What Unmarried Women Want: Big Government?
23rd February 2016
In a New York magazine excerpt of her upcoming book, All the Single Ladies, Traister writes that the rise of the single-lady demographic represents “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.”
With results as you see them.
What do all these single women want? Well, according to Traister, it is most certainly not a “hubby state,” the term some conservatives have used to insinuate that women still desire dependency, just on Uncle Sam instead of a family patriarch. “The notion that what the powerful, growing population of unmarried American women needs from the government is a husband… is of course problematic,” she writes. “It reduces all relationships women have to marital, sexual, hetero ones and suggests that they are, by nature, dependent beings.”
Traister is right to point out that when men rely on government social programs or tax incentives, we don’t say they’re seeking a “wifey state.” Also that men, especially married men, long benefited from government policies designed to sustain their dominance, be they direct (laws limiting the hours that women could work) or indirect (policies that propped up the mid-century nuclear family). But the problem comes when Traister tries to define what single women do want from government: laws ensuring “pay equity, paid family leave, a higher minimum wage, universal pre-K, lowered college costs, more affordable health care, and broadly accessible reproductive rights.”
With the exception of the last point, those are all either direct requests for state support or requests for state-mandated support from private actors. Sure, these policies aren’t designed solely to benefit women (unless you think of things like parenting as purely female), but there’s no mistaking this agenda for anything other than a call for More! and Bigger! government.