I knew at age five that I didn’t want to get married and have children, and I’ve never seriously questioned that decision. (And I’m now about to turn 40.) I knew then that it was unusual, but reading E. Kay Trimberger’s The New Single Woman I came to understand why many people, Americans in particular, find it not just odd, but extraordinary.

She asks: “Is it possible to be a single woman in one’s fifties with a full life and a lot of joy?” My answer, “well of course; you’re at least as likely to be happy than if you are married or, at least as likely, going through a divorce.” Yet, as Trimberger points out, the general answer is: “Not if you listen to the cultural messages beamed at us…. Only in an intimate couple will we find emotional satisfaction, sexual fulfillment, companionship, security and spiritual meaning.” (I’d added, from everything I’ve read and seen: “particularly in America”. These pressures also exist in Britain and the UK, but being societies generally less keen to enforce conformity, they are not as strong.)

Trimberger, by profession a sociologist (she’s professor emerita of women’s and gender studies at Sonoma State University), over a decade from 1994 followed the progress of a group of 46 middle-class, largely professional women, some white, some African American, some Latina, to explore how their personal and professional lives developed through their thirties, forties and fifties. Her initial finding was that “almost all of the women, even those in their fifties, whether heterosexual, lesbian or bisexual, still hoped to find the ‘right one’.”

In part seeking answers for her own life — she’s a never-married woman who adopted a child on her own at age 40 — Trimberger seeks to identify the steps, emotional and practical, they needed to take to become “happy”. She eventually arrives at six key points that she believes single women need:
1. A home “that nurtures her, whether she lives by herself or with other people”.
2. Work that is satisfying, allows her to be economincally autonomous, and that also provides “a psychological identity but is not her whole life”.
3. Satisfaction with her sexuality, whatever that means.
4. Some connection with the next generation – family relationships, volunteering, proteges or similar.
5. A network of family and friends “that provides companionship and people they can rely on in times of trouble”.
6. A community built around that friendship network.

Yet looking objectively at this list, it is clear that this is not just a list for single women, but for all women, and men. Trimberger says:

“When we embark on adulthood, few of us really know where we will end up. Given that, it is important for single women in their twenties, thirties and forties more consciously to pursue these goals. Whether they hope to couple or not, this is the route to a richer life and one with more options later on. Conversely, to focus primarily on finding a partner while other parts of life are neglected is a recipe for unhappiness.”

That list also addresses one of the biggest fears Trimberger’s subject identify, as a successful African American woman she calls Lanette says, even though she’s already made financial arrangements:

“Whenever I pick up the paper at Christmas-time and see a story about an older woman who has no relatives, who needs a couple of hundred bucks so that her lights don’t get turned off, I say to my mother, ‘That’s my fear. I’ll be eighty-five years old and all my family and friends will have passed on, and because I have not partnered myself, I’ll end up here.”

My reaction to this is that most women will end up this way anyway; even if partnered, and happily partnered, the mortality statistics mean that most women will end up on their own. And while some children might be in a position to take a large role in these circumstances, many will not be able, or will not want, to do so.

But Trimberger is resolutely focused not on comparisons, but on the strategies her subjects attempt to take to deal with this and other concerns. And she has hugely reassuring tales from two of her subjects, both of whom died of breast cancer during the decade. Yet they died not alone, but within large friendship networks, which looked after both their practical and emotional needs. The account of Diane is particularly inspiring:

“She told me that she preferred to rely on friends rather than family members. Although her daughter had moved back in with her, Diane wanted her to have her own life. Diane’s mother was eighty-six, and her sister and cousins lived several hours away. Diane shared her fears more intimately with her friends, for she felt that they could handle her illness more objectively and philosophically. Family members got too upset and made dealing with the cancer more difficult for her.”

Yet, as Trimberger points out, much needs to change in the framework of society to facilitate such networks of care.

Hospitals … often admit only immediate family members (which, in progressive institutions now include domestic partners) to intensive care units and the rooms of those who are seriously ill or dying. … Workplace bereavement policies do not include paid time off to attend the funeral of a friend. Even the most progressive family leave policies provide time off only for the care of family members … Public policies that help build networks of care will improve the life of all adults.”

The fact is that societies are returning to more historically normal levels of childlessness and “singleness”. The New Single Woman points out that in 1950 20 per cent of women aged 40-45 were childless; the 2002 figure of 18 per cent is heading in the same direction. Trimberger quotes a psychological survey which says motherhood is no longer “necessarily central to the development of women’s sense of her adult self”. Yet of course what is needed is to find alternative adult selves, as women in earlier ages did. In the end, Trimberger concludes, in the words of one of her subjects: “The art is in making the choice you can live with.”

This book offers, through practical examples and advice, a framework for doing just that. Trimberger’s case studies from one social class, and one nation, which does limit its scope. (For many women with low-incomes financial constraints ensure daily survival is the most choice that they have.) But there’s still something here for anyone, particularly any woman, who wants to address the question: “How can I have a good life?”

My 19th-century “blogger” Miss Williams Wynn is today showing the breadth of her interests, with a diary entry about the history of Haiti, particularly the reign of the despot Henry Christophe. She’s been reading a manuscript history by a “Mr Courtenay”, who visited with Sir Home Popham, but then goes on to report her own involvement, in trying encourage a friend of Christophe’s daughter to write a memoir from her recollections.

