When Jane Austen wrote her novel Pride and Prejudice in 1813, the oft-quoted opening (It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife) showed very clearly the position of middle class women at that time.

Their future depended on men: husbands if they married, fathers or other male relatives if they did not. When they lived on an entailed estate, it passed to a male relative, however distant, when the father died. Daughters then had to leave their home and move elsewhere.

Jane Austen was lucky, for her brother who inherited the family estate supported his sister financially for a time. She knew all about the difficulties of middle class unmarried women. In spite of the touch of irony, it is a recurring theme in her books.

So Mrs Bennett, however silly she appears in Pride and Prejudice, had reason to be concerned about the future of her five daughters. Seen in the light of the customs of nineteenth century England, marriage was for all her girls, save the independent Elizabeth, one of their few options other than being an ‘old maid’. A ‘good’ marriage was vitally important to them. Few jobs were available other than as a governess. In that position they were neither fish nor fowl; too well-born to be accepted downstairs, too lowly to be welcomed upstairs.

Yet even a ‘good’ marriage was no piece of cake. Women could not keep their own money or easily leave their husbands. If they ever managed to get a divorce (a most difficult procedure, needing the help of clever lawyers), they had no automatic right to the custody of their children. This possible deprivation was often used as a threat to recalcitrant wives.

ADULTERY AND INHERITANCE

The reason for this situation is not hard to seek. Double standards of chastity for men and women were enshrined in the laws which governed marriage and property rights in England until the late nineteenth century and in other parts of Europe until the early twentieth century. Inheritance went through the male line. Unless a baby was swapped at birth, there was no doubt as to who was its mother. For many years royal births had to be witnessed to avoid such a contingency. Blood tests were not used and DNA not yet discovered so there was no indisputable proof of fatherhood.

A wife’s adultery could result in the birth of offspring not fathered by the legitimate husband. Women were therefore made the target of legal constraints. These constraints did not apply to men, for if their adulterous affairs led to unmarried women giving birth, their children were more patently illegitimate. The children could not inherit, though provision might be made for them.

Working class women were not troubled by the laws of inheritance. Marriage usually offered them (as for their richer sisters) the best option. There was no welfare state provision. Jobs paid starvation wages, but that was better than nothing. Without work, the spectre of the workhouse loomed ahead. Organised charity, with few exceptions, was, in the words of J.B. O’Reilly, ‘scrimped and iced in the name of a cautious, statistical Christ’. Marriage then provided a safeguard of some kind.

The possible earning power of a husband gave to his wife and children a degree of security. By contrast a mistress, unless of a rich and very generous man (traits which do not always go together), was in a very vulnerable position, and her children might be even worse off. Until the end of the nineteenth century, 30 out of every 1,000 children still did not survive their first year.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES AND FREEDOMS

The lot of all women has altered radically since Jane Austen’s day and is likely to alter still more in the twenty-first century. Contraception gives them the opportunity to have sex without the fear of bearing an illegitimate child. The concept of illegitimacy itself has gone out of the window and in Britain, abortion can be had almost on demand. Mothers need no longer fear starvation, social stigma or the workhouse for themselves or their ‘bastard’ children. They can have sex without marriage and even children without sex and do not have to look to the father, known or unknown, for financial support. The state will do that job if either is unemployed.

Social welfare, assisted housing or tax concessions may be miserly compared with the finances of better off parents, but such benefits ensure, at least, that no child with or without two parents need die from starvation in the Western world today.

Women do not have to be governesses or nannies, but if they choose these jobs, they are likely to earn a good salary and be respected by the wealthy families who can afford them. Neither do they have to resign jobs on marriage, as they did for example in the UK civil service and teaching, until World War Two. Some part, at least, of the world is now their oyster. Under-represented in politics, banking, the international scene, top posts in industry, academia and the civil service, women nevertheless have new career opportunities opening up to them in a way never possible even only a couple of decades ago. In theory at least it seems a woman can have everything if she has the ‘right’ personality – with a modicum of good looks. If both are not quite perfect, high qualifications might suffice. This means a longer period of study to get those qualifications. To rise higher in their chosen career, women postpone marriage and children until the time seems more propitious. That tends to be in their middle thirties. They then look round and find that many of the once ‘eligible’ men are already married or do not want a ‘commitment’.

