled or not, but she also wants to generate dialogue about alternatives if one does not find another person with whom to engage erotically and sexually. What then? Yes, one can certainly pleasure oneself sensually and sexually, but in addition, we should consider our opportunities for enhancing our sensual experience in non-erotic ways. One of her case studies features a woman who is an avid flamenco dancer and experiences her dancing as intensely passionate and sensual. As for myself (and I do happen to be married), I love the touch, the fragrance, and the delicacy of flowers - indeed, I'm a self-proclaimed "flower floozy." I surround my self with flowers in the garden and in my home. They are definitely charged with passion and sensuality for me. Why can't we allow these other avenues of rich and intense engagement with our physical and sensory world to be acceptable paths of fulfillment for single and coupled people, regardless of gender, instead of seeing them as "mere" sublimation of a sexual/genital focus?
The New Single Woman is a breath of fresh air. Buy it, read it, share it with others, and know that the likelihood, if you are a woman, is extremely high that at some point in your life (or at repeated points), you will be single.

Everyone should read this book, not just single women. It is chock full of warmth, tolerance, wisdom, and insight into human relationships of all kinds. Fascinating life stories, interesting statistics, brilliant observations, and uncommonly good sense - this book has it all. When you finish reading, you don't just feel edified by the contents, you want the author for your best friend.

The author takes a handful of anecdotes and her own personal story and stretches them thin, generalizing far too much from what seems like an atypical sample of women. But we can't really tell how atypical they might be, since she never explains how they were sampled, or interviewed, or tracked, or why she did any of the above. She repeats stories again and again, with far too much detail. She offers irrelevant comments on the body size of each of her informants, and the ethnicity of any of them who aren't white.

Three pages into the book I was thinking of several authors who've written widely and in depth about single life in America, and I started waiting for Trimberger to quote them. She never did. Instead she quoted the same couple of newspaper and magazine articles again and again. This is not good research. And it is disappointing for me to pick up a book on a topic about which I am not an expert, hoping to learn more, and then to find that I seem to have read more widely on the topic than this author.

A good editor should have caught the holes in Trimberger's research, and edited out the unnecessary details in her stories, and the repetition of more than a few of her anecdotes. For example, do we need to know who her babysitter was, and where the babysitter had taken her son when Trimberger was sorting out some family issues? Not so much.

This isn't scholarly writing, and it's not popularized, it's just weird, and wasn't worth my time.

Kay Trimberger interviews women who are divorced, widowed, and never-married. The term "never-married" itself shows a cultural bias toward the superiority of married people: Trimberger uses the term "ever-single". Why not call married people "un-single"? Why use marriage as the gold standard of life's achievement?

Trimberger interviewed straight and gay women. She interviewed women with children and child-free women.

I agree with a reviewer who said "I've had first-hand experience with prejudices directed against those who are single and childless. The whole system is based on the assumption that every patient comes with a family."

Although it was referring to the medical system, that is just the start. People who don't assume that everyone is in a family ASSume that everyone who is single is just dying to become part of a family. "After all, isn't that what every single woman wants?"

You will even find so-called singles' authors and columnists who slant their entire writing around the assumption that all of your singleness is until you get that holy grail of a wedding or a soul mate. (Barf.) A so-called singles' columnist and author, Susan Dietz, writes her advice to singles as if they were all building their single life in preparation for that holy grail of the soul mate and the wedding. She actually calls single people who are in relationships for other reasons than the goal of becoming a family "fluff". Her column reads like dating advice to the lovelorn lonelyhearts, and mating advice to single parents.

If a so-called singles columnists make insulting assumptions like that about singles, then the prejudice and assumptions about singles are so deep that even people who fancy themselves forward-thinking, free of prejudice, or even advocates, for crying out loud, have bigotries they won't admit or don't have the depth and sensitivity to perceive.

This book uses the interviews to blow away the myths about single women. (So-called singles columnists would do well to read it.) Bella DePaulo's book "SINGLED OUT: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After" is directed toward singles regardless of gender, and deconstructs the so-called "study" that "showed" that "married people are healthier and happier than single people". (So-called singles columnists would REALLY do well to read this book.) SIngles who really dislike the insulting assumptions about their gearing up their rich, full life all for the purpose of "finding that special someone" would also like Sasha Cagen's "Quirkyalone". I highly recommend all three books.

This in-depth study of the single woman as seen through the eyes of Kay Trimberger evolved from an article she wrote entitled, "Ones of a Kind, Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the 20th Century". Her research began in 1994 when she interviewed forty-six middle-age women of diverse backgrounds who'd migrated to northern California searching for the elusive dream. All middle-aged and still hoping to find the right man. Ten years later, she relates that they are still single, but not by choice. Hope springs eternal.

As a sociologist living in Berkeley, California, she wrote about politics until she successfully parlayed an article, "For Better or Worse" into the 1991 book, INTIMATE WARRIORS, for which she wrote the Introduction, about a long-lasting marriage of opposites living in Greenwich Village, New York. She describes the "new" single woman as "a woman who is content with her single life" though some are still waiting for their prince to arrive. The soul-mate ideal affects the older single women, too, but they face the possibility of heartbreak when, after many years of living alone, they find the "perfect" one who is too young and married. Then, what?

If her figures are correct, they show that 42 million women over the age of eighteen are unmarried, but are they single by choice. Her latest study involved only twenty-seven women between the ages of 30 and 60. Before the wild 1980s and 1990s, there was such a thing as family values. "Between 1980 and 2002, births to unmarried women rose from 18 precent to 34 percent of all births and, during this time, births to unmarried women aged thirty to 34 jumped from 7 to 15 percent. By 2002, two-thirds of all births ...were to women over the age of twenty. Twenty-three percent of all children in 2003 lived in a one-parent household. About 70 percent of children in the United States will spend some time in a single-parent family before they reach the age of eighteen." Today, it seems to be the norm for unwed women to have children -- look at the example of Tom Cruise and his #1 fan, Katie.

The author gives the history of how she obtained a mixed-race baby through private adoption (expensive procedure) when she was past forty. Now twenty-four years later, she calls herself a single mother. "No one in my leftist, academic, feminist community had done this, and everyone thought it was grat...deeming it as a humanitarian deed. That wasn't my perspective, but if they needed to think that to be supportive, then so be it. I even got a tax break because a black child was seen as hard to adopt. She used this venue to reveal the background of her adopted, Marco, now 25 years old. Did she do him a favor by sparing him the shame of growing up illigetimate in a white Louisiana family? Since she was a college professor, albeit in the Bay area, she was able to provide a better education in a small alternative private school "he attended from kindergarten through sixth grade. Fourteen students all seven years and five of them wer, like him, a mix of African American and white."

She had the means to take him to Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and other places in the Southwest which his biological mother from a working-class family would not have been able to do. I too was a single mother through divorce, which took place when Justin was only five, and I can verify that "the strong cultural ideals warning that close mother-son relationships were bad for a boy." They are bad for the mother, too, as I made him my whole life and became co-dependent, belt that my world in that small "college town" was over when he grew up and moved away. It is not something I would choose to live through again, as the stress almost "killed me." Married women and single women are certainly different. Ms. Trimberger was never married, so she has only figures culminated during her many years of research to compare. It is as different as day and night.

She ends thusly, "Finally, I thank my son, Marc. His arrival in 1981 began my transition to the satisfying life of a new single woman [surely she meant mother?]. His move out of our house in 2000 -- even though he still remained very much a part of my life -- gave me the space, psychological and physical, to write this book. This is not my idea of "the new single woman." I really was expecting something erudite and different.