The purpose of this article is to explore the rhetoric surrounding single women. In popular culture, single women who are often described as lonely (Budgeon, 2008; Haddock, 2010), unhappy (Koeing et al., 2010; Zajicek & Koski, 2003), unfulfilled, and lacking interpersonal ties and strong social bonds (Budgeon, 2008). Lahad (2014) found a contradiction between those who said they find singlehood to be empowering, and those readers who consider it a “fake” condition, arguing that single women cannot possibly be content with their “condition.” So, even though many women may indeed be content with their single status, there are outside social pressures telling them that it is not okay to remain single. This pressure may be one of the reasons so many women feel that marriage should be their ultimate goal.
In this study, rather than viewing women as passive victims of dominant ideologies and social structures, we see women as active social actors who both reproduce and redefine the cultural discourse of singlehood. Singlehood is often a contested site where meanings are produced through the rhetorical enactment of identity. Dales (2014) argues that “experiences of singlehood vary significantly with levels of family support, financial capacity and an individual’s health, and that single women’s agency is, therefore, subject to broad socioeconomic factors, as well as cultural factors” (p. 225). In other words, social support and available resources play a crucial role in women’s experiences of singlehood. These social interactions are heavily mediated via self-help support groups, which shape the experiences of singlehood significantly and thus require more critical examination. Studies suggest that the self-help genre is one of the most popular genres for women (Ebben, 1995; Koeing et al. 2010; Schilling & Fuehrer, 1993; Simonds, 1996). As one of the most prevalent modalities of self-help among women today, online self-help groups provide valuable access to communities of invested single women whose vernacular commentary evidenced individual and collective efforts (see also Brouwer & Hess, 2007) to redefine the cultural meanings of single women.
It is in this vein that we offer a metaphor analysis of a Facebook self-help group called The Single Woman, along with a short book of affirmations entitled The Single Woman’s Manifesto, to analyze how women frame their singlehood and work to fight back against the cultural stigma surrounding their status. While the Facebook pages contained discussions, the affirmations were particularly powerful and contained specific metaphor patterns which indicate the authors’ perspective on single life. We scrolled through the site dating back to 2014 and pulled what appeared during that time period. The Single Woman’s Manifesto is entirely affirmations. In all, we analyzed 82 affirmations among the two artifacts. We then sorted the metaphors by frequency and intensity to reveal two dominant metaphor structures – “being single is a journey,” “being single is a battle,” and “being single is a gift.” These metaphors indeed support the struggle between those who feel empowered by singlehood and those who feel it is a daily struggle based on social narratives.
Key words: Metaphor, discrimination, women, single
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