WHERE ARE ALL THE SINGLE MEN?

Where do these partnerless 30+ women now find an eligible single man under forty – or even stretching the age gap a bit, under 50? The problem is felt especially by women wanting to have children, for pregnancy gets less likely as they approach the menopause, whereas men can go on having children until very late in life. Surrogacy is fraught with emotional hazards. Having a baby is possible by impregnation with donor sperm, but this option is usually favoured only by a woman desperate to bear a child. She may be prepared to become pregnant by an invisible father, a man never seen, and who has never shown her love. What of children born in this way? How will they feel having a father who does not care whether they live or die?

The facts

The dearth of eligible males for women in their thirties is more apparent than real. In the UK there are actually more younger men than younger women. For the whole of the 20th century more boys than girls have been born: 104 boys to every 100 girls. In developing countries this ratio remains as in the world as a whole, but more girls than boys die between one and four years of age. Although the figures for male and female births tend to be similar throughout the world, there are occasional variations for which no explanation can be found. As an example, the proportion of boys increased briefly during and immediately after World War One. The numbers rose again in the early thirties to just over 105 per 100 female births. Another marked increase occurred around the middle of World War Two.

After the early forties, there was a 40-year period of stability in relative birth rates during which time around 106 boys were born for every 100 girls. In the eighties fewer boys were born. The statistics now continue to show around 105 male per 100 female births. This higher ratio of males to females is maintained but with the preponderance of males reducing until in the UK, numbers of males and females in the 45 to 50 age group is roughly the same. After this plateau the proportion of males in the population drops considerably.

Other influences affect these trends. In the UK as in other industrialised countries the death rate is higher for young boys than for girls of the same age. In developing countries the reverse is true but this inbalance is being remedied by fewer women in those countries dying in childbirth. The number of men dying between the ages of 29 and 40 years in the UK, however, is currently at its highest for a century. The Department of Social Statistics reported in 1996 that young men were dying at this early age because of the new danger of AIDS and the stress of modern living, including the trauma of divorce or separation. Men apparently adapt less well than women to a life alone and commit suicide more frequently. Women also live longer than men. The early surplus of males to females caused by more boys being born than girls thus levels out and later reverses. After the age of 50, in almost all industrialised countries, more women survive than men.

The ‘surplus’ of men to women in the teens and twenties means that at those ages, women have a wide choice of partners. When a partnership comes to grief within the first five years, they can take their leave and graze in richer pastures elsewhere. In the older age groups from 40 to 50 onwards, it is men who have more choices. Even if they are already ‘committed’ or ‘promised’ as they would say in Ireland, they may be tempted to look around at what’s on offer, and unfortunately, for those left behind, there is usually plenty.

MAN: THE ENDANGERED SPECIES?

Along with changes in population and the economic position of women over the last decades, there has been an almost unnoticed change in the status of men. This used to come from power, inherited or created by the man himself. In the middle and upper classes that power meant titles, money and position. According to Rosalie Osias of The Los Angeles Times, ‘the man with the biggest club still gets the woman’. She once wrote of President Clinton that he ‘exudes so much power and charisma that women were willing to ignore domestic flaws in the White House that would detonate a divorce in their own homes’. A survey of 800 female secretaries by her own research institute showed that 68% of them found power and position to be one of a man’s most sexually attractive attributes.

Muscle-power

For working class men in the UK and doubtless in other countries too, power used to be rated in terms of their physical strength. Men and women may be equal in courage, endurance and brainpower, but men are taller, stronger and bigger. They have a longer reach, more powerful muscles and usually a far more compelling sex drive. They can walk, run and swim faster than women.

In the early part of the twentieth century, when unemployment in the UK hovered round the two million mark, the strongest man capable of hard manual labour was one of the ‘lucky’ ones. He was, for example, able to push his way to the front of a throng of 600 men scrambling for one of the 20 jobs available at the London docks. For the ‘privilege’ of getting this work, he earned all of sixpence an hour with the chance of drowning or other accident and no compensation. Without that meagre wage, however, his family could end in the workhouse. The welfare state was not yet born.

