Jill Summerville describes the many ways that single women with disabilities are unfairly disadvantaged. This is Part 1 of 2.
Bella’s intro: The experiences and perspectives of people with disabilities have been vastly underrepresented in writings about single people. I am so grateful to Jill Summerville for all she is sharing in her 2-part contribution focusing on single women. Here, in Part 1, she tells us about the implications of federal laws as well as workplace policies and practices for single women with disabilities. She also explains why we need to think more deeply about what counts as adulthood, and she tells us about “disability time.”
In Part 2 (coming soon), she takes on the “desirability” of single women with disabilities in the context of the feminine ideal. She discusses marriage rates, and wisely acknowledges that some people do not aspire to marry. That, to me, was a particularly welcome, especially when one of the people she quoted (and critiqued) was peddling the same old myths about the non-financial benefits of marrying.
Single Women with Disabilities:
A Worth Universally Doubted, Part 1
By Jill Summerville
A Historical Truth Universally Acknowledged
Like most romantics, I spend hours reading Jane Austen novels. I spend even more hours taking quizzes that will tell me which of her heroines I am most like. While I wish I possessed Elizabeth Bennet’s wit and fine eyes, there is only one character of Austen’s whom I could reasonably argue I resemble, and she is certainly not one of Austen’s heroines. For Miss Bates, a comedic character in Austen’s 1815 novel, Emma, “unmarried,” is, not a temporary, unfortunate condition, but a permanent social and socioeconomic status. After Emma caustically mocks Miss Bates at a party, Emma’s best friend (and future husband), George Knightley, expresses his disappointment in her conduct. Emma should behave better towards Miss Bates, he tells her, because she is better than Miss Bates.
For a woman in the Regency period, getting married was the surest way to ensure her socioeconomic security. As an unmarried woman, Miss Bates—like Austen herself, who never married—depends on her family’s financial resources. Since Miss Bates’ family’s financial resources are limited, her socioeconomic status has decreased. As an unmarried woman, Miss Bates has a social status lower than that of any married or marriageable woman.
Thanks to the sociocultural and socioeconomic gains earned by activists in the women’s rights movement and the disability rights movement, I have privileges that Jane Austen may not have been able to imagine. As a twenty-first century American woman who uses a manual wheelchair due to cerebral palsy, I possess physical mobility and social mobility. Yet I still live in a society that privileges marriage, a society where married women have sociocultural and socioeconomic privileges that single women do not. Further, single women with disabilities often have an even lower sociocultural and socioeconomic status than their able-bodied single counterparts.
[Certainly, not all biological women identify as female, and not all females have childbearing bodies. However, as we will be discussing sociocultural constructs affecting people who are likely to be identified as female—whether or not that is how they personally identify—I will exclusively use the pronouns “she” and “her.”]
The “Marriage Penalty” For (Some) People With Disabilities
While uncoupled single people pay more taxes than coupled singles or married couples regardless of ability, disabled or interability, married couples also receive financial benefits unavailable to single people with disabilities. In the United States, any eligible person with a disability could receive monthly Social Security Income (SSI) benefits. The marriage penalty—the policy wherein two married people receiving SSI benefits will each receive one-quarter less per month than they would if they were unmarried, cohabiting individuals—has been justly criticized, and it may discourage two partners who both receive SSI from marrying in order to maintain their benefits.
However, married individuals receiving SSI are entitled to more total income than single, non cohabiting individuals receiving SSI. In 2021, a married couple could receive $1,191 in benefits. By contrast, a single person could only receive $794. An individual must have no more than $2,000 in assets in order to be eligible for SSI, while a married couple where both partners have a disability or disabilities may have up to $3,000 in assets. [The Social Security Administration bases eligibility on one’s income level and assets, and not every person with a disability is subject to the “marriage penalty.”]
In order to be eligible for SSI, a person must live below the Official Poverty Measure (OPM). The U.S. Census Bureau determines the OPM by comparing pre-tax cash income against a threshold that is set at three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963 and adjusted for family size. The maximum SSI benefit may not exceed 74% of the lowest threshold for the OPM.
