In April of 2020, a friend told me she felt bad for me. “The shutdown is hard enough with a husband. I can’t imagine doing it as a single mother.”

I understood she wanted to show empathy, an acknowledgement of what she imagined was my struggle. But the truth was I was better than I would have been doing had I been married. It was a truth universally acknowledged in my group texts: “Can you imagine if we had to quarantine with our ex-husbands?” Even women who were the primary caretakers of their children and not given the 50/50 custody break agreed — it was easier alone.

The struggling single mother is a tragic specter of our cultural imagination. She’s poor, she’s struggling, she’s without a man. It’s that last one that is the biggest offense.

According to a 2022 Pew Survey, “Some 47% of U.S. adults say single women raising children on their own is generally a bad thing for society, an increase of 7 percentage points from the 40% who said the same in a 2018 Center survey.”

White people are more likely to see single motherhood as a threat than Black, brown, or Asian people. And a majority of men, 59 percent, see single motherhood as a threat, compared with 37 percent of women.

Our country hates a single woman. JD Vance has called childless women a drain on society and suggested that they have fewer rights than people with children. Meanwhile, single mothers have been blamed for a rise in crime, school shootings, and well, nearly every societal problem in existence.

Single motherhood is correlated with lower incomes and higher school dropout rates, yes. But that is because our society punishes women who work, and mothers in particular. The United States punishes single mothers economically. The U.S. has the world’s highest rate of single-parent households, the majority of those are headed by women. 

Working mothers earn 69 cents to the $1 earned by fathers. And women who become mothers see a 40 percent drop in their pay, while fathers see no impact on their income at all. A lack of paid parental leave and affordable childcare compound that problem. And in response to this inequality, politicians tout marriage as a ticket out of poverty. 

There is a racial element to this. Single mothers tend to be Black. So the cultural unease with the existence of single mothers sits at the intersection of racism, poverty, and the mass incarceration of women in America. We don’t like a woman alone. We don’t like a woman alone as a parent. And we don’t like a Black mother alone. 

The discomfort sits in the sense of ownership over the female body, especially the Black female body. A woman alone is worrisome. A woman acting out her reproductive capacity alone is horrifying. 

But single mothers and women without children are not the problem. The problem is that our country stigmatizes and undercuts single women, and offers marriage as the only solution. But for so many women, marriage is work of another kind; it’s just uncompensated. 

This narrowing of opportunity is happening alongside a historic reversal of women’s rights. Who can be a woman is a matter of contentious debate and restrictive harmful legislation. The overturning of Roe brought with it a flood of laws legislating women’s access to healthcare and along with it a rise in maternal mortality.

The pandemic saw women and mothers forced out of the workforce. Professions like childcare, teaching, and nursing, which employ a large percentage of women, were on the front lines of the pandemic, which led to higher rates of burnout and turnover. Childcare is unaffordable; the wage gap still exists. Locked out of employment, given few options for reproductive access, women will be forced to give birth and forced to become mothers without adequate economic support or healthcare.

And it’s not just single mothers in the crosshairs. Childless and child-free women are being attacked as a drain on society. The logic is that a woman must reproduce to be of value. But she can’t just reproduce; she must reproduce in the heteronormative confines of a marriage. The demand is that women justify their existence by being in service to a man.

These regressive ideas about partnership are based in a mythology that subverts the desires of women as things they have to give up — they must be nailed to a cross to save children and partnerships. 

A lot of the data used to scold single mothers is untrustworthy, plagued by bias and inaccurate reporting. Still the response is indicative of a tightening bind around the choices and options women have, one represented by the Pew data. It shows Americans are more willing to control a woman daring to parent alone than they are to control guns or the spread of a deadly virus. 

And it shows how little people think of women, that their happiness is so disposable — that it should be sacrificed in service to the ideal of marriage. Marriage is hard, they say. And sure, some things are hard, but marriage shouldn’t be miserable. And if it is, then it’s the institution that should be chucked out, rather than the happiness of women.

But the prevalence of this logic isn’t surprising.

Free women are destabilizing. Single women, single mothers, their existence, their radical happiness — it upsets the whole enterprise. Women and love are the infrastructure of this exploitative culture. You begin to examine love and partnership, question it, reject it, the entire system becomes weak.

And I am happy. I’m happier than I’ve ever been. Even when I was broke and ghostwriting op-eds to buy groceries, I was happy because I was finally free. This monolithic image of the exhausted single mother is simply a myth.

