Singleness and self-identity

Abstract

Demographic trends in recent decades such as the delay and decline in marriage and increase in divorce have meant more men and women experiencing periods of singleness. For women in particular, singleness has long been considered anomalous: normative femininity, bound up with marriage and motherhood, has meant single woman being represented in terms of deficit or deviance. The increase in singleness is one aspect of wider social changes that have implications for the categories of identity available to single women. In this article, I draw on in-depth qualitative interviews with never-married single women in Britain to examine the single self-identities evident in their narratives. I consider the extent to which these suggest shifts in the centrality of partnership status in the context of the latter half of the 20th century.