Re: The Last Unmarried Person In America
That first line of “The Last Unmarried Person in America”—“The great marriage boom of ’84 began shortly after Congress passed the historic National Family Security Act”—is such good science fiction that it took me several beats to realize it was in fact made up. Then Ellen Willis expands on it, noting that the Act abolishes divorce, prosecutes single people as vagrants, requires applicants for civil service jobs to sign a monogamy oath, and my personal favorite, makes the interstate sale of quiche a federal offense.
This America has finally made “a reality of what had then been an impossible dream: universal marriage.” Gays who take an oath for a sexless marriage can marry, and young couples insist that their marriage has nothing to do with the NFSA but is instead about their love; they assure the narrator that their desire to commit is spontaneous. They tell the story of the cute proposal: the guy told his wife-to-be that she could stop sewing scarlet S’s on her clothes and start sewing buttons onto her husband’s shirts.
Willis wrote this in 1981, a time I think of as not particularly marriage-friendly, mostly due to the fact that my own parents, along with seemingly ever other Baby Boomer couple in California that was part of my grammar school orbit, divorced in the early ‘80s.
I have resisted the urge to read the Atlantic cover story on single women because I was so put off by Kate Bolick’s NYT story on being an aunt. But reading Marisa Meltzer’s take on this story by Ellen Willis will make me both read that story and likely shell out the $159 for an EmilyBooks subscription. Oh look, just did.
