Single blithe female

>> Unmarried women sound off in Marian Botsford Fraser’s Solitaire

by JULIET WATERS

“Work and love,” Freud once answered when asked what a normal person needed to do in order to be considered mentally healthy. One wonders what he might make of Grace, one of the women in Solitaire: The Intimate Lives of Single Women. Author Marian Botsford Fraser considers Grace, a 55-year-old single slacker living in Newfoundland, one of the most contented women she’s ever met.

Grace has worked as a singer in a bar band for 10 years—“me and six guys.” And she has loved. She raised one son on her own, taking him on the road with her while she sang. One day she met a cute guy on the beach and married him. After five years, and another son, her husband died in an accident at sea. The insurance money was enough to build a small house near the beach and to give her a small annuity. She does what she wants with her days and looks forward to the boys coming home every weekend. “The louder the damn music, the better I likes it.” Single and celibate for 17 years, she loved her husband, but says she doesn’t miss him. “I think it’s just the bother, the hassle of an intimate relationship. I’m quite fine on me own, right? I enjoy being alone.”

Ten years ago, 10 per cent of Canadian women ages 30–34 were unmarried. Last year it was closer to 17 per cent. Add to that women who are divorced or widowed and there are now almost as many single women as there are married. Slowly the perception that singletons are an invisible, powerless minority is changing. Thirty years ago Mary Tyler Moore was cutting edge; now it’s hard to find a sitcom that isn’t about unmarried women. Need more evidence? Consider the recent Bush administration proposal to put aside $100-million (U.S.) to promote marriage more aggressively.

Fraser doesn’t approach her subject as a political issue, but in her epilogue she argues that society is not weakened, but strengthened by singlehood. “The choice to be, to become, or to remain single is arguably subversive, a form of revolt. Not always a loud, large sign, but a way of saying, ‘I am not conforming.’ I will make my way in this society as something other than a wife. I will define myself by what I do, not by my attachments. I may choose not to be upwardly mobile in order to realize other ideals. I will absolutely fulfill my obligations as a mother, but I want to construct family life on a less rigid model.”

Fraser has done an earnest and thorough job of collecting and organizing a huge cross-section of single women from across Canada, across the classes, races, sexual identities and family circumstances. As a group they have little in common, except possibly less housework. Here are women who are happy, lonely, serene, stressed, interesting, boring, career-minded, poor, horny or indifferent. Only one might be considered mentally ill. The only category Fraser has left out, unfortunately, is younger women. She assumes that younger women don’t have a solid enough sense of themselves to know whether or not they will stay single. Perhaps, but it would have been nice to have included a few voices who were actually dreaming about being single, alongside the many that seem to have made peace with their decision or fate.

Fraser is a pedestrian writer, but Solitaire is still compelling, if only because it does subvert one of society’s core beliefs: that mental health and emotional maturity can be defined by what is really, in the end, just a lifestyle. The more one reads, the more irrelevant and bizarre this idea seems. It won’t answer questions about whether single women are more or less evolved than married women. But it may contribute something to the age-old Freudian question “What do women want?” Judging from Grace’s life, maybe a good insurance company. :

Solitaire by Marian Botsford Fraser, MacFarlane, Walter&Ross. hc, 295pp, $36.99