A working class wife might earn a few shillings by cleaning, washing, sticking boxes together, making streamers, basting trousers or other forms of usually sweated labour, but her husband was the main earner: the breadwinner. His earnings were all-important for the family’s survival. If food was short, he had to be given the main share to keep up the strength needed for his job. Even when he was not an unskilled manual worker but a tradesman, his earnings, not those of his wife, determined the quality of life which the family had.

THE NEW BALANCE OF POWER

Technology changed that picture. It lessened the need for physical strength. Those who provided manual labour – young and old, the hewers of wood and the drawers of water – were no longer essential in a modern economy. That should have released them from the daily grind of providing for a family by gruelling work for long hours in factories and underground for a pittance. However, with technology, super-women and lesser varieties of the species appeared on the scene. Their contribution to the household income was no longer derived, like that of their mothers and grandmothers, from part-time virtual slavery at home. It might now be almost as much as and sometimes more than their partners. This apparent equality has proved elusive for both sexes. Juggling careers with the needs of children and home sometimes proved a bit too much of a good thing, even for superwomen.

But the position of men as breadwinners had already been demoted. They are no longer seen, if seen at all, as the head of the family but downgraded to sperm providers and pleasure givers. Healthy young men, like pedigree bulls, can now be valued and paid for their ability to reproduce. Why do they allow themselves to be used in this way, to help breed children they will never know or see? Can it really be for the love of their species? Have they got a super ego complex? Or are they just after the money?

CHILDREN NEED FATHERS

Being a parent is more than being a sperm or egg provider. Procreation is usually pleasurable and sometimes, at least according to all the best romances, ecstatically so. If it were not, far fewer children would be born. But that is only the beginning. Some single mothers often do a wonderful job bringing up their daughters and create with them a powerful, long-lasting relationship. Young lads are more influenced by ‘achievers’ whom they can emulate. They tend to take notice of authority laid down by someone more powerful and physically bigger than themselves.

The lack of a father figure, a prototype on which they normally base their own ideas of male adulthood, can make them feel alienated. This absence, whether because of divorce, a moment of passion and a hasty exit thereafter, a sperm injection from an unknown donor, or in the case of the very young, curiosity, has the same result. In the place of fathers never seen, known or spoken of by mothers with respect or love, boys substitute football ‘heroes’ or the gunslinging characters with a vocabulary of four words and not much else, seen on TV and in American films. The example of other ‘heroes’ is sometimes worse.

Consequences of having no father figure

The majority of crimes against the person, of mugging and burglary, are committed today by young males, usually from homes where the father is missing or unknown. Research by Professor Kathleen Kiernan of the Social Policy Unit (London School of Economics) reveals some grim figures about children from fatherless families. They are:

• 8 times more likely to be murdered
• 18 times more likely to murder
• 40 times more likely to fail in the education system
• 20 times more likely to be unemployed
• 32 times more likely to be homeless
• 10 times more likely to abuse drink and/or drugs
• 35 times more likely to be in prison.

Professor Kiernan blames unmarried parenthood for these ‘fragile beginnings’, yet further research shows that children of lone father families develop similarly to those in two-parent households. It is the absence of fathers as role models that appears to harm children.

Stepfathers do not necessarily feel affection for another man’s teenage son living in the same house. A stepdaughter may get unwanted attention. Teenage sons, for their part, do not always become as endeared to step-siblings or their mother’s new lover/husband as she is. Such emotions can lead to friction in the home and homelessness in the streets. Sons and daughters need a good father as a role model of men generally, otherwise their own future happiness may falter, even if it does not follow the same pattern as that of their separated/divorced parents.

In the case of boys, rejection, as they see it, can lead to heartbreak or violence; in daughters, guilt, distress and emotional instability. Yet even devoted fathers are finding it more and more difficult to keep in touch with their children after a divorce; 50% of them lose contact altogether within three years. This may be due to:

• the attitude of the mother
• her new partner
• financial difficulties
• commuting problems.

However much he loves his children, and for many it is a most terrible blow to have to lose them, even temporarily, the father tends to lose contact with them over time. Unless he is very highly motivated or a legacy or heritage is involved, he gradually becomes exhausted with the effort of trying to keep in touch with his children and finally gives up seeing them at all.

