Rebecca Traister’s new book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, opens with an examination of the treatment of Anita Hill by the Senate Judiciary Committee during the hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Rather than refute any of her charges of what came to be known as sexual harassment, the conservatives on the committee and in the media attacked Ms Hill. It was suggested that she suffered from erotomania or had certain “proclivities” (according to William Safire, this word, used by Senator Alan Simpson, was “a code word for homosexuality”).
As Hill would later write of her experience, “Much was made in the press of the fact that I was single, though the relevance of my marital status to the question of sexual harassment was never articulated.”
The relevance of her single status was how it distinguished her from established expectations of femininity. Hill had no husband to vouch for her virtue, no children to affirm her worth, as women’s worth had been historically understood. Her singleness, Hill felt at the time, allowed her detractors to place her “as far outside the norms of proper behavior as they could.” Members of the Judiciary, she wrote, “could not understand why I was not attached to certain institutions, notably marriage,” and were thus left to surmise that she was single “because I was unmarriageable or opposed to marriage, the fantasizing spinster or the man-hater.”
It turns out that her marital status did not, in fact, place her “outside the norms of proper behavior.” Rather, it placed her right smack dab in the middle of what was becoming a national movement away from marriage as the mark of adulthood for American women.