ABSTRACT
After his election in 2008, President Barack Obama nominated a single woman with no children, Janet Napolitano, to be the Secretary of Homeland Security. Commenting on Napolitano’s qualifications, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell declared her to be “perfect”—“because for that job, you have to have no life. Janet has no family. Perfect. She can devote, literally, 19-20 hours a day to it” (Collins, 2008). About a year into her time as Homeland Security Director, Napolitano was called
early in the morning when a passenger on a flight headed to Detroit, Michigan, turned out to have a bomb concealed in his underwear. It was Christmas Day, 2009, and the director was at the home of her brother (Kornblut, 2010). Yet neither Napolitano’s brother nor her sister seem to come to mind when people
such as Ed Rendell think about Janet Napolitano’s life. There are shorthand words and phrases used to refer to single people with no children-they are “alone,” they “don’t have anyone” (DePaulo, 2006). Those ways of thinking and speaking render invisible all of the important people in the lives of singles with no children, including their family and their friends (DePaulo, 2011b). In this chapter, I will draw from the available research literature to show that single
people with no children have families and do family-type things. They have personal communities that typically include friends and relatives. They have “social convoys” that provide shared experiences, continuity, and a sense of identity. Singles with no children are in some ways even more interconnected with other people such as friends, siblings, parents, and neighbors than are individuals who are married. Perceptions of who counts as family have not kept up with the realities of how people actually live their lives. As I will document in the next section, the number of single people, and of adults with no children, has been climbing for decades, so perhaps our understandings of those demographic juggernauts will soon begin to catch up.
