Starting “Real” Life

Previous research has argued that despite the historically shifting meanings of singleness and family relationships, the “single woman” remains a “deficit identity.” We wondered whether this is the case for women who are at a point in their lives when meeting the married-with-family standard is becoming less probable. Interviews were conducted with 12 women (ages 35–44) who lived in Western Canada and identified as “never married,” “non-mother,” and “midlife.” Data were analysed using discourse analysis. Participants negotiated a space where being single is constructed as normal, while at the same time answering to normative discourses of womanhood. They resisted the deficit identity of singleness by drawing on the “transformative midlife” interpretative repertoire, which constructed midlife as a time of creating a secure, independent life. In doing so, they positioned themselves as “comfortably single at midlife women,” an identity defined in terms of who the woman is. Our analysis offers a depiction of midlife as a continuous struggle to create and maintain this space.