Description
Book SynopsisThe number of one-person households is rising steeply all over the world and a growing proportion of these ''new singles'' are women. It is estimated that one woman in three lives on her own. This development reflects general social trends, ranging from rising divorce rates to the growing professionalization of women and their dissatisfaction with a traditional model that offers them a future organized solely around ''husband-baby-home''. At the same time, the attractions of that model still linger and the fairytale prince is by no means a figure from a story or a remote past. Even in an age in which the internet promises that love is ''just a click away'', many women still wait for their prince to come.
Jean-Claude Kaufmann''s sympathetic study of the lives, aspirations and sometimes despair of the ''new single women'' is based mainly on an analysis of a sample of the hundreds of letters sent to Marie-Claire magazine after it published a first-hand account of the single life. Funn
Trade Review
"Kaufmann is a wise and clever microsociologist, inspired by Erving Goffman, by fashion magazines, and by kittenish and cougarish women. He is the voice of the annoyed, the vexed, the fearful, and the comforted."
Contemporary Sociology
“Freedom and autonomy have their glories and their miseries. Jean-Claude Kaufmann has composed a thoroughly researched inventory of both, while analysing in depth the present-day condition of women and its impact on the male half of humanity. As women replace self-effacement with newly gained self-confidence, the lynchpin is driven out of the family and the private sphere, and the hard-to-reconcile drives to autonomy and companionship result in the increasing fragility of commitments and fear of loneliness for both women and men. In masterly fashion, Kaufmann records the ongoing transformations in the human condition that follow. His findings hit at the very heart of the harrowing dilemmas which most men and women confront these days and struggle to resolve.”
Zygmunt Bauman, Universities of Leeds and Warsaw
“Anyone seeking to understand the fastest growing trend in personal life – more people living alone – should read this book. Jean-Claude Kaufmann moves elegantly between broad-brush historical overviews of changes in family life and fine-grained scrutiny of the narratives of women ensnared in the drama of these new demographics. Paradoxically, the opening up of personal choices for everybody seems to close down the options for many women, who are finding it harder to find the partners they long for.”
Lynne Segal, Birkbeck College, author of Why Feminism?
“This is a brilliant book on the everyday effects of the rise in female singledom. Kaufman provides fascinating insights into the pressures that single women experience today, from society's disapproval of female autonomy as a threat to traditional family models, to the hopes and disappointments of the modern dating world.”
Veronique Mottier, University of Lausanne
Table of ContentsFOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: IS THERE A MODEL FOR PRIVATE LIFE?
1. LIVING ALONE: A LONG HISTORY
Intolerable Celibacy
Great Buffalo Woman
Celibacy Becomes Legitimate
A Maid in Men’s Clothes
Introspection
The World Turned Upside Down
The Nineteenth Century: The Main Trend Begins
Grisettes and Phalansteries
The Break
Dark Times
The American Model
The Scandinavian Model
Crazy Times
Uncertain Times
2. A LIFE DIVIDED
The ‘Accusing Finger’
‘Weird’
Uncomfortable Places
The Family: What Can Be Said and What Cannot Be Said
The Laughter of Girlfriends
Betrayal
A Cycle in Three Stages
3. A LIFE SHARED
Back to History
Premonitory Experiments
The Personalization of Feelings
A Model for Private Life
The Mother-Children Group
The Model Undermined
4. PRINCE OR HUSBAND?
Facts and Fairies
The Prince with a Thousand Faces
‘Like a Love Story’
The Prince Settles Down
When the Carriage Turns Back into a Pumpkin
The Prince Plays Musical Chairs
PART TWO: PORTRAIT OF A SINGLE WOMAN
5. INTROSPECTION
‘The Disease of the Infinite’
From Laughter to Tears
Double Reflexivity
From Diaries to Blogs
The Mirror and the Clairvoyant
6. AT HOME
Fixtures and Fittings
Bed
Meals
Wrapping Up and Regressing
Freedom from Domesticity
The Lightness of Being
7. THE OUTSIDE WORLD
Going Out
Other Ties
The Family
Work
Being Oneself in the Outside World
8. MEN
Arms
Sex
Man-Hunters
A Gloomy View of Life
Married Men
9. THE INTERNET REVOLUTION
A Sudden Change of Epoch
Love is Just a Click Away
The Dark Side of the Web
Real Life
Men and Women: Sex and Commitment
‘Don’t Give Up’
An Experience in its Own Right
PART THREE: THE AUTONOMY TRAJECTORY
10. BEING ONESELF
The Concept of Trajectory
The Irresistible Injunction to be Oneself
Oneself
Widows
Young People
Women Who Have Broken off Relationships
Predisposing Factors
The Impulse to Remain Single
The Lesser of Two Evils
Two Trajectories, Two Identities
11. WAITING
Dinosaurs of Love and Galloping Horses
The Ravages of Love
For Want of an Alternative
Sentenced to Hard Labour
Comforting Habits
Extreme Isolation
Negative Individualism
12. ‘WOMEN CAN DO ANYTHING!
Flight as Therapy
The Logic of the Shell
The Paradox of Appearances
Women Can Do Anything
Autonomy with Company
CONCLUSION
EPILOGUE
DOSSIER. THE GLOBALIZATION OF SINGLEDOM: THE FIGURES
The Irresistible Rise in the Number of One-Person Households
Interpreting the Figures
Late Marriage
A Short World Tour
Mail-Order Brides
A NOTE ON METHODOLOGY
Stages in the Research
The Letters
Constructing Hypotheses
The Informants
BIBLIOGRAPHY
