Singles at the heart of the big debate by Romain Huret

Des gilets jaunes près de l'Arc de Triomphe à Paris, le 16 mars 2019. Zakaria Abdelkafi - AFP

Since the beginning of the movement of yellow vests, the figure of the single person haunts the many interpretations, often hasty, but always evoking the specific part of the men and the unmarried women. Humorously, some have even created dating sites for yellow vests in search of great love; with lucidity, others recalled the importance of militant conviviality for people who are often isolated. But their presence on the roundabouts owes less to the bagatelle than to the continuous deterioration of their social and professional situation. Isolated women, single mothers, men living alone, people with disabilities often share not only significant participation in the movement, but also similar marital status. Demographic data, collected by some social scientists in surveys in the process of publication, set an average age of around 47, and many of the yellow vests are not married. Subject to further studies, we are therefore in the presence of almost "definitive" singles to use the categorization of demographers.

The social, professional and political difficulties of this age group are not only French. In an important analysis of what they call the "deaths of despair" in the United States, Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown a similar deterioration in social indicators for men and women whose age is between 40 and 55 years, and among them, once again, a high number of singles. As they observe, their mortality rate has been rising continuously for thirty years. . . .

In French cases, earlier work on poverty and inequality also emphasized the great precariousness of singles, with or without children. As early as December 2018, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe was moved by the importance of single-parent families and the great difficulties of women living alone. But, beyond the legitimate emotion, and if the great debate must lead to something other than the expression of wishful thinking, it seems important to us to rethink the place of singles in countries whose social order has been built on the primacy given to traditional families.

For forty years, the number of single people has increased steadily in our societies, and if we take into account the divorced and widowed, the increase is only stronger. This growth is inseparable from that of inequality. Singles are the main victims of contemporary vulnerabilities because of an invisible world of discrimination. US researchers have coined the term "singlism" to refer to this multitude of devices that weaken already precarious work and family situations. From access to housing through insurance contracts or transportation costs, there is an invisible premium for traditional families, thus legitimizing the marital order. Anyone who has sought to rent an apartment alone, to obtain a bank loan alone or to buy insurance alone knows the difficulties, sometimes insurmountable, to obtain the desired product. And these social devices owe nothing to chance; they are rooted in ancient practices, deeply rooted in the marital order built throughout the twentieth century.

This celibacy contrasts with the tax penalty paid by single people in the majority of tax codes in the Western world. If they are taxable, they pay proportionally more taxes than married couples. It goes without saying that indirect taxes also weigh heavily on individuals who have only their salary (or social assistance) for any income. For a long time, for the sake of reciprocity, specific programs for these more fragile populations had compensated for this difference. For thirty years, budget cuts in many social programs have reduced these compensations and this specific support. Unsurprisingly, singles are proportionally very well represented in the poorest strata of our societies.

These inequalities are reinforced by important gender schemes. In a beautiful book on rental evictions in the United States, Evicted (2016), sociologist Matthew Desmond portrays the plight of African-American women living alone, who make up a large proportion of the expelled. Accumulating odd jobs, raising their children alone in the illusory waiting for the arrival of alimony, they can not make ends meet and find themselves quickly on the street. In France, the data goes in the same direction: single people, with or without children, join the ranks of people who are expelled every year from their homes. The United States example also invites us not to neglect men, even if the difficulties are different. In their study on the deaths of desperation, mentioned above, Case and Deaton recall their specific pathologies (suicide, massive consumption of opiates, junk food, job insecurity).

Finally, the situation of single people often deteriorates over the different ages of life, due to the dislocation of family solidarity. With time, and the disappearance of family members, often older, loneliness and precariousness become more pronounced. This important point could be an explanatory factor for the data collected on the specific age of yellow vests; he already explains the specific difficulties of singles in the United States.

If the big debate is to open a reflection on our society and its most recent transformations, not taking into account the specific and all-encompassing category of single people would be a mistake. It is not a question of returning to the conservative marriage injunction, but rather of reflecting on the strength of the marital order and its inadequacy with the new social configurations. Rethinking the social, professional, tax and symbolic systems that have traditionally relegated singles to a lower status for married people would be a good start in laying the foundations for a more egalitarian society.

Romain Huret completes a work temporarily entitled Les Oubliés de la Valentine. Singles, social order and inequalities in the United States (20th-21st centuries) to appear in France and the United States.

Romain Huret director of studies at EHESS, historian of the United States

Liberation 27.03.19
Translated by Google