The Discursive Climate of Singleness: the Consequences for

Women’s Negotiation of a Single Identity

Jill Reynolds and Margaret Wetherell

Abstract
The privileging of marriage and long-term partnerships contributes to the marginalization
of single women. This article explores the ways in which women defined as single work
with the typical constructions of their identity available in the public arena. We view
singleness as a discursively constructed social category. Using data from interviews with
30 women we examine the identity that women construct for themselves through their
talk. We present the four main interpretative repertoires that women draw on, and look at
two patterns of identity work commonly used to deal with the highly polarized
repertoires. Singleness is a troubled category, and yet the positive and idealized
repertoires available seem to make other aspects of women’s lives and expectations
pathological. We argue for a feminist psychology of singleness based on critical
discursive psychology: the focus needs to be on the patterning of ideology rather than the
supposed dysfunction of single women.

Key words:
critical discursive psychology, ideological dilemma, interpretative repertoire, single
women, social categorization, social constructionism, subject position

Subject position

Introduction
A significant achievement of feminism has been to draw attention to what Adrienne Rich
(1980) called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’. What seems to be compulsory is not just
heterosexuality as such but long-term partnerships with men within a marriage or similar
situation (Rosa, 1994). Women’s lives, their experiences and their relationships have
evolved in the shadow of this powerful but often tacit set of regulations about appropriate
forms of desire and intimate partnership. In this article we focus on a group of women
who have been somewhat neglected in feminist research. These are women who are
defined through compulsory heterosexuality: those seen by others and by themselves as
‘single’. We report some empirical findings from an interview study and use critical
discursive psychology (Billig, 1991; Edley, 2001; Wetherell, 1998) to develop a feminist
perspective on ‘singleness’.

One of the main ways in which normative prescriptions such as compulsory

heterosexuality operate is through the construction and policing of various forms of
‘otherness’. Those who lack ‘rightness’ help define what is ‘right’. Some modes of living
become accountable while others remain unexceptional and taken for granted. Our
interest in women defined as single began with the commonplace observation that
whereas married women or women in long-term partnerships with men are rarely asked to

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explain themselves, single women do seem to have to engage in a lot of explaining (see
also Adams, 1976). Women in long-term relationships do not tend to be asked (in a
concerned tone of voice), for example, ‘how did you end up married?’ Apology and
confession are not the dominant discursive genres for these accounts. The single woman,
in contrast, is expected to have an explanation for her ‘condition’, preferably a story of
‘circumstances’ and ‘missed opportunities’ or one that blames herself for being ‘unable to
hold on to her man’.

Literature on Singleness
A number of studies have documented the marginalization of single women (Adams,
1976; Bickerton, 1983; Chandler, 1991; Chasteen, 1994; Holden, 1996; Jeffreys, 1985).
Jeffreys, for example, in her historical research on lesbian women records the attacks on
single women in the early part of the twentieth century. Chasteen describes how sexism is
built into the single woman’s everyday environment, while Adams has noted that
conventional psychological theories often equate wellbeing with marriage. There has been
little investigation, however, of the ways in which women defined as single respond to
and work with the typical constructions of their identity available in the public arena. We
will argue that singleness is best viewed as a discursively constructed social category. The
discursive field organising ‘singleness’ marks the identity of single women through the
subject positions (Davies and Harré, 1990) and interpretative repertoires (Potter and
Wetherell, 1987) it offers for making sense of life patterns.

In line with the general marginalization of single women, academic research on

singleness has largely assumed, if not quite pathology, at least that the psychology of the
single woman will be shaped by ‘difference’ and, possibly, personal ‘dysfunction’. The
field as a whole is surprisingly sparse and under-developed with few sustained empirical
investigations. One strand of research has applied models of the life course or life stages
to understand the situation of singleness. Allen (1989) and Lewis and Moon (1997) have
attempted to revise life course models (typically based around the stages of marriage and
child rearing) for single people. Lewis and Moon, for example, offer a list of non-
sequential developmental tasks that adult singles need to address. Thus the successful
single woman will have prepared herself financially and emotionally for old age even
though she may hope never to be old and single (p.130). Schwartzberg et al. (1995) have
used life stages as a therapeutic tool that might help the single person understand and
value their own life course. Such alternative routes through the life course nonetheless
involve acknowledgement of the non-normative nature of the single track, and emphasize
ways of coming to terms with the loss of the usual life trajectory.

Similarly, writing from a psychoanalytic perspective often traces any current difficulties
experienced by a woman in finding a partner back to defences formed earlier, perhaps in
early childhood (see for instance, Bickerton, 1983). Psychoanalysts taking an explicit
feminist perspective (e.g. Eichenbaum and Orbach, 1987) have been critical of the
patriarchal context in which women negotiate relationships. Eichenbaum and Orbach
argue that normative assumptions about femininity necessarily require connection with a
man. Such assumptions explain why women are propelled into relationships, rather than
celebrating an identity as a separate, free standing and autonomous person. They remark
that women often talk in therapy of how they stay on in unsatisfactory relationships for
fear of a loss of self. Eichenbaum and Orbach suggest that women think of their identity

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as being supplied through an intimate relationship, and therefore seek a relationship not
just for connection, but driven by the need for identity. A criticism of this psychoanalytic
literature is that what the model describes as normative – girls being brought up to
provide supportive and caring relationships for others – is at the same time seen as
pathological, in that therapists become involved in unravelling such expectations in their
consulting rooms (McLeod, 1994). Single women, in particular, can be seen as having
problems in forming intimate relationships and be targeted for therapeutic intervention
(see Reynolds, 2002 for a review).

