All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Rebecca Traister, 2016
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476716565
Summary
In 2009, the award-winning journalist Rebecca Traister started All the Single Ladies—a book she thought would be a work of contemporary journalism—about the twenty-first century phenomenon of the American single woman.
It was the year the proportion of American women who were married dropped below fifty percent; and the median age of first marriages, which had remained between twenty and twenty-two years old for nearly a century (1890–1980), had risen dramatically to twenty-seven.
But over the course of her vast research and more than a hundred interviews with academics and social scientists and prominent single women, Traister discovered a startling truth: the phenomenon of the single woman in America is not a new one.
And historically, when women were given options beyond early heterosexual marriage, the results were massive social change—temperance, abolition, secondary education, and more.
Today, only twenty percent of Americans are wed by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960. The Population Reference Bureau calls it a "dramatic reversal." All the Single Ladies is a remarkable portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the single American woman.
Covering class, race, sexual orientation, and filled with vivid anecdotes from fascinating contemporary and historical figures, All the Single Ladies is destined to be a classic work of social history and journalism.
Exhaustively researched, brilliantly balanced, and told with Traister’s signature wit and insight, this book should be shelved alongside Gail Collins’s When Everything Changed. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1975
• Raised—near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Northwestern University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Rebecca Traister is a senior writer at Salon.com, where she has covered women in media, politics, and entertainment since 2003. She covered, with much attention and acclaim, the 2008 campaign from a feminist (and personal) perspective. She received a huge response to her pieces on Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, the media’s coverage of the candidates, and the role of women within the media. Her first book Big Girls Don't Cry is the result. It makes sense of this moment in American history, in which women broke barriers and changed the country’s narrative in completely unexpected ways.
Traister's 2016 New York Times' best-seller All the Single Ladies has been met with wide critical acclaim, leaving the Boston Globe proclaiming "We're better off reading Rebecca Traister on women, politics, and America than pretty much anyone else." Today, only twenty percent of Americans are wed by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960. The Population Reference Bureau calls this a "dramatic reversal."
All the Single Ladies is a remarkable portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the single American woman. Covering class, race, sexual orientation, and filled with vivid anecdotes from fascinating contemporary and historical figures, All the Single Ladies is destined to be a classic work of social history and journalism. Exhaustively researched, brilliantly balanced, and told with Traister’s signature wit and insight, this book explores the rise of the unmarried woman as a political and cultural force.
At the podium, Traister shares her first-person account of being a young woman navigating this turbulent and exciting time while keeping track of the modernization of the women's movement and the explosion of a new generation of feminism. She explains how—thanks to the campaigns of Clinton and Palin, and the history-making work and visibility of Michelle Obama, Tina Fey, and Rachel Maddow, Katie Couric, and others—America got a powerful view of the ways and directions in which roles for women had expanded in the forty years since the second wave, as well as the limitations that remained.
An in demand speaker, Traister speaks regularly at prominent national events, including on panels at the EMILY’s List annual gathering, NARAL events, among other women’s organizations, and at events surrounding the Democratic National Convention. She is perfect for universities, town halls, in addition to other conventions, conferences, and organizations looking for an intelligent and contemporary take on feminism and its evolution in politics, media, entertainment, and society at large.
Traister has also written for a range of national publications, including a profile of a trip to Africa with Bill Clinton for Elle, the New York Times, Vogue, and a profile on Rachel Maddow for the Nation. She has appeared on CNN, CNN Headline News, MSNBC, NPR’s Brian Lehrer Show, and other TV and radio outlets.
Traister started out in the media as an entry level assistant at Talk magazine, and then as a fact checker at the New York Observer, where she soon became the most unwilling gossip columnist in the history of New York nightlife, before reporting on the film industry in the city. In 2003, she moved to Salon.com, where she had been hired as the Life section’s staff writer. She wound up writing so many stories from a feminist point of view that soon her beat simply became about women.
Traister was raised outside Philadelphia, where she attended Quaker high school, and then went on to major in American Studies at Northwestern University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York City. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Traister brings a welcome balance of critique and personal reflection to a conversation that is often characterize more by moral policing than honest discussion.... Perhaps one of the most important aspects of [her] narrative is her acknowledgement that the experiences of single women are far from identical.... An informative and thought-provoking book for anyone--not just the single ladies—who want to gain a greater understanding of this pivotal moment in the history of the United States.
Gillian B. White - New York Times Book Review
[I]mpressively well researched...it's the personal narratives drawn from more than 100 interviews...that make the book not just an informative read but also an entirely engaging one.... Some of what's covered in the book is already well-trod ground...but the exemplary framework of cultural inclusion, the personal candor and palpable desire to lift up each and every one of us, is what makes All the Single Ladies a singularly triumphant work of women.
Rebecca Carroll - Los Angeles Times
[Traister is] one of the nation’s smartest and most provocative feminist voices.... All the Single Ladies is a multifaceted endeavor. Bringing together US history and life in this 21st century, through data, interviews, and an enormous stack of reading and viewing material,...Traister produces an invigorating defense of a demographic too often criticized and caricatured, rather than recognized for its profound effect on American society
Rebecca Steintz - Boston Globe
The enormous accomplishment of Traister's book is to show that the ranks of women electing for nontraditional lives...have also improved the lots of women who make traditional choices...This rich portrait of our most quietly explosