Don't archive
Joe Muer's yet• • •
On The Bookshelf
`The Improvised
Woman'
Now traditions can
be recorded in Southfield.
Same extraordinary difference.
It's no Mande' to be single,
says author Marcelle Clements.
EDITH BROIDA
Experience the difference
Special to the Jewish News
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MeWe's
Now Appearing
RON
CODEN
TRIO
SAL, MAY 1, 8, 15 & 22
5/7
1999
23380 Telegraph, Bet. 9 and 10 Mile • Southfield. • (248) 352-8243
wo 60-plus women, one
married, one widowed, both
fashionably attired in tennis
togs, are talking about The
Improvised Woman (WW. Norton &
Co.; $26.95), an engrossing new study
of single life authored by New York
journalist Marcelle Clements. "I
wouldn't mind a relationship," remarks
the widow, "but I certainly wouldn't
want to live with anyone again."
"Actually," replies her married
friend, "you really only need a man for
weddings and bar mitzvahs."
This dialogue would not surprise
journalist Marcelle Clements. For
almost a decade she interviewed a
cross-section of single women, ages
20-plus to mid-90s. Her findings con-
firmed her own suspicion: Single life
today is "comfortable."
Edith Broida is a freelance writer
based in Farmington Hills.
The single woman, the unmarried
mother, the divorcee, the widow, she
discovered, have found ways to impro-
vise, and their new life, which often
places men on the fringe, is not only
tolerable but enviable.
At the very least, she suggests, some
of the common beliefs about the tradi-
tional American family are archaic,
reflecting the wishful thinking of the
Dan Quayle bunch; "new families" are
disparate, reflecting a technology that
has made artificial insemination,
sperm banks, in vitro pregnancy, sur-
rogate mothers and grandmothers
almost commonplace.
Her research is demographically sig-
nificant: There are two single women
for every three married, she discloses.
In the United States, this means a pop-
ulation of 43 million single women.
There is additional data: the 50 per-
cent divorce rate is static, she writes,
but the remarriage rate has dropped by
40 percent. The steepest increase of
births out of wedlock is among white, (
educated, professional single women.
Marcelle Clements defines the
"new family'• its her own.
European immigrants attempting to
Marcelle Clements introduces her
reconstruct family life with the rem-
with
a
book The Improvised Woman
nants that remained.
frank admission: She never anticipated
Clements' own parents -
her life would become what
both of whom were previously
it is today.
married -- spent the war years
She marvels at the equa-
in hiding. They immigrated to
nimity she feels as a 50-year-
the United States in 1958,
old single mother who main-
convinced by the Suez Canal
tains a successful freelance
and Algerian crises that more
writing career in New York
dangers loomed in France.
City while managing the
In an interview,
affairs of a 93-year-old wid-
Marcelle Clements Clements compares the
owed mother and the needs
strong Jewish women of her
of a 4-year-old adopted son.
childhood to the strong Jewish
But upon reflection, she suspects
women she interviewed as part of
there were role models in post-war
her research on single life.
Paris, where she lived as a child. She
She is still sorting her findings, not-
remembers many "new" families in
ing with some surprise that a dispropor-
her community, many were corn-
tionate number of single Jewish women
prised of Holocaust survivors and