In addition to these lines of investigation (and see also work undertaken from a role
theory perspective, Bankoff, 1994 and Chandler, 1991), a range of qualitative
investigations has been conducted. These have mostly adopted thematic forms of analysis
and, usually implicitly rather than explicitly, an experiential, humanistic or
phenomenological psychological perspective. These studies often verge on the
journalistic, and feature extended quotations or pen pictures of women who are single (for
instance Peterson, 1981; Anderson and Stewart, 1994; Reilly, 1996; Clements, 1998). The
findings tend to be organized into a framework of themes, and the authors may claim to
give single women a voice (for instance, Gordon, 1994, p. 41). Clements (1998) in her
study, for example, has commented on the degree to which single women have no
collective sense of themselves. However, more commonly, these studies propose a
politics of self-acceptance, self-transformation and self-actualization.

A Feminist Discursive Analysis of Singleness

In contrast to these lines of work we seek to develop a feminist discursive analysis of
‘singleness’. In this section, we shall try to outline the theoretical commitments guiding
our empirical research. These commitments consist of five linked claims about
‘singleness’ and follow variants of discursive psychology which work across both
conversation analysis and post-structuralist discourse theories (see Wetherell, 1998, for a
description and justification of this form of critical discursive psychology).

First, we suggest that the single state is best viewed as socially constructed. This notion
brings into sharper relief than experiential, psychoanalytic or life course models the
shifting patterns of meaning through which singleness has been understood historically as
well as the changing pattern of social arrangements and social practices for regulating
relationships. It is a reminder that singleness is not a natural fact or a natural social
arrangement. It highlights the historically and culturally variable status of singleness. At
an empirical level, this draws attention to the relativity of current relational forms. It
raises questions about the other ways relationships might be constructed and why these
particular modes and representations of the single state dominate social organization now.

Second, singleness is a social category. We understand categories and categorization,

however, from a discursive rather than a cognitive perspective (Edwards, 1997; Potter and
Wetherell, 1987). As Harvey Sacks (1992) has argued, categorization-in-use is revealing
about social order. Categorization practices and the flexible resources these provide for
constructing relationships and events at any given moment (wife versus mistress, mistress
versus spinster, spinster versus bachelor, and so on) help provide an orderly and
accountable framework in social life. The use of categories evokes an order for that
moment. And, categories are wonderfully flexible devices. The category single can be

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worked through many different category contrasts, and constructions of ‘otherness’ and
‘sameness’, ‘outsider status’ and ‘insider status’, to produce a wide range of accounts and
evaluations (Hester and Eglin, 1997). Once more, the question arises, among all these
possibilities, why are some repeated over and over?

Much of the existing literature again treats the categorization of singleness as a natural
phenomenon. Thus much discussion concerns the correct definition of the term. Does the
category just include the ‘never married’ (Allen, 1989; Peterson, 1981) or what some call
the ‘ever single’ (Reilly, 1996). What about the divorced, the separated and the widowed,
those who are ‘single again’? Are these people true members of the category? In contrast
to these debates, our interest is in how the category is constituted at different historical
moments and in different interactional contexts. We want to re-focus research, therefore,
on ‘how’ the social category of singleness is constructed rather than ‘who’ really is a
member. How do the methods of categorization work and what are the institutional and
identity consequences and implications of different formulations?

Our third broad premise is that singleness should be studied not just as socially
constructed and as a social category but also as a discourse. Singleness is a set of
complex meanings and practices. The discourse of singleness produces knowledge, forms
of truth and expertise (see Hall, 1997). To speak about singleness is to speak in relation to
this discourse. Although Foucault (1980) rejected the term ideology, in our view it is also
helpful to see singleness as an ‘ideological field’ following the definition of ideology
suggested by Billig (1991, see also Wetherell and Potter, 1992). Both the terms
‘discourse’ and ‘ideological field’ stress that the shifting patterns of meaning which
construct singleness are formed in relation to power. Indeed the notion of ‘compulsory
heterosexuality’ itself and the peculiar accountability associated with being single make
this salient. Singleness is a discourse regulating conduct. We would expect to find that it
is a discourse which naturalizes and pathologizes, creates patches of visibility and patches
of invisibility and mystifies some forms of being while normalising other forms. In line
with the work of Billig et al. (1988) and Wetherell and Potter, 1992, we anticipate that it
is likely to be an ideological field organized through commonplaces, tropes and
dilemmas, a highly variable and inconsistent patchwork of representation.

These formulations suggest a range of avenues for historians, social policy and cultural
studies researchers to explore. It would be fascinating, for example, to examine shifting
media representations of the ‘single woman’ from ‘spinster of this parish’ to ‘Bridget
Jones’. Our interest, however, in this paper is more psychological than sociological. Our
fourth proposal is that singleness needs to be studied as a set of personal narratives and
subject positions. Social history, social practices and the ideological field around
singleness construct a cultural slot and a set of identity possibilities. The process,
however, of living in this slot and living with these possibilities (working with them,
complying, resisting and transforming them) becomes a personal identity project for the
individual single woman. In developing narratives and accounts of themselves, and in
making sense of their lives and life choices, people work up the discursive resources
available as identity. Indeed, narratives are a way of managing identity in a shifting,
fragmented and complex ideological field. In this respect categorization practices and the
discursive field of singleness produce a psychology and modes of subjectivity.

Identity is a negotiated performance. Our focus in this paper is on women’s narratives and

4
stories as they explore with an interviewer their history around singleness, and answer
questions on their single identity. We are interested in the everyday ways in which
women make sense of their situations in talk and conversation. In line with previous
research in discursive psychology, we anticipate that these accounts will be highly
variable, the identity positions developed will be distributed and multiple and the
contradictions and inconsistencies will be informative about the constitution of the
discursive field of singleness as a whole. We assume that identity is ‘precarious,
contradictory and in process, constantly being reconstituted in discourse each time we
think or speak’ (Weedon, 1987, p. 33).

As well as mapping these fragmented patterns, and discussing their psychological

implications, we also aim from a feminist perspective to critically evaluate the kinds of
identity resources on offer to women to negotiate their identity projects. Our final guiding
principle, therefore, is that singleness is not just socially constructed, a social category, a
discourse and a set of personal narratives and subject positions, singleness should also be
a politics. In other words, it is an arena in which feminists need to develop further
strategies of resistance and develop a collective voice which might help women position
themselves in much more enabling ways.

The Interviews
The research data consisted of interviews conducted with thirty women. The sample was
recruited through ‘snowballing’ and through poster and handout advertisements. The first
author (who conducted the interviews) contacted women known to her and then asked
them to pass on an information handout to others. Handouts and posters were displayed in
libraries, shops and other public places asking ‘women alone’ to participate in a study of
meanings of ‘singleness’. These notices explained that the researcher was herself single,
and that she was interested in knowing ‘what being single means to you now, what it has
meant to you in the past, what kind of choices you have made, and your hopes for the
future’. Twenty-one women were included in the study as a result of the snowballing
process and nine women were included who made contact because they had seen a poster
or received a handout. The typical demographic profile of the participants did not vary
significantly across the two methods of recruiting.

The criteria for inclusion in the sample were that women had either remained single, or
been divorced, separated or widowed for more than two years; were not living with
anyone (male or female) in an intimate partnership at the time of making contact; and
were aged between 30 and 60 years. Apart from these fairly broad parameters it was left
to women to self-define themselves as single. For the theoretical reasons discussed above
we did not wish to define ‘who is single’ according to strict criteria. Appendix 1 shows
the sample by age grouping, occupation, parenting status and by their status as ‘always
single’ or ‘single again’ (which refers to those who have been married previously). The
majority of women interviewed were relatively homogenous in terms of social class,
ethnicity and educational background (mainly middle-class, white British), with some
variation in current employment and income. Eight of the sample had children, in four
cases these were adults living in separate households at the time of the interview. Two
participants had a mixed race background. Most referred to heterosexual experience, one
person identified herself as lesbian and two had had relationships with women as well as
men. The research was mainly carried out in London, another city in the Southwest of

5
England, and in rural areas of the Cotswolds. The aim was to work in depth and to
develop a rich or ‘thick’ understanding of a relatively small sample with a broadly shared
social position rather than conduct a questionnaire survey, for example, which would
have allowed a ‘thinner’ exploration of a much more diverse sample.

It could be argued that the sample is diverse in terms of their marital status, that having
always remained single and childless is very different to having been married, or having
had children within or outside marriage. To treat all participants as members of the
category ‘single’ may conceal important differences. Clearly there are differences in the
kind of accounting and relationship history that women give, and we will be exploring
these elsewhere. In this article we are looking at particular commonalities that appeared
across the sample. Appendix 1 shows some of the variation in statuses and allows readers
to see how we reached our conclusions in relation to the data that we discuss.

All of the interviews were conducted on a one-to-one basis with the exception of one
group discussion with four women. Interviews lasted between one and half and two hours
and were usually conducted in participants’ own homes. The researcher was able to
interview with the status, to some extent, of an ‘insider’ (Adler and Adler, 1987). As
noted, she identified herself as a single woman, and shared some features such as cultural
and class background with many of the sample. We hoped that this shared culture would
avoid reproducing the situation noted in the introduction where women who define
themselves as single are constantly put on the spot to explain their ‘oddity’. While we
generally refer to those interviewed as ‘participants’, we recognize that the researcher was
also a participant in the discussion and the resulting discourse was jointly constructed. A
schedule of questions was prepared for use in what can be described as the ‘guided but
informal conversation’ of the interview. Participants were provided with an outline of
topic areas in advance, and were asked to complete a form relating to personal details.
Interviews were taped and transcribed. The transcripts have been anonymized, with
names changed and details which might lead to identification of the person removed.
Participants were provided with a copy of their own transcript and offered the opportunity
to correct or delete material.

The interview topics covered three broad areas. The first area also served as a general
introduction. The researcher asked about the images participants held of singleness and
how they perceived others’ views of themselves. The second area focused on the
participant’s past and current relationships. The final questions aimed to revisit the
participant’s current feelings about her situation, and to elicit any political perspectives
she might hold regarding the single state.

In this paper, we focus on discourse drawn mainly from the first area and in particular the
sample’s responses to three questions:

1. ‘How do you prefer to describe yourself?’ This question usually followed an initial
question asking the participant to give a brief description of herself and picked up on
whether singleness was mentioned and what words were used in that brief description.

2. ‘What images of singleness do you recall having when younger?’ This was commonly
accompanied by a follow up question – ‘what does singleness mean to you now?’

3. ‘How do you think other people see singleness?’ ‘What images are common?’ This

6
 question was sometimes specified in relation to the images held by particular
significant others such as parents and family.

We have also included material produced in response to two further questions:

4. ‘What kind of things do you like doing? Are there any activities that are either easier,
or more difficult to take part in, because you are on your own?

5. ‘Are you actively looking for a partner or seeking long term commitment at the
moment?’ This was usually asked towards the end of the interview.

Our focus on these questions reflects our research questions for this paper. How do
women who define themselves as single respond to and work with the typical
constructions of their status available in the public arena? How do those typical
constructions constrain and influence the ways in which women manage a ‘single’
identity?

Analytic Concepts and Procedures

We worked with a corpus or data file derived from all the material produced in response
to the questions above. We looked first for regularities and patterns in women’s talk about
singleness in general and second at the identity management relating to these. Our aim in
this paper is to report the main patterns across the sample rather than the detail of
particular constructions or individual women’s identity work.

The search for pattern was guided by three analytic concepts characteristic of critical
discursive psychology – ‘interpretative repertoire’ (Potter and Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell
and Potter, 1988), ‘ideological dilemma’ (Billig et al., 1988) and ‘subject position’
(Davies and Harré, 1990; Hollway, 1984; Wetherell, in press). (See Edley, 2001, for a
discussion of all three concepts.) Interpretative repertoires are the recognisable routines of
arguments, descriptions and evaluations found in people’s talk often distinguished by
familiar clichés, anecdotes and tropes. They are the building blocks through which people
develop accounts and versions of significant events and through which they perform
social life. Interpretative repertoires consist of ‘what everyone knows’ about a topic.
Indeed the collectively shared social consensus behind a repertoire is often so established
and familiar that only a fragment of the argumentative chain needs to be formulated in
talk to form an adequate basis for the participants to jointly recognize the version of the
world that is developing.

A typical finding in research on interpretative repertoires (c.f. Wetherell and Potter, 1988)
is that people’s discourse tends to be highly variable and inconsistent since different
repertoires construct different versions and evaluations of participants and events
according to the rhetorical demands of the immediate context. This variability allows for
ideological dilemmas to arise as people argue and puzzle over the competing threads and
work the inconsistencies between them. In terms of subject positions, Davies and Harré
argue that who we can be is dependent on the positions made available through talk, in
interaction and conversations (1990, p. 46). The story lines of everyday conversations
provide us with a position to speak from and they allow the positioning of others as
characters with roles and rights.

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Analysis and Discussion
We present first the four main interpretative repertoires women drew upon to make sense
of singleness.

ƒ singleness as personal deficit

ƒ singleness as social exclusion

ƒ singleness as independence and choice

ƒ singleness as self-actualization and achievement.

The first two of these repertoires were strongly denigrated in the talk of those
interviewed, and the second two strongly idealized. We will go on to argue that these
highly polarized and indeed inconsistent repertoires present single women with a
problematic ideological package which has challenging consequences for their personal
identity work.

Singleness as Personal Deficit

This repertoire usually emerged in women’s descriptions of single women encountered
when a child, impressions formed in early life, or in imagining the views of others.

Extract 1 i
Jill: […] I’m wondering if you have any particular images about single women
that (.) sort of going back, if you can remember, to what you might have
thought as a child or a teenager or as a young woman, coming up to the
present really. What it might have meant to you at different times?

Rachel: Mm, mm. Well I think growing up as a child, and as a teenager and as a
young woman, um. I think the image that I had of single women was of
women who were not able to have a relationship, or not able to find a
relationship, or find a man. […]

Extract 2
Jill: […] I am interested in whether you’ve got any kind of memories of your
images of singleness over time, what you might have thought as a child or
a young woman growing up or at the point when you became divorced and,
perhaps how you see it now.

Jay: I think my images when I was growing up were largely negative ones. Erm
I’ve been trying to remember whether I had any spinster, maiden aunts or
relatives in the family and I don’t think I had any. I don’t, so my images
would have been the ones that have sort of filtered down through family
perceptions and through obviously through the media and erm ones that
come packaged for you rather than any direct experience. But certainly, or
through literature I suppose, things like Jane Eyre and you know them, erm
the sort of Victorian image of the spinster in the family who had to be
supported somehow by the men in the family. And who was erm, not quite

8
 a whole person in some way. So I suppose I grew up with those images,
erm, and with an expectation that it wasn’t me, it wasn’t going to be me, I
was heterosexual I was erm at some stage going to get married and have
children which I duly did.

The notion of singleness as signalling a particular kind of personal deficit (inability to get
a man) is positioned in Extract 2 in particular (and in general in the corpus) as the
‘canonical view’, in other words as part of the well-worn stories of one’s culture. In
effect, the participants are rehearsing here some of the most familiar (and negative)
aspects of the general discourse of singleness. In the personal deficit repertoire the focus
is on the personal characteristics of the single woman, and a strong link is made between
these characteristics and membership of the category. The single woman constructed here
is pitiable, pathetic and problematic as a character. The ‘historical’ flavour of this account
suggests that it might have little relevance for women’s representations of their current
situation. We shall demonstrate later that, on the contrary, it powerfully shaped their
management of their identities.

Singleness as Social Exclusion

An alternative repertoire involved a construction of singleness as social exclusion rather
than personal deficit. This repertoire typically emerged in anecdotes and stories about
other people’s reactions to oneself involving reported speech and accounts of internal
dialogue in response. It was presented through actual experiences rather than as the
familiar story of culture and was thus more firmly ‘owned’.

Extract 3
Lyn: […] And I think that you don’t get locked into a sort of social network if
you’re single, or I haven’t, it hasn’t been my experience. And when I was
in my 30s a single friend said to me ‘oh well couples won’t invite us
because they’re scared of us; they think we’re going to walk off with their
men’. And I don’t think of it the same way now but I think there are, there
are, there is this sort of couple network thing. And they’ll invite each other
round to dinner and you’ll sort of share it and swap it and make it equal
and as a single person I have never felt included in that. […]

Extract 4
Josie: […] I was riding my bicycle to [place name] and I was thinking to myself,
this is lovely, no car has disturbed my peace. It was a Sunday, […] and I
was just coming down into the road leading to the lake and some car came
up behind me and beeped me. And it made me jump out of my skin. My
immediate reaction was aggression, and that is synonymous, that is
symbolic of what I’m saying about being vulnerable. I’m more vulnerable
on a bicycle than I am in a car. And she, this young girl, turned to just to
her partner and smiled. And that made me so angry, that she did that to me
and smiled at her partner because she’d doubly insulted me. She not only
made me jump out of my skin but she was with a partner, so […]

In these extracts Lyn and Josie are responding to a question about what they find it easy
or difficult to do as a woman on her own. The repertoire of social exclusion constructs a

9
strong contrast between singleness and coupledom. These are presented as in effect two
quite divergent, almost unconnected, social worlds or social spaces. In general, this sense
of a strong binary, a separated geography of two unrelated states, is a commonplace
feature of the broader discourse of singleness. In this repertoire, typically, one of these
spaces (coupledom) is constructed as privileged and the other (singleness) as excluded,
lacking and disadvantaged.

The subject positions constructed in these two extracts vary. Thus the excluded single
woman in Extract 4 is constructed as vulnerable, attacked and insulted. The impotence
derived from the construction of exclusion is mitigated in Extract 3 by the construction of
an alternative source of power – the power of the single woman to take other women’s
men and thus as a threat.

Singleness as Independence and Choice

In contrast to the first two repertoires, this and the next repertoire construct singleness as
a highly positive condition. Singleness is idealized.

Extract 5
Jill: Are there other things you could pick out that you enjoy or the things that
you find difficult?

Annie: Um, well, it’s silly little things really. I suppose like being able to decorate
the house exactly as you like there’s no compromise in anything, you can
do anything you want. I mean people can moan and say that’s stupid and
say well there’s not a lot I wanted, you know, whereas when I was married
you are forever sort of um toning down what you like, or what you want. I
know that’s a very selfish attitude but I do enjoy being able to have exactly
my own way. Bad things, I don’t think there’s anything particularly bad
about it, it’s hard put to find any down side you know.

Extract 6
Susie: […] And I think I’m really fortunate I don’t have to put up with all the
negative things about relationships. And I think, I think overall they’re
quite difficult things. I don’t think they’re sort of romantic, sharing of the
burden things at all. I think they are an additional burden and I think most
of the time I’m grateful not to have to carry it. […]

In this repertoire, in contrast to the repertoire of social exclusion, the two states of
singleness and coupledom become differently marked. Now it is singleness that is the
privileged and celebrated space. Women position themselves as ‘grateful’ to belong in
this freer space of independence and choice. Indeed, as in Extract 5, privilege has to be
carefully managed, to acknowledge the possible negative consequence that those who
occupy privileged spaces might be held to account as ‘selfish’.

Singleness as Self-Development and Achievement

The final pattern we wish to draw attention to in the data can be described as a repertoire
of singleness as self-development and achievement. It is more diverse than the repertoires
described above and three extracts have been included to give a flavour of the range. The

10
first extract is drawn from the group discussion:

Extract 7
Jennifer: I think also we have more time to think than other people, to do what we
want. And therefore we don’t, we can actually take time off to get off the
wheel, and so we have time to think about what we want to do and
therefore we can develop ourselves more, maybe, sometimes.

Jane: We’re like free spirits, we’re not boxed into some little cage.

The suggestion is that women on their own have the time to develop themselves. In
Extract 8, Val is talking of a time when she was adapting to a new job in San Francisco:

Extract 8
Val: I can remember thinking a lot of that time when it was difficult ‘I’m really
pleased I’m doing this on my own’. Because the whole equation about (.)
because like I say I had this conversation with myself and this voice said,
‘well just go home you don’t have to stay here, you can go home now’.
And this other voice would say, ‘no, no’. So I really had to work out what
was really important for me; absolutely for me and the terms on which I
was there and at which point I would decide to give up and what
difficulties I would decide were worth sticking with and overcoming. And
it was totally on my terms. And if I’d had to take someone else into
account, and weigh it all up with them and take their feelings into account
as well, I don’t think I could have done it. Well I know I couldn’t. […]

As with the repertoire of choice and independence, the freedom to make decisions
without having to think about a partner is emphasized. But also here there is a
construction of challenge, and work on one’s self in response to that challenge. Val
constructs herself as achieving through adversity.

Extract 9
Milly: […] there are so many more professional women who don’t want to put
their careers aside while they have children and marriage is largely about
having children, still. And so many women are choosing not only not to
have children, but not to get married, and so they are single because they
are career types and that to me is a positive image. […]

Milly, in her early 30s, relishes the subject position of the ‘career women’. Singleness as
self-development is a repertoire that formulates female ambition within both liberal
feminist and humanistic psychological terms. Financial independence is presented as a
goal as well as other more diffuse aims of self-fulfilment.

The Repertoires in Combination

These four interpretative repertoires were the prevalent patterns of sense-making in
relation to our interview questions about images of singleness. They constitute a large
part of the discursive terrain of singleness for this sample. Most women drew on all four
repertoires; a few drew only on the second two, none drew solely on the first two. These

11
repertoires in part construct the kinds of conversations, dialogues and internal
monologues that are possible around singleness. They tend to form rhetorical point and
counter-point and provide a discursive package creating a powerful set of ideological
dilemmas without easy resolution. The idealized third and fourth repertoires of
independence and self-development, for example, can be a response and contrast to the
first and second repertoires of personal deficit and social exclusion. And the reverse was
also commonplace in the discourse of the women interviewed. The positive repertoires of
choice and self-development were often undermined and shadowed by the first and
second repertoires of deficit and exclusion. The subject positions offered to women across
the repertoires vary widely from ‘strong and independent’ to ‘pitiful and problematic’ and
from ‘fulfilled’ to ‘attacked and excluded’.

As noted, the repertoires are highly polarized – two involve denigration and two involve
idealization. But what are the consequences of this polarization for single women’s
constructions of their identity? How do women inhabit this discursive space and
formulate a self within it? How is this complex mix of idealized and denigrated subject
positions managed?

We suspect it may be unusual to have to draw on a discursive and ideological space that is
so polarized, where the ideological dilemmas raised by the contradictions between the
repertoires are so closely linked to the possibilities for who one can be as a person.
Membership of other marginalized social categories based on ethnicity, class, sexuality
and disability perhaps also involves managing both denigrated and idealized
categorizations simultaneously. Yet what may be different for single women is the lack of
a social movement or identity politics around singleness and thus the absence of co-
ordinated and collective efforts to deal with denigration. Possibly, without this, it is more
difficult to unequivocally inhabit the positive, and distance self from the denigrated
constructions. In the remainder of this analysis we want to focus on two pervasive
negative ways in which this pattern of repertoires seemed to shape the identity work of
the women in our sample. From a feminist perspective, these modes of management
suggest to us the need for a more elaborated and positive politics of singleness.

Constructing the Self as not a Typical Member

One consequence of the mix of both highly positive and very negative constructions is
that it leads to delicate footwork over the ways in which one ‘belongs’ to the category,
and indeed how the category is defined in the first place. Consider Extract 10 below in
which Val argues that although she fits within the category ‘woman living by herself’, she
doesn’t fit within the category ‘single’, as she has a boyfriend.

Extract 10
Jill: Mm, yeah, absolutely fine. I think when we spoke on the phone you didn’t
tend to think of yourself as single and I didn’t hear you say that just then;
just that you’re quite happy living on your own.

Val: Yes. I suppose when we were talking on the phone. I, um, I think what I
said was ‘I think of myself firstly as financially independent’. I don’t think
of myself as a loner, as alone at all. I do have a boyfriend, um, I don’t think
of him as a partner, probably ’cos we don’t live together and our lives

12
 don’t join up so much that I have to take him into account an awful lot.
I’ve rarely not had a boyfriend actually. In fact sometimes they overlap,
which can be difficult. So I’ve never been short of a boyfriend and always
had, um, plenty of friends and two or three close friends, women friends.
So ‘single’ sounds awfully alone and I don’t think of myself as being
alone, except when I come back to this house I suppose, but then again,
yes, I think the first thing is financial independence. I choose how to spend
my money and it’s not really a big issue until I see how other people don’t
have that. I just take it for granted.

Val draws strongly here on the personal deficit repertoire in constructing her reading of
the category ‘single’. ‘Single’ becomes constructed as a noxious identity. It is defined as
being a ‘loner’, ‘awfully alone’ and being ‘short of a boyfriend’. These identities are
firmly disavowed in Val’s case in favour of being ‘financially independent’, ‘never short
of a boyfriend’ and having ‘plenty of friends’. It is instructive to witness the kind of work
which becomes necessary to manage the disavowal of membership in a troubled (c.f.
Wetherell, 1998) category membership.

Could women just side-step these problems through defining the category ‘single’ entirely
through the positive and idealized repertoires of choice and independence and self-
development and achievement? It might then not be necessary to distance oneself from
the category. Very few of the women interviewed followed this discursive strategy. The
power of the repertoire of singleness as personal deficit seems to be such that it is
‘around’ as a potential reading of one’s character even when the interviewer is also single.
Its availability, and possible applicability to oneself, needs to be addressed in some way
and warded off. Women developed several ways of achieving this. The next two extracts
from Polly exemplify three common strategies. First, Polly finds another category outside
‘single’ that can hold the negative meanings of personal deficit, leaving ‘single’ to hold
more positive connotations. Second, she reviews her own credentials to show why she
doesn’t herself qualify in the more negative personal deficit interpretation of the category.
Finally, she contrasts herself positively with someone who does seem to have all the
negative attributes.

Extract 11
Jill: Is it [single] a word that you would apply to yourself generally and are
there any others that you might use instead?

Polly: No, I do say I’m single. I dislike intensely the word ‘spinster’. I mean
bachelor does not have a sinister, pathetic or even unpleasant ring to it, but
spinster does have a very unpleasant ring to it. Um, I would say from
choice I would like to have been married. Um, but I’m not married. And as
I said I was engaged three times; I had three options of marriage, maybe
that’s a clearer picture of myself. I had three options of marriage. And it
was me that turned down the engagements because I didn’t love enough,
um, and I suppose I’ve always looked for the ultimate love and maybe that
doesn’t exist.

Polly does place herself within the category ‘single’. She goes on, however, to
differentiate it from ‘spinster’. She then constructs a picture of herself as having had the

13
chance to become a non-member of the category ‘single’ by getting married, and
therefore as someone to whom attributions of personal deficit are not relevant.

Extract 12
Polly: I think I’ve only got one friend that is a spinster, as I am. And I do think
she is a spinster with her trundle basket. And I’m afraid to say, I was going
to say her cat as well. And she does fall into what I feel is that spinster
category; ’cos I mean she’s still in the same job I met her in 30 years ago
and she hasn’t moved on. She’ll be there until retirement and she hasn’t
moved on whereas, as I say, most of my collection of friends are actors,
drunks, or Jewish, or Irish funnily enough. I mean I have a sort of, I
suppose, an eccentric selection of friends; I don’t think any of my friends
would be categorized as the norm; and I’ve got a lot of gay friends.

Here, in contrast to the previous extract, Polly does include herself in the category
‘spinster’ but works to establish that she is not a ‘proper’ member of the category. She
does not take on its negative features. She draws a distinction between herself and a
friend who is a more typical member and ‘does fall into what I feel is that spinster
category’. Markers of ‘typical spinster’ include the trundle basket and the cat. Polly then
contrasts the majority of her friends – eccentrics, not the norm – which has the effect of
further distancing her from the category of spinster. The link that Polly makes between
her friend who ‘hasn’t moved on’ and her other friends is a non sequitur, unless it is
considered that actors, drunks and so on have by definition ‘moved on’. The contrast to be
made is more with Polly herself. By implication, in having unusual friends, Polly herself
becomes unusual, and less like a spinster.

Our last example of the power of the personal deficit repertoire in defining singleness
initially presented a puzzle.

Extract 13
Jill: Well, that’s very good, thank you very much, that gives me a very helpful
introduction

Mary: I’ve got lots of friends, lots of friends and supportive relatives, so my
social life is good.

This sequence comes after Mary has given a brief description of herself. Why does Mary
go on to comment on her friends at this point? It appears as an afterthought to her
introductory account of herself, in which she mentioned her divorce, another long-term
relationship and discusses in more detail her career as a nurse. It is not a response to any
question. It may be a response to the interviewer’s comment that she has been given ‘a
very helpful introduction’ – a conversational act that attempts to close off what has been
said so far preparatory to further exploration. If so, we can read Mary’s response as an
effort to fill out the portrait that she has given of herself, finding that it is incomplete in
some important way. But there is a defensive quality to this interjection as though she is
warding off some unspoken accusation. The unspoken accusation, we suggest, arises from
the personal deficit repertoire of singleness. Single women in effect stand always accused.
Women have to establish that they are not ‘one of those’ in order to formulate more
positive senses of self.

14
Troubled Desire
The second prevalent area of trouble among women in the sample arose in relation to the
interview question concerning wishes around future relationships or future marriages. It
was striking how often women appeared to be apologising for acknowledging a desire for
commitment with a partner.

Extract 14
Jill: […] These are just some final things; um, sort of summary things really,
like, I think you’ve partly answered this but, I mean, let’s just try you
again. Do you feel that you’re actively looking now for a long-term
relationship, possibly?

Milly: Yes I think I am really. I’ve never been the party animal type; I’ve never
been the one to want lots of dates. You know, I tend to be a one-man
woman I suppose. And while it was never a big issue when I was younger,
now I do appreciate the companionship side of things. I value that far more
highly than perhaps I did before and I want someone to belong to and
someone to belong to me. And I suppose, if I’m honest, yes I’m looking
for a husband. Yes. I have to be specific. I don’t think I want to go into
another one of these, five or six year living together type situations; I don’t
really want that. I want to be married I suppose. But, you know, I’m not
feverish about it! I’m just hoping that it will happen in the near future.

Milly gives an account of her pursuit of a long-term relationship that is positive, so why
does she frame the statement that she is looking for a husband with: ‘if I’m honest’? This
and similar phrases such as ‘I must admit’, ‘I can’t deny’, ‘I wouldn’t rule out …’
occurred very frequently when women addressed the issue of future relationships. Why
does this discursive pattern occur? Why do women confess to the desire for a relationship
and present it as a ‘truth’? Specifically, a truth ‘underneath’ what now becomes re-
positioned as the ‘rhetoric’ of desirable independence. In many ways this is surprising in
light of the pattern highlighted in the previous section. There we suggested that women
have a difficult task in relation to being single. They have to acknowledge their
membership of the social category, distance themselves from the imputation of personal
deficit, and build a positive account of themselves. Superficially, one might expect that
the subject position of ‘looking for a husband’ would help to ward off the position of
personal deficit. Yet it seems to create more trouble.

Trouble may now be arising from the highly idealized repertoires of singleness and the
relative lack of discursive routes available to women to celebrate their single identity. If
one avows a strongly positive view of singleness then this makes the desire to move out
of the category troublesome to express. What seems difficult to hold together in the
current discursive climate is a positive construction of the category ‘single’ with the
desire for relationship. One seems to obviate the other. The positive constructions of the
idealized repertoires seem to render the desire for relationship difficult to admit.