Married individuals receiving SSI may not exceed an income level of 74% of the federal benefit rate, but a married couple’s joint income is higher than the income of an individual who lives independently. Additionally, a cohabiting married couple financially benefits from sharing living expenses and taking advantage of tax benefits only available to married couples. While non cohabiting, unmarried couples receiving SSI may fare better than married couples because The Social Security Administration cannot monitor their sharing of resources, single people who live independently are most severely disadvantaged, especially since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) allows companies to pay some full time employees with disabilities a salary that is below the federal minimum wage.
In a marriage where only one partner with a disability is eligible to receive SSI, a portion of the higher earning marital partner’s income is considered joint income. The benefits awarded to the marital partner who receives SSI may be greatly reduced or eliminated. In some cases, expenses related to that partner’s disability accommodation needs negate any financial benefits provided by either SSI or tax breaks connected to one’s relationship status. However, a single person with comparable disability accommodation needs will be paying expenses with less SSI income than either a married or an unmarried couple where one or both partners receive benefits. Further, a single person will not be eligible for any tax breaks related to relationship status.
The “Marriage Penalty” For All Single People With Disabilities
Though the work of marriage equality activists such as Lori Long and Dominick Evans is valuable, their passionate and necessary advocacy for people with disabilities whose SSI benefits would be reduced or eliminated if they were to marry is not addressing a broader form of socioeconomic inequality. Anyone with a disability who is eligible to receive SSI is living below the poverty level.
Any unemployed or underemployed single person living in a country that does not provide universal healthcare has fewer options for paying medical expenses than an unemployed or underemployed person who can be added to her marital partner’s employer provided healthcare plan. Nonetheless, single people with disabilities especially risk falling into the Medicaid gap, the name given to the debt people fall into when they make too much income to be eligible for healthcare coverage through Medicaid in their state of residence, but they still do not make enough income to pay their medical expenses.
According to an October 2020 study conducted by the National Disability Institute and Stonybrook University, “The Extra Costs of Living with a Disability in the U.S.—Resetting The Policy Table,” a household containing an adult with a disability who has a limited ability to work needs an additional $17,960 (28%) more income per year to maintain the same standard of living as a comparable household that does not contain a person with a disability. Of course, inequalities in access to SSI and healthcare could affect any single person with a disability, regardless of gender. However, some forms of inequality especially affect women with disabilities.
Women With Disabilities: The Invisible Sex
Though all people with disabilities face significant barriers to employment, such as a lack of access to transportation, a lack of flexible work schedule options, and a lack of job options due to specific accommodation and modification needs, even women who have full time jobs earn lower salaries than men who are working in comparable professional positions.
Able-bodied women earn an average of $0.80 per every dollar an able-bodied man earns, with lower rates for women of color. Able-bodied women are paid less for their work than able-bodied men, but women with disabilities encounter a more fundamental barrier to employment. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, women with disabilities are twice as likely to be unemployed or underemployed as men with disabilities due to a lack of employment opportunities and accommodation and modification options.
Single women with disabilities encounter financial hardships that single able-bodied women do not, but perhaps the most pernicious barriers single women with disabilities encounter are not socioeconomic, but sociocultural. Whether by choice or by circumstance, singlehood is more likely to be a permanent state—as opposed to a temporary condition—for women with disabilities than for able-bodied women. The first marriage rate for people with disabilities is 24.4 per one thousand people, as opposed to 48.9 per one thousand people in the able-bodied population.
When their singlehood is a permanent state, females with disabilities are often perceived as doubly “helpless;” they encounter both the trope that women are more physically and emotionally fragile than men, and the trope that women with disabilities are not physically or intellectually capable of exercising personal autonomy. This trope is (unjustly) strengthened because single women with disabilities are less likely than their able-bodied counterparts to take actions that are perceived as indications of personal maturity, such as buying a home, living alone, or working at a stable job that provides financial security.
