Miss Bradshaw Goes to Washington
The Marriage Movement, American Families and Sex and the City

by Ashley Nelson

HBO

It has been 10 years since Dan Quayle pinned the moral decay of American families on single career mom Murphy Brown, but old habits die hard. Recalling the vice president’s criticism — and Murphy’s defiant response to it, in which she dared to suggest that "families come in all shapes and sizes" — the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson recently proclaimed on CNN, "There’s really no argument that television has become more vulgar since that famous Murphy Brown speech."

Indeed, so repulsed by the idea that single mothers have not caused the "breakdown of Western civilization" (another of Murphy’s "radical" points), the bow-tied pretty boy went on to argue that the series was responsible for all of today’s cultural gems, including Fear Factor’s stomach-turning presentation of pig genitals.

He is hardly alone. In response to the recent spate of televisions shows like Sex and the City, Friends and Will and Grace, in which women live happy, healthy and even childbearing lives all without tying the knot, cultural critics have once again taken to chastising single women. Forget about the antics of Ken Lay and his boys: Carrie, Rachel and Grace represent the true ethical hurdles of our time. Mocking the importance of men and marriage, they are so "selfish" they make The Osbournes look wholesome. 

At least at Ozzy’s house, as Dan Quayle (a self-proclaimed fan) recently explained, "You have a mother and father, who are very involved ” very loving." Of course, Carrie and her girls never bit the head off a live dove on television twice, but apparently that’s beside the point.

To be fair though, there is something behind Tuck and Danny’s statements. The women in TV Land are growing more vocal and defensive about their chosen lifestyles. Having not found Prince Charming, Grace seems content to have a child with her best (and gay) friend, Will. Rachel and Ross on Friends will be great parents to their newborn, despite their not being married. And Sex and the City (SATC) – the most poignant exploration of single women today — takes for granted that with the financial and sexual freedoms women now enjoy, it is only natural that relationships between men and women would change.

These are fairly daring topics, even for today. After all, single women, especially those past their prime, have long been seen by conservative politicians and critics as threats to the cherished nuclear family. In the 1970s, Mary Richards caused a controversy when she let it slip that she was on the pill. A decade later, up against the likes of super moms, Claire Huxtable and Elise Keaton, the only singletons around were either arthritic like Estelle Getty or neurotic like Molly Dodd. 

Even Murphy Brown’s delivery in 1992 came with all the comfy and traditional trimmings. The child was "legitimate" in that it was the product of a one-night stand between Murphy and her ex-husband. And who could forget how the new mom broke into a sweet rendition of "Natural Woman" the minute she saw her baby?

In retrospect, this famous scene seems miles away from Miranda’s recent delivery on SATC. Upon seeing her son for the first time, all the slightly bewildered single mom could say was that it was like there was a giraffe in the room. 

But then again, the women on SATC are not at all like single women we’ve seen before. They want relationships with men, but they don’t mind being single — at times, they even love it. Distinct from many of their predecessors, and even their contemporaries, like Ally McBeal, these women can be a little neurotic, but rarely are they pathetic or psychotic. Unlike Alex in Fatal Attraction, they don’t boil rabbits; they have vibrators named after them.

Shows about single life — from the award-winning Seinfeld and Frasier to Ally McBeal and Friends — have clearly struck a cultural chord. According to The New York Times, an estimated 7 million people tuned into last season’s final episode of SATC. And Variety recently reported that the series, which will begin its fifth season July 21, has on occasion surpassed the overall ratings of the four major networks among female viewers ages 18 to 34 — a startling fact considering HBO only reaches about 32 million homes, less than a third of the networks’ household penetration levels. 

Even more surprising, however, is that SATC should rise to fame now, when the culture seems to have an increasing interest in getting and keeping women married. After all, we are in the midst of what some have called a marriage movement, wherein walking down the aisle is prescribed for every social ill from poverty and teen pregnancy to drug use and poor education. This obviously has major effects on women, who have long struggled to gain financial and sexual independence whether married or not. 

Take for instance the Bush Administration’s recent proposal to allocate $300 million to state-sponsored programs that encourage women on welfare to wed. So convinced that marriage provides social stability, states are now offering everything from high school courses on marriage to financial incentives for those who say, "I do." Teenagers are also learning through federally funded programs on abstinence that sex outside marriage has "harmful psychological and physical effects." So unless they have the will of Sisyphus, young girls better start thinking about marriage before college or careers.

