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But the results of these surveys, and others like them, were lost or entirely unknown to a generation of younger women, born in and around 1970. The image of highly successful single career women dragging all these personal crises through their lives seemed slightly ridiculous. In many ways, this older generation of women seemed to have handled their lives, especially their personal lives, irresponsibly. I read the following two paragraphs to all women I interviewed who were under thirty-two. The first, as reprinted from a major newsweekly, circa 1990:

With a bulk of baby boomers entering the final stages of their fertile years, the sound of several million biological clocks has become as loud as Big Ben on steroids. I alternated this quote with that of an excerpt from Salon, 2000:

I did a year of unidentified inseminations…that’s “donor-deposit” or “DD,” where the donor remains anonymous. (If it’s “DI,” that means the donor is willing to be identified later.)…I carried my sperm home in a dry ice cooler that’s called a “mini-mate.”

After reading one or sometimes both quotes, almost all of the young women expressed disapproval that ranged from pity to physical disgust.

“No offense to you,” one twenty-three-year-old subject told me firmly, “but I would not want to be your age and not have these ends tied together. That’s really a hopeless way to build a life…. “a mini-mate”? This is so pathetic…. How low can you go?”

It is this generational contempt that gives us the first single archetype of the 1990s and the new century: the young, defiantly post-feminist woman who believes she must take care of the “single situation” in a prompt and businesslike fashion. Before she turns twenty-seven. Or else.

BABY BRIDES AND BABY BOOM BUSTERS

If you suffer, as I do, from a lifelong tendency to listen to three conversations simultaneously in public, “graduate-level eavesdropping” as I think of it, then you must have noticed, circa 1998, a shift in lunchtime conversations and those of women friends out for drinks and dinner. Suddenly they weren’t just discussing men. They were discussing marriage. And they seemed young. I’d gotten married in 1989 at age thirty, and was one of the first of my peers to do so. (Two friends, separately, had spoken to me, asking if I would promise not to have a baby right away; it was too much, too distant and unthinkable; I’d…disappear. And besides, I was too young.)

For the generation below me, all those for whom “women’s lib” is as archaic a term as “abolitionist” or “freedom rider,” postponed marriage and childbearing is a laughable notion. It has been a long, long while since men were legally empowered oppressors and wifery the well-traveled path to madness. The conditions that made marriage so difficult for women—and spurred the protective notion of waiting to develop one’s “full self” before leaping—had disappeared. There were more reasons to marry young, or whenever one could, than to wait. Many young women had lived what Rose, twenty-eight, a book editor, calls

a totally new untraditional life featuring the whole range of experiences starting from a very young age and your parents separating. I mean we had step-siblings on top of step-siblings. We had pot and drinking and sex, even if that was deemphasized because of disease. There was a lot of worry and denial. Oh, I mean, by twenty-one you had done…everything…. And I think everything was too much for that age. I think our view was—I mean, my friends—if the opportunity was there, why not get married?…No, I’m not married, but I would definitely like to be married. A lot of my friends are married…. To be honest, I’m tired of being the odd girl out. It’s a big pain in the butt.

During the early nineties the short-lived Married Woman magazine ran a story called “Old Friends, New Friends.” The subtitle read, “Don’t Feel Guilty if You Want to Put Your Single Friends on Hold and Reserve a Table for Four”; elsewhere in the piece we learned, “It’s only natural to feel a strong urge to edit your address book.”

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