(3 of 8)
Society, to be sure, is far more accepting of single women than it was even a few years ago. When Barbara Baldwin, the director of Planned Parenthood in Tennessee, divorced her husband in 1981, she needed her father's help before anyone would give the then 29-year-old single mother a car loan and a credit card. Beverley DeJulio, a divorced Chicago mother who hosts Handy Ma'am, a weekly home-improvement show on pbs, says she dreaded the hardware store for years, because salespeople kept asking, "Where's your husband?" And the Stone Age year when Anne Elizabeth, a Chicago artist, then 35, had to fight to not be listed as spinster on the mortgage application for her lakeside home? It was 1984.
Business has wised up. Now some auto manufacturers train salespeople to aim their pitches at women, going for the softer sell rather than the hard-nosed, macho wrangling of yesteryear. More than 100 travel companies have started to take women-only trekkers across deserts, up mountains and into volcanoes. Ace Hardware (where the slogan "Home of the Helpful Hardware Man" has been replaced by "Home of the Helpful Hardware Folks") now offers drills that are lighter with easy-grip handles, greenhouses full of flowers, and walls painted in pastels. They also run special seminars for women, who make up at least half their customers.
About a fifth of all home sales last year were to unmarried women, up from 10% in 1985. "Lenders don't presume single women can't make the mortgage anymore," says Mark Calabria, a senior economist at the National Association of Realtors. Orna Yaary, 42, a single mother and an interior designer, recalls that in the 1980s her single-women clients typically viewed their home as a temporary way station on the road to marriage. "It was like these single women with suitcases at the door, they wanted something but not anything permanent," says Yaary. Now she's decorating apartments for women like the 35-year-old investment banker who ordered built-in furniture and reconstructed the bathroom of her apartment. "She's doing what she wants. None of this attitude of 'I'll need to take it with me when I meet a guy.'"
Meanwhile, more single women--especially those watching their biological clocks run down--are resorting to solo pregnancies, sperm donors or adoption agencies. While the birthrate has fallen among teenagers, it has climbed 15% among unmarried thirtysomethings since 1990. In the TIME/CNN poll, fully 61% of single women ages 18 to 49 answered yes when asked whether they would consider rearing a child on their own.
Playwright Wendy Wasserstein recalls the clamor raised against her 1989 Pulitzer-prizewinning play, The Heidi Chronicles, because it concerns a woman who decides to have a baby alone. One female critic returned more than once to trash the play. "She said this was a cop-out, my saying women could be happy having a baby alone," the playwright says. Last year Wasserstein, still single at 49, gave birth to a daughter, Lucy Jane, conceived with the sperm of a friend she won't identify. "If I put Heidi out now, people would just say, 'Yeah, that's true,'" she says, shrugging.