Adulthood Versus “Adulting”
In her 2018 article, “Queer Time: The Alternative to Adulting,” Sarah Jaffe says that milennials’ use of “adulting” (a verb) instead of “adulthood” (a noun), signifies a concept of adulthood as a temporary state consisting of a series of performative acts (marrying, having children, buying a house, obtaining a stable job that provides financial security) that one may or may not choose to perform. Now, says Jaffe, adulthood is a subjective experience that consists of achieving personal milestones, whatever those milestones might be, and having the stories of those personal achievements listened to and validated.
Jaffe argues that this new construction of adulthood, which she calls, “queer time” (borrowing from queer scholar, Jack Halberstam’s theory of heterotemporality) is more inclusive for people who identify as gay or queer, as members of the LGBTQ+ community have historically encountered sociocultural, socioeconomic, and legal barriers to achieving the milestones traditionally associated with adulthood.
When the concept of “disability time” is acknowledged in discussions about best practices for disability accommodation in schools and workplaces, it is limited to the idea that people with disabilities may complicate ideas about what constitutes intellectual progress (the school) or productivity (the workplace) by taking longer than their able-bodied counterparts to understand certain concepts or perform certain tasks. I would argue that there is also a “disability time” that is more akin to (but not synonymous with) “queer time.”
Sarah Jaffe argues that, because someone who is queer is unlikely to come out during childhood, experiencing a queer childhood is an act of nostalgia; a queer adult imagines the childhood she could have had if she could have securely expressed an authentic sexual identity.
“Adulting” In Disability Time
Similarly, even someone who has a visible disability that is diagnosed during childhood experiences both her actual childhood as a person with a disability and the shadow of an imagined, able-bodied childhood projected onto her body by physical and societal barriers to accessibility. For me, “disability time” is also a construction of time wherein indicators of physical, emotional, and social maturity are regarded as fluid. Not unlike the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities have historically encountered sociocultural, socioeconomic, and legal barriers to achieving the milestones traditionally associated with adulthood that Jaffe mentions.
However, “disability time,” includes more fundamental actions associated with adulthood that reveal how our definition of “maturity” often excludes people with disabilities. For example, someone who is chronologically an adult might need assistance with physical tasks, such as walking, eating, or getting into bed, never obtain a driver’s license, or benefit from socializing with a peer group whose chronological age differs from her own chronological age. In “disability time,” all of these people are successfully “adulting.”
If we do not often acknowledge “disability time,” it is partially because people with disabilities occupy a lower social status than people who have more effectively accessed traditional milestones associated with adulthood. For example, queer scholars debate whether the 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage in the United States has transformed the institution of marriage by extending its privileges to a long excluded minority group or “normalized” same sex partnerships by entrenching them in an institution associated with heteronormative values. To be fair, unlike the United States’ previous federal ban of same sex marriages, legal exclusions from marital privilege have never been universally applied to Americans with disabilities. However, as any candid analysis of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) reveals, it is possible to legally grant a right or privilege to a minority group while simultaneously safeguarding barriers that keep that minority group from claiming the right or privilege.
Perhaps I have unintentionally created an ideological barrier of my own. I have been writing as though it is the institution of marriage that deserves our attention. In truth, the women who are affected by the institution are far more important than the institution itself. I have said that, in Jane Austen’s world, the difference in their marriageability status makes Emma and Miss Bates inherently unequal. In part two of this article, we will see how a married Emma and an unmarried Miss Bates compare in our world, if both are women with disabilities.
Jill Summerville, photo by Rhonda Summerville
About the Author
Dr. Jill Summerville earned her PhD in Theatre in 2014. Her dissertation is a study of the practical and metaphorical complexities of putting manual wheelchairs (and the actors who sit in them) onstage. She is especially passionate about finding a place in the spotlight for her own sparkly blue manual wheelchair, Chitara Pequeña (CP). Since she is an actress who can’t wait tables, she currently works as a freelance theatre scholar, theatre maker, and writer. Her publication credits include Toptenznet, Onstage Blog, and The Washington Post. Jill is happily single. She married herself on July 9, 2015, and she gladly accepts anniversary congratulations. Share your creative proposals and anniversary gifts with her at https://jillellensummerville.com/
[Please note that the opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality.]
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