This is the 2nd of Jill Summerville’s 2-part article, “Single women with disabilities: A worth universally doubted.” Part 1 is here.
A Woman With A Disability Must Be In Want Of A Marriage
A Google search for “How can I build my dream girlfriend?” provides so many options that VideoInk actually ranked the best virtual girlfriend apps available in 2022. Users may make many choices about the physical traits and personality traits of a dream girlfriend, and some sites offer to use this information to make predictions about a user’s (presumably flesh-and-blood) future partner. Despite their promises of infinite variety, the choices these sites offer (or rather, decline to offer) strengthen the idea that there is something a dream girlfriend or wife should never be: disabled.
Perhaps the app designers’ lack of imagination shouldn’t surprise us. After all, we are invited to imagine a dream girlfriend or wife, not only doing anything we ask, but doing it effortlessly and perfectly. The presence of a disabled body, even in a virtual reality, would mar that fantasy.
Disability scholars acknowledge that the presence of a disabled body—especially a disabled female body—transforms the institution of marriage, because it strains the gendered division of labor that characterizes a heteronormative marital structure, making married people with disabilities more likely to divorce than their able-bodied counterparts. Further, within the heteronormative framework we often use to determine the societal value of a marriagable woman, a woman with a disability is “undesirable.”
[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.”]
She is an “undesirable” lover due to the perceived undesirability of the disabled body and an “undesirable” wife due to the perceived helplessness of women, especially women with disabilities. A bride with a disability represents an “undesirable” female body elevated to a “desirable” sociocultural status. The tension within that body is visible in the design of wedding cake toppers marketed to brides with disabilities depicting a woman using a manual wheelchair who is wearing a long, flowing bridal gown that would be dirtied and worn if the gown rubbed against the wheelchair’s tires.
Such a cake topper reveals that the bride’s desirability, as a woman and as a wife, is tenuous. As Nancy A. Brooks wryly says in her 1985 article “Disability: Sexism Without A Pedestal,” “a disabled woman needs a man to take care of her, if she can find one.” Regardless of whether a woman with a disability desires to be married or not, she is more likely not to get married at all than an able-bodied woman. In fact, she may never independently accomplish any of the milestones Sarah Jaffe associates with “adulting” in her 2018 article, “Queer Time: The Alternative To Adulting,” such as marrying, having children, buying a house, or obtaining a stable job that provides financial security.
Happily Single
Now that we have considered women with disabilities who wish to marry or do marry, let us consider women for whom “single” is a permanent social and socioeconomic status. In the marriage equality movement, access to marriage without “the marriage penalty” for people with disabilities who receive SSI is conflated with the right to pursue happiness. By associating marriage with personal happiness, marriage equality advocates call marrying an individual choice without acknowledging that marriage is also an institution that privileges married people over single people, regardless of ability.
Americans safeguard this institutionalized privilege. In a 2011 study, Dr. Bella DePaulo and Dr. Wendy Morris conducted a survey wherein they created several pairs of nearly identical case studies, except that in one bio a person was described as single, and in the other the same person was described as coupled. Survey participants consistently rated the coupled person’s happiness more highly than the single person’s, even when the study was repeated with case studies that included favorable details about the personal happiness, community involvement, and financial and material success of the single people.
It is a sociocultural “truth” universally acknowledged that a single person’s assertion of her own happiness should be doubted. A single woman with a disability, however, isn’t only destabilizing a sociocultural “truth” about what women (should) want. She is destabilizing sociocultural “truths” about femininity itself. In” A Simple Fix For One Of Disabled People’s Most Persistent, Pointless Injustices,” his 2020 article for Forbes critiquing the “marriage penalty,” Andrew Pulrang enthuses that removing the penalty wouldn’t only allow people who want to marry to do so without risking their financial security. It would give all people with disabilities who had previously stayed single—or shared their lives with non cohabiting partners to avoid losing their SSI benefits—an incentive to marry.
