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To be sure, the rise in single women encompasses some other important trends. An estimated 4 million of these unmarried women are cohabiting with their lovers, and a growing number are being more open about gay relationships. Nevertheless, single women as a group are wielding more and more clout. A Young and Rubicam study released earlier this summer labeled single women the yuppies of this decade, the blockbuster consumer group whose tastes will matter most to retailers and dictate our trends. The report found that nearly 60% of single women own their own home, buying them faster than single men; that single women fuel the home-renovation market; and that unmarried women are giving a big boost to the travel industry, making up half the adventure travelers and 2 out of 5 business travelers.
Equally important is the attitudinal change. The dictionary once defined a spinster as an unmarried woman above a certain age: 30. If you passed that milestone without a partner, your best hope was to be seen as an eccentric Auntie Mame; your worst fear was to grow old like Miss Havisham, locked in her cavernous mansion, bitter after being ditched at the altar. Not anymore. "We've ended the spinster era," says Philadelphia psychotherapist Diana Adile Kirschner, who has made single women a focus of her practice. "Women used to tell me about isolation, living alone, low level of activity, feeling different. Now there's family, lots of friends, they're less isolated and more integrated into social lives."
More confident, more self-sufficient, and more choosy than ever, women no longer see marriage as a matter of survival and acceptance. They feel free to start and end relationships at will--more like, say, men. In a Yankelovich poll for TIME and CNN, nearly 80% of men and women said they thought they would eventually find the perfect mate. But when asked, if they didn't find Mr. Perfect, whether they would marry someone else, only 34% of women said yes, in contrast to 41% of men. "Let's face it. You don't just want a man in your life," says author Bank, 39. "You only want a great man in your life."
Single by choice--it's an empowering statement for many women. Yet it's not a choice that all women arrive at easily or without some angst, and it raises a multitude of questions. Are women too unrealistic about marriage--so picky about men that they're denying themselves and society the benefits of marriage while they pursue an impossible ideal? Does the rejection of marriage by more women reflect a widening gender gap--as daughters of the women's movement discover that men, all too often, have a far less liberated view of the wife's role in marriage? Do the burgeoning ranks of single women mean an outbreak of Sex and the City promiscuity? And what about children? When a woman makes the empowering decision to rear a child on her own, what are the consequences, for mother and child?