In fact, it seems to be the opposite. Even “happy” marriages are inherently unequal. Study after study shows that women still do the majority of the household and kid-rearing tasks in every marriage. Even women who out earn their husbands still do more housework. Marriage is a raw deal. 

Once, at a very fancy party, a woman, wine-drunk, leaned in to tell me of her awful marriage. I told her, “Leaving is easy, you just go.” She frowned. “But I don’t want to be poor.”

“I’ve been poor,” I told her. “But something I’ve never been is free.”

I think about this moment a lot, as I watch joking TikToks about women who don’t want to work, who just want to get wifed up. I want to tell them that being a wife is the worst kind of work; it’s unpaid labor. It’s not creative. It’s uncompensated. It’s living for something or someone other than yourself. You get erased. Live for yourself.

It’s no small wonder that multilevel marketing companies and the “trad wife” ideal prey on the frustrated ambitions of stay-at-home moms, who find themselves without economic opportunity and without a creative outlet.

TikTok videos about single moms almost always show them as hot, young women with impossibly good hair, who are making money and going to the gym. They are doing it all. They are attractive to the male gaze without being a “drain on society.” She’s not a scary single mom. She’s one men like. She’s one of the ones working hard. But this misses the point. Women should not be celebrated because they do it all.

Some arguments in favor of childless cat ladies emphasize the care work they do for the people around them and their communities, but that also misses the point. 

Tying women’s sense of success and happiness to economic outcomes or care work means that we will always be chained to a broken system that values men over women. Women should not have to justify their existence, whether they are childless, or with children and unpartnered. Women get to just exist however they want to.

In her essay for Catapult, “Why Are We So Afraid of Single Women?,” Heather O’Neill writes of single women and horror movies:

When we watch a horror film, the sight of a woman alone fills us with dread. We expect terrible things to happen to her. But she also fills us with a sense of supernatural expectation, because we know so little about what a single woman’s trajectory in life could possibly look like without romance at the center of it. In days of yore, the woman alone would have been tied up and tossed in a river, nominally to ascertain whether she was a witch, but more simply just to get rid of her. Culturally, she remains an uneasy figure. It is not only men that are made uncomfortable by the idea of a woman existing beyond relationships — for women themselves this is an uncharted land.

There is a whole cottage industry designed to make women — white women in particular — feel unsafe in the world. Murder podcasts and murder shows revel in the dark stories of women taken advantage of when they are alone. But as O’Neill so poignantly argues, the most unsafe place for a woman is home — they are most likely to be murdered by partners or husbands. Most violence occurs in the home. But the fear is necessary to control women from going out alone, from feeling comfortable in the spaces men occupy, from feeling truly free.

We consume these stories as our laws regress, pushing women down the funnel back into the home, where we tell them they will be safe with a man. Every 11 minutes a girl or woman is murdered by a family member. We have nothing to fear from the dark; we have nothing to fear from striking out alone.

In 2020, I helped my friend move out of her home and out of her bad marriage. I helped her pack, rented a truck, and fed her daughter mac and cheese. Her husband was out of town, and we had only a few hours to get her out of there. Months later, I asked her if she was okay. Was 2020 a bad year for her? She laughed. It was the best year. Even though she had primary care of three children. Even though she was working harder and homeschooling, and doing it all alone, she was free. And that, that was something she had never been.

There are not many good cultural scripts for the freedom of single motherhood. Movies after show the beleaguered single mother finding a new man. Even in my favorite single-mom movie, This Is My Life, based on the Meg Wolitzer book, the single mom turned stand-up comedian still finds a man. Sure, he’s ancillary to the story, almost a comedic prop of a human. But he’s there — allaying fears of a woman achieving dreams and having children on her own.

To quote Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex, our culture is “so saturated with male bias that women almost never have a chance to see themselves culturally through their own eyes. So that finally, signals from their direct experience that conflict with the prevailing (male) culture are denied and repressed.” 

I am a single mom and it’s the best decision I ever made — to blow up my life, to imagine a new one, one where happiness and partnership are based in community rather than individual relationships. I hear my married friends, even the ones happily partnered, joke all the time about their dreams of a commune, of women living together — the Golden Girls house is the platonic ideal. But it’s also not a joke; it’s an indictment of the misery of inequality in partnership. 

In 2024, it is still radical for a woman to imagine her life without centering it around a man. I will never remarry. At this point in my life, I can’t even imagine having someone living with me. I love my freedom too much; I love the way I am finally able to live a life, not in service of others, but for myself. 

This essay was originally published in this newsletter on June 8, 2022. I updated it and republished it because single women have become, once again, a subject of discussion in politics and culture. You can read the original newsletter here.