An incentive to marry can also be experienced as pressure to marry, pressure that is most unwelcome by anyone who wants to be single and loves single life, such as the Single at Heart.
Married Women With Disabilities: A Feminine Ideal
Pulrang doesn’t argue that people with disabilities who receive SSI should primarily marry for financial reasons even though, if the marriage penalty were abolished, married couples would be permitted to possess more assets than non cohabiting, unmarried couples and more income than single people. Instead, he argues that choosing to marry would lead to increased happiness for most people with disabilities. Pulrang writes that, “while marriage is far from the only path to happiness, it is something most adults at least aspire to on some level. And for those who are lucky enough to find someone they love, marriage offers enormous benefits that go far beyond financial or practical conveniences. Disabled people in particular both struggle more than others to find this kind of companionship, and benefit from it in ways that can never be quantified.”
If the worth of a benefit cannot be measured, then how can we be sure that it is beneficial? If I called myself an excellent lover whose amorous skill and intensity could not be described, I doubt anyone would want to take me home. The only person who will truly know whether a single woman with a disability is happy is the woman herself. What would anyone else gain from incentivizing marrying, when it is only one of the milestones usually associated with “adulting?”
Even if a heteronormative married woman with a disability transforms the traditional, gendered division of labor within her own marriage, her presence does not transform the social norms associated with marriage as an institution. A wife who is physically and socioeconomically dependent upon her husband is successfully “adulting,” because the role of wife has traditionally been a submissive role. The Law of Coverture, in which a husband and a wife were declared one person—the husband—under the law, still affects some legal practices and legal formalities in the twenty-first century United States. In their 2005 essay, “Men in Motion: Disability and Masculinity,” Lenore Manderson and Susan Peake note that the passivity and dependency associated with both femininity and disability are “consistent and synergistic.”
Though the marriage of a heteronormative woman with a disability should be respected as her individual choice, we should note that a woman’s sociocultural and socioeconomic dependency upon her husband is the only form of dependency that has historically been considered “adulting.” The eligibility requirements for receiving Social Security Disability (SSDI), which are determined based on either one’s own work history or the work history of a family member, illustrate this distinction.
If someone who is receiving SSDI based on her own work history marries, or receives SSDI based on the work history of a marital partner, that person may retain her benefits. However, if someone who is receiving SSDI based on a parent’s work history marries, that person must give up her benefits. A person who transitions from socioeconomic dependence on a parent to socioeconomic dependence on a marital partner isn’t increasing her financial independence or personal autonomy, but she is reaching a milestone associated with adulthood.
Single Women With Disabilities: A Happiness Universally Doubted
Unlike a married woman with a disability, a single woman with a disability adds complexity to both the desireability traditionally associated with femininity and the sociopolitical, sociocultural, and socioeconomic progress towards independence traditionally associated with the feminist movement.
She may need assistance to reach milestones traditionally associated with adulthood, if she reaches them at all. She complicates, and sometimes belies, the trope that the possession of romantic love is symbolic of physical and emotional wholeness. Yet she also complicates the feminist trope celebrating women’s ideally unfettered progress towards personal autonomy.
If we include the experiences of women with disabilities within our narrative of what constitutes female singlehood in American culture, we see that romantic relationship ideals are the stories that we tell ourselves about what kind of love is worthiest of coveting and who is worthiest of receiving that love. After all, women with disabilities seldom appear as either whole or whole-hearted in pop culture, though artists with disabilities often challenge that narrative in their own work. If they are not always presented as “loveable,” perhaps that is because we are defining love too narrowly.
In his invocation for U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2021 presidential inauguration, Father Leo O’Donovan urged his listeners to think of loving, not as a singular act of expressing desire or desirability, but as a universal act of providing care: “There is a power in each and every one of us that lives by turning to every other one of us […] It is called love.”
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 JillEllenSummerville.
[Please note that the opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality.]
About Bella DePaulo