Family law in the UK is heavily weighted against the father having custody and can cause him and his children great grief. Bob Geldof wrote a brilliant and moving plea in The Times 5 December 2003, describing the tribulation of divorced men such as himself trying to keep in touch with their children.

MARITAL HARMONY

A study by the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO) found that children in trouble with the police have little or no attachment to their fathers, even if they still live at home. Where the father never joined in the activities of their children at the age of 12, for example, this doubled the risk that the youngsters would be convicted of a crime as teenagers and of violent offences later in life.

From research in several countries, NACRO found that twice as many boys offended whose fathers had left home because of marital breakdown as those whose parents lived together in relative harmony. Delinquency was far more often associated with fathers being absent because of ‘parental conflict’ than with fathers being absent through death or illness. Children under four when their fathers left were most likely to go on to serious crime. One study found that a third of working class boys whose parents were separated through marital breakdown were convicted as juveniles, and girls are currently fast catching up with boys in terms of violence.

Why bother?

In modern marriage, no matter what vows are taken, neither partner can rely on a lifetime’s commitment by the other. The wife can divorce the man, get custody of the children and retain the family home. The husband is shoved out, sometimes so that his wife’s lover can move in. This is perhaps an exaggerated picture of the hazards of marriage for the modern man but it is enough to put many young men off that idea altogether. What do they lose by foregoing marriage and ‘shacking up’ with a woman, instead? And if the woman is happy to go along with this attitude, what has she got to lose? If she becomes pregnant, he can move off and leave the state to pick up the bill. Indeed a teenage girl might find that being a young single mother housed by the council and fed by social security has more to recommend it than living in the parental home tied to an unemployed loafer lounging around the house or drinking down at the pub.

‘Cast off’ older wives

For older wives the scenarios are different – though sometimes worse. After perhaps 15 years or more of working in the home, looking after children, accompanying husbands on prestige raising trips abroad, acting as unpaid secretaries, or giving up a career for less well paid or part-time jobs, they can easily be discarded for younger models. They may not be so nubile as they once were, and unlike men of the same age, usually have less opportunity, if they should so want, of another partner. Lacking a skill, the poorer among them may also find it hard to get work and have to take a low wage job to make ends meet. Pension rights once expected and assets such as the family house might be in jeopardy and along with companionship and a once comfortable lifestyle, go up in smoke.

Wives who have been ‘cast off, through no discernible fault of their own except that of growing older, often become more cynical about men than they used to be and so team up with somebody unsuitable. In spite of working harder this time because, misquoting Wilde, ‘to divorce one partner looks like a misfortune, to divorce two looks like carelessness’, the next few years at least could see a bumpy ride for them and yet another applicant for the ever growing First (and second and third?) Wives’ Club.

When you grow tired of somebody, today’s message is to move on. Ignore any promises you made in the registry office, or at the altar. You have your own life to live. Think above all else of your own needs, your own happiness. Ignore the rest.

The cult of celebrity

The many spouses and lovers of rich people or ‘celebs’ are written about as if everybody, not only those intimately involved, gains more happiness from this inconstancy. Newspaper inches give them valuable publicity – hard luck on discarded pawns in these games of sexual chess. Get yourself a better agent. Young children, older wives or lovers, are the ones who most often lose out financially, physically or emotionally.

Most important from a social point of view is that trend setters like these ‘celebs’ encourage those who have neither the opportunity nor the money to copy their example. Imagining such a lifestyle is worth striving for, they forget that short-term marriages or pairings give short-term happiness. Partnership is meant for the long term. Like a financial investment it does not soar ever upwards. It goes through troughs and peaks, yielding gains and dividends on the way. With a bit of luck thrown in for good measure, it is always possible, if you know yourself and what you want, to meet somebody whose company you enjoy so much you will want to live with them, not for a night and a day, but for at least part of a lifetime.

The following chapters will help you to discover more about yourself while or even before you start looking for a counterpart on either side of the gender line. They also suggest other options that you may never have considered, but which could give you more happiness and peace of mind than chasing after an elusive Will or Willa of the wisp.