The eldest daughter was described as a woman of superior talents, who had taken great pains in cultivating her mind. She was said to have been the confidante and counselor of her father during his latter years. She spoke French easily but not well, she had a good figure, and, as far as I could judge from under a close black bonnet, an intelligent eye. The other sister was a heavy, stuffy, short, fat person. They were in deep mourning, and very plainly dressed. …
In the summer of 1824 I heard of them travelling in Germany: at this period the King of Bavaria purchased a part of a set of the ex-Queen’s jewels (rubies I believe) for a wedding present to his daughter, who married the Prince Royal of Prussia. In 1826 I saw one of these Haytian Princesses walking in the street at Pisa. My laquais de place called her a Principessa della Morea, spoke of them as living very retired, but knew nothing of the mother, who, I conclude, is dead.

It would be nice to have some good environmental news to report. Unfortunately there isn’t any:

Anyone for Yes Minister? The Guardian today reports that as row between the Department of Trade and Industry and the environment department (Defra) has paralysed for seven months a decision on carbon emission targets.

Labour has pledged in three successive manifestos that by 2010 it will cut the UK’s CO2 emissions by 20% below 1990 levels. The promise has reached almost totemic status in the party.
But publication of a programme to meet the targets has been held up, with the Department of Trade and Industry arguing that emissions have risen at such a rate over the past two years that it is unlikely Britain can meet the target. The DTI’s latest projections show that, on current measures, CO2 will have been reduced to “only around 10% below 1990 levels by 2010”.
But the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, armed with less statistical and economic modelling firepower than the DTI, is contesting the figures, and insists the target can still be met by vigorous action.
Ministers are frustrated by the delay since the postponements reduce the government’s chance of meeting its 2010 target. They fear that the UK’s claim to international leadership on climate change is being undermined.

It must be time for Tony Blair to make another “Green” speech, just to “prove” his credentials.

The government’s inaction is demonstrated by the latest transport figures:

The total distance travelled by Britain’s cars has doubled since 1979 to 247 billion miles a year, and the number of private cars has risen by 12 million to 26 million.
Last year cars accounted for 85 per cent of the total distance we travelled. The average person spent 221 hours in a car and covered 5,500 miles at an average speed of less than 25mph.
There are now more homes that possess two or more cars than homes that do not have a car. One in 20 homes now has at least three cars, up from one in 50 in 1980. The typical family no longer shares a car but has one for each adult member, with 60 per cent of cars on the road containing only the driver.

Of course when the congestion gets a bit worse, it will be quicker to go virtually everywhere by bicycle. I can manage about 10mph average on a reasonable urban run, and I’m no athlete.
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What should pupils read before they leave school? A survey comes up with the usual dead white males, with an odd smattering of Bronte. Who says the canon is dead?

But cheers to Zoe Williams for defending the current abortion time limit of 24 weeks. At least the Guardian seems not to have gone anti-abortion, unlike its Sunday sister.

It is seldom that you get to see a master actor, and a master creator, at the top of his or her form. Robert Lepage’s The Andersen Project at the Barbican is one such show. If you can, borrow the cash, or sleep with someone to get a ticket, do it.

You could write a summary that would make the plot sound like a bad Victorian novel. This account of Frederic, the Canadian pop lyricist brought to Paris to write a libretto inspired by one of the darker fairytales of Hans Christian Anderson for a European “co-operative” project right out of the horror files of the Telegraph, is, however, instead a deeply human story that never strikes a false note.

There are plenty of laughs, with a rapid-fire string of European and Atlantic arts in-jokes that almost, but not quite, descend to a stand-up routine. You are, however, always laughing with Lepage, never at him. On the wilder artistic avant garde: “what makes the English furious makes the French delirious”.

This is a one-man show, in the sense that Lepage plays not only the would-be librettist, seeking professional and personal validation, but also all of the other characters, from Arnaud, the conniving but troubled administrator of the Paris Opera, to the Dryad of Anderson’s tale. Yet there’s a long list of technical credits, from the puppeteer who produces a wonderfully believable mutt out of thin air to the “horse cart-maker”, and these are well deserved. Every aspect of The Andersen Project from the supra-realist video backdrops to the elaborate but designerista set, has been polished to almost eerie perfection.READ MORE

On 17 April 1467, John Russell, a future Chancellor of England, bought in Bruges a printed copy of Cicero’s De Officilis, printed by Fust in Mainz the previous year. This was “one of the first records” of an Englishman purchasing a printed book. (William Caxton was the Governor of the English Nation in Bruges at the time.)

Of such small steps are intellectual leaps – such as into the Renaissance – made.

(From A.S.G. Edwards, “Continental Influences on London Printing and Reading in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries,” London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages, Julia Boffey and Pamela King (eds), 1995, Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Queen Mary and Westfield College University of London, pp. 230.

One of the topics discussed at yesterday’s Camden Greens AGM (on which hopefully more soon) was the world’s second problem commodity, water. Topically, it turns out, since the England and Wales are facing their worst drought in 75 years.

One the first problem commodity – fossil fuels – there is also more bad news today, with a report saying there is “only a small chance of greenhouse gas emissions being kept below ‘dangerous’ levels.

Yet it might not, quite, be too late:

On the other question asked at the 2005 conference – what are the options for avoiding dangerous concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – the report says that technological options to reduce emissions do exist.
It concludes that the biggest obstacles to the take up of technologies such as renewables and “clean coal” lie in vested interests, cultural barriers to change and simple lack of awareness.

So I’m going to try to do my bit. I signed up to be a Green candidate for the Regent’s Park ward in the Camden Borough elections in May. At least I’ll be able to say I tried.