Middle- and upper-class women are not off the hook either. With the recent and much hyped publication of Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, author Sylvia Ann Hewlett has revived the old scare tactics of the 1980s, by suggesting that career women today are forgoing families for fat paychecks, and getting nothing but heartache and infertile eggs in return. Her advice? More marriage, less career — and sooner rather than later.

For all the things it is not — a treatise on race relations, a study of class in America — SATC may still be one of the most progressive reactions in popular culture today against this simplistic view of matrimony. Unlike the promises of politicians and critics, marriage on the series doesn’t guarantee a happy or stable ending, but sometimes, as Samantha once put it, "just an ending." 

At other times, it can have very serious side effects. Indeed, by tapping into many of the cultural anxieties about career women and traditional family values, the series presents rather profound ideas about why marriage may be difficult, or even unnecessary for modern women. If women once wed in large part because it was the financially and morally acceptable thing to do, how might modern women who have more control over their personal and professional lives view marriage differently? 

This question has framed SATC from its earliest episodes to its most recent. Despite the arguments of critics like Pamela Paul, who insists in her new book, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, that shows like SATC "shout loud and clear that normal people want marriage and their own neuroses are what prevent them from getting it," the series has long taken on the expectation that women should marry. 

In fact, Carrie and her friends are often far less bothered by being single than by being typecast. "All those ‘poor you’ single looks," complains Miranda in the first season, reinforced by her friends’ unanimous agreement. "Loser," "leper," "whore." And later in the second season, they berate those "cautionary tales" about how women over 40 are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than find a man — for the record, an actual quip from a 1986 issue of Newsweek.

Carrie and her friends are outraged when New York magazine publishes an article on how single women "fill their lives with an endless parade of decoys of distraction to avoid the painful fact that they’re completely alone." Carrie had agreed to be photographed for the cover, thinking the piece was going to take a positive look at single life. "Fuck them," Miranda says defiantly. "Every couple of years an article like this surfaces ” to scare young women into marriage ” this piece of trash has nothing to do with us."

Of course, the article really has everything to do with them. To be fair, the women on SATC do regularly long for satisfying relationships with men. And Charlotte, the "Victorian straight up," no doubt dreams of the fine china and monogrammed towels marriage brings. But even she, the only character who marries, leaves this not-so-fairy tale life in part because the sex is no good. Let’s just say that’s not what Donna Reed would have done. 

No matter how hard she tries, Charlotte cannot turn back the clock on women’s achievements. Nevertheless, to forgo relationships altogether and just "have sex like a man ” without feeling," as Charlotte’s opposite, Samantha, would like, is not so simple either. As Carrie asks in one early episode appropriately titled, "Evolution," "Is Samantha women’s future or their demise?" More simply put: With women’s liberation, relationships have changed — but how much and to what extent?

This question is most seriously considered through Miranda and Carrie, the two moderate characters. Throughout the series, they have struggled to find the right balance between life with a partner and their lives as independent women. To a certain extent, SATC supports the idea that women’s progress has made relationships difficult. Miranda’s dates fall asleep when she tells them about her school days at Harvard. And her success as a lawyer drastically affects her relationship with Steve, a bartender, who leaves her because she makes more money. He calls it quits when she offers to buy him a suit. "No way. I’ll start to think of you as my mother ” You need to be with someone more on your level." "Fuck the suit," Miranda yells back. "I’m being punished for being successful." 

In a similar scenario, Carrie is uncomfortable with her fiance Aidan taking care of her, particularly financially. She panics when he offers to buy her a new computer. "I’ve been taking care of myself a long time. This is how I handle things."

Yet overall — and unlike Ally McBeal, whose inability to "have it all" leads her to be perpetually depressed — the women on SATC do not resent their modern lives. In fact, they often cling desperately to it. When Aidan moves in after their engagement in the fourth season, Carrie finds herself longing for the privacy that comes with being single. "I miss walking into my apartment with no one there ” and I can do all the stuff you do when you’re totally alone." Carrie calls it her "Secret Single Behavior." Further, she becomes quickly annoyed when people begin to see her only in relation to Aidan. To remedy this, she begins wearing her engagement ring around her neck, where it is less noticeable.

The problem is not that she doesn’t love Aidan, or want to be with him, but that despite what Bride magazine or the culture at large says, single life is not some ephemeral state she temporarily resides in until she marries and blossoms into womanhood. As she asks in her weekly sex column, "Once we found what we’ve been searching for, why are some reluctant to let go of our single selves? ” To be in a couple, do you have to put your single self on a shelf?"