Milly also disclaims ‘being desperate’ – ‘I’m not feverish about it’, she states. We suggest
that given the ideological dilemmas generated by the available interpretative resources,
the very best identity allowed to the single woman is to embrace independence, autonomy
and self-development without remainder. And, the very worst and most shameful identity

15
(as evidenced in what is warded off and avoided in the talk) is to express strong needs for
others and to pitifully fail to have them met. Personal deficit is marked by failure ‘to get a
man’ or, as one participant noted, through the failure ‘to be chosen by anyone’. Such
failures elicit the personal deficit and social exclusion repertoires while single successes
are constructed narrowly within the two idealized repertoires. Women in fact literally
can’t win here with this combination of repertoires. One aspect of their lives and
experiences becomes mystified and pathologized. The next extract demonstrates how this
discursive and ideological tension consistently became read in psychological terms as
splits and tensions within the self.

Extract 15
Marion: […] You know, I think if, if I had a choice, and you know I could have a
perfect person to be with, I’d much rather have that than to be on my own.
I can’t deny that (laughs). I was trying to, I was trying to work out why I
didn’t want that to happen but, because I know I want to be, in my head I
am perfectly happy and content, but in my heart I am not really.

Marion also frames her preference as an admission: ‘I can’t deny that’. To deal with the
dilemmas contained within the discourse of singleness she constructs a split or divided
self with head and heart going in different directions. Splits within the available
discursive resources become re-located as contradictions within women themselves. The
talk of a ‘perfect person’ also does some complex work to sustain positive constructions
of the single self. Marion effectively formulates her want as a serious choice and
something potentially out of normal reach. Singleness is so desirable; a potential
relationship has to be very good indeed.

Conclusion
We have used data from interviews with women to examine how they work with the
patterns and contradictions contained within the current polarized discursive climate
around singleness. We have tried to demonstrate the negative consequences for women of
the way the ‘logic’ of this ideological field is typically organized. We are not suggesting
that single women cannot think and speak in other and more diverse ways about their
situation, but rather given the homogeneity and ubiquity of these discursive resources, the
identity work of most of the women interviewed seemed to take them into account in
some way. They form an uncomfortable discursive climate and one of the goals of
feminist politics must be to contribute to a more comfortable climate.

It is not for us to prescribe how this might be done. There are some difficulties in building
an identity politics around a category that includes quite diverse experience. It is also a
category that individual women do not necessarily see themselves as inhabiting forever.
The women’s movement’s use of consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s and later has
been critiqued for making assumptions about universality of experiences. It lost some
force through its late attention to the different experiences of, for instance, black, lesbian,
or working-class women (see discussion in Connell, 1987, pp. 270–274). We hope that
papers such as this one can contribute to recognition of the dilemmas of self-
representation that women on their own have to deal with, and stimulate further thinking
on this subject.

16
Singleness is a troubled category (difficult to align oneself with) and yet, in a double bind,
the positive and idealized interpretative resources that are available seem to make other
aspects of women’s lives and expectations pathological. Women are faced with a difficult
set of dilemmas. Either, they can choose to construct singleness very positively through
the repertoires of choice and independence and self-development and achievement and
then it becomes difficult to talk about any move out of the category. Or, women can talk
unashamedly about their desire for a relationship and risk being constructed as deficient
and ‘desperate’, and marked by their failure to already have a man. There seem to be few
satisfactory ways out of these dilemmas given the contemporary politics of relationships.
The only positive strategy used by a small number of women interviewed was to develop
a reflexive account and talk about the dilemmas per se rather than alternating between
each side of them as experiential truths. There is clearly work here for feminism to do. A
feminist psychology of singleness based on critical discursive psychology will we hope
aid this political project through focusing attention firmly on the patterning of ideology,
as we have attempted to do here, rather than the supposed dysfunction of single women.

i
The transcription symbols used are […] to indicate that there is an omission of text, [text] to show a
clarification of text inserted by the authors, and (.) to indicate an untimed pause in the talk. The punctuation
used is for convenience of reading rather than to signify changes in tone.

17
APPENDIX

Table of participants showing occupation, age bands, marital

status and parenting status

Name Occupation 30-34 35-39 40-44 45-49 50-54 55-60

Shelley Secretary AS

Val Computer SAc

programmer

Sarah Therapist AS

Milly IT Trainer AS

Josie Teacher SAc

Receptionist
Polly AS

Thari Teacher ASc

Sue Counsellor AS

Susie Probation SA
officer

Lucy Lecturer SA

Mary Nurse SA

Ruth Student AS

Annie Secretary SA

Margaret Shop assistant ASc

Marion Mental Health SA

User
consultant

Lyn Lecturer AS

Pat Lecturer ASc

Patsy Management AS
consultant

Rachel Social work AS

18
 trainer

Pauline Lecturer AS

Maggie Information AS
work/research

Mya Racial ASc

equality
officer

Jay Housing SAc

manager

Alix Lecturer SA

Claire Therapist SA

Grace Lecturer AS

Molly Social worker AS

Margot Unemployed/t SAc

rainer

Jane Student AS

Jennifer Student AS

AS = ‘Always single’ includes all those who have never married

SA = ‘Single again’ includes all those who are divorced or widowed
C
= Has a child or adult children

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