Living longer years alone

The sudden realization that 51 percent of American women are living without a spouse has demographers, statisticians and politicians pondering the whys and what ifs.

Surely these unwed women are the career-focused - see Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada." Why should a woman who does a man's job expect to have a man on her arm?" asks one study.

But no! The unwed dames come from the lower classes, the uneducated who once strived to "marry up" but now are doomed to a spinsterhood or divorced lifestyle because they didn't go to college, says another.

Too many warmed over conclusions from cold statistics.

Sluffed off in these studies are women older than 50. They live longer, the analysts say, without explaining why these women many times chose to live these longer years alone.

I think I know.

I have no scientific studies or demographic charts to support my conclusions. I do have a gut feeling that data claiming 60 percent of the divorces after age 50 are instigated by women, translates into a heck of a lot of feminine economic security coupled with a determination to toss off the cultural shackles of the 60s and70s.

These gals are the ones who pioneered the women's movement. Many of them had college degrees, brains they wanted to use in the workplace.

They already forced a singular cultural change in demanding individuality.

When I became the editor of a woman's section of a small city daily in the early 1960s, journalistic norms demanded women be addressed according to their married status.

Thus, I was "Miss Jane Glenn" in print, forever labeled a spinster until I was able to wed and become "Mrs. Stephen Haas," never to be formally addressed by my first name again until I divorced and became "Mrs. Jane Haas," another label that identified my role in the social pecking order.

Small town stuff, I hear you muttering. Maybe. But we were more a nation of small towns then. Women didn't work unless they "had" to work. By the 1970s and the women's movement, there were working married women but many of them had husbands like mine, who insisted he "allowed" me to go to work because I was bored at home.

For many, the goal was not a career. Our choices were tragic, barren spinsterhood with no guarantee of equality in the workplace or relegation to second-banana status in marriage where the man came first simply because of gender.

But being married meant being socially acceptable.

"You'll lose status," were the first words out of my mother-in-law's mouth when she heard her son and I were divorcing. She had to be divorced, you see, because she was humiliated by a husband who was openly cheating on her. As a single midlife woman in a small city, she then had to scramble for social acceptability. And every time she was featured in a write-up of one of her woman's clubs, the shame-of-it-all was there for everyone to see: Mrs. Josephine Haas (i.e. divorced woman.)

All those "Mrs." and "Misses" got tossed by the late `70s, to the great relief of reporters who lived in fear of marrying or unmarrying women correctly in addition to spelling their names right.

But I digress.

Why aren't women who divorce or widowed after 50 as anxious to remarry as the previous generation? I mean, the standard joke about Greatest Generation older widowed men has always been the way they deal with the "casserole brigade," the older single women who court them with pot roast and lemon meringue pie.

Well, I'm a pre-boomer and a widow. I don't need a man around the house.

My late second husband and I had 25 good years of marriage. Still, even if I met Mr. Wonderful, I'm not sure I want him to move in.

I like my freedom. I like making my own decisions. I control my own money - money that I made myself. I don't need a man to go into a fine restaurant or even to go dancing. I can join a square dance group as a single.

I have a great handyman who does my "honey-do's."

I don't need a husband for recreational inter-gender sport, either.

Society allows couples to get together now, sans wedding ring.

I am not against marriage. I believe in it, particularly to form families and raise children. But at my age, I'm not anxious to recommit.

Why are 51 percent of American women not married? Tap into each generation and you'll get a different answer, I suspect.

For those of us over 50, the answer could be as simple as we have an option our mothers never enjoyed: We don't have to.

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(Jane Glenn Haas writes for The Orange County (Calif.) Register. E-mail her at jghaas@cox.net.)

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(c) 2007, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.). Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.