Ultimately, Carrie does find marriage to be incompatible with her life. When she finally brings herself to try on a wedding dress, she immediately breaks out into hives. "My body is literally reacting against the idea of marriage." When Aidan refuses to just live together, as Carrie suggests, she breaks off the engagement. 

Like Miranda, who in the fourth season gets pregnant, but refuses to marry Steve, the father (and now owner of a bar), Carrie cannot bring herself to tie the knot. Later, she explicitly refutes the desirability of marriage when she writes, "As progressive as our society claims to be, there are still certain life targets we’re all supposed to hit: marriage, babies, a home to call your own. But what if instead of breaking out into a smile, you break out into a rash? Is it something wrong with the system or is it you? And do we really want these things or are we just programmed?"

For all its celebrity sell-out wrestling and Who Wants To Be a Ditz and Marry a Millionaire fare, television is doing women a great service when it comes to SATC and shows like it. At the very least, they are certainly more on target than much of politics and culture today. After all, women who have chosen "non-traditional" paths have long been relegated to the gutter. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser’s early 20th-century version of SATC, almost never saw the light of day because its free-for-all heroine wasn’t punished by syphilis or some other literary just dessert. Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary underwent a similar inquisition a few decades earlier.

These stigmas remain today, as not marrying or having sex outside marriage is increasingly presented as unhealthy and morally suspect. Again, welfare mothers who do not marry are said to be putting their children as risk; teenage girls cannot receive information about contraception in some schools because a husband, not effective and self-monitored birth control, is supposedly the key to safe sex. 

But in SATC, women’s concerns about marriage, divorce and motherhood are legitimate ones. Successful and secure in their own right, marriage is not something these women need to feel confident, supported or loved. Nor is it something they question merely because they are selfish and juvenile — accusations often thrown at older single women. 

When they marry, or rather, if they marry, it will be on their own terms — not because of any social stigma or guilt over having initiated the so-called collapse of values. Indeed, for them marriage is given all the serious consideration it deserves — unlike the government, which mistakes shotgun marriages for social policy every chance it gets.

Most importantly, SATC — like Murphy Brown and even Mary Tyler Moore before it — expands the notion of family in America so that it is not only more inclusive, but more realistic than those conservative Leave It to Beaver fantasies. The four women in the series constitute their own family. Charlotte cashes in her wedding ring so that Carrie, facing eviction, will not have to ask a man — her ex, Mr. Big, no less — for money. Similarly, when Miranda finds out she’s pregnant, it is her friends she turns to first. "We’re going to have a baby," Charlotte screams in delight. The women have relationships with men too, of course — they just want to define them according to their own changing needs.

In this sense, Carrie and her pals are more like us than we may think. Sure, most of us won’t pay $10 for Cosmopolitans, and certainly not $400 for a pair of Manolo Blahnik strappy heels, but women today are increasingly determined to find the families that work for them — and we shouldn’t be made to feel bad about it. Only 25 percent of us live in nuclear families, while an increasing number of men and women are choosing to marry later, or forgo it altogether and co-habitat. 

Moreover, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, an overwhelming 79 percent of Americans think the government should not be in the business of promoting marriage. Nor is there any reliable data to prove Hewlett’s claim that women must decide between fulfilling careers and functioning ovaries, as Garance Franke-Ruta recently demonstrated in The American Prospect. 

So despite all the talk about "traditional" or "conventional" families that politicians and conservative critics employ to denounce everything from aid to single moms to gay marriages, there are no prefabricated perfect families, no ready-to-wear lifestyles. As with everything on SATC, families are custom-made. I’ll certainly join the girls in toasting that — as long, of course, as they’re paying.

P o p  F o r u m
What is fate of the single woman?

Ashley Nelson writes frequently on women, popular culture and politics. Her work has appeared most recently in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Dissent and The Brooklyn Rail. She will be contributing to a collection of essays on Sex and the City to be published by I.B. Tauris in September 2003. She lives in Brooklyn.

Related Sites
In Salon, Heather Havrilesky looks at marriage revivalists and their faith in matrimony.
Ten years later, Candice Bergen addresses Dan Quayle.
Eric Deggans, St. Petersburg Times TV critic, shares his favorite modern-day matriarchs.
From PopPolitics, Alana Kumbier on the personal politics of government promotion of marriage (see also her article "Wedding Bells and Welfare Bucks" in Hip Mama). Alana also compares the women of SATC with those in Absolutely Fabulous, while Arin Greenwood wonders where are the Jews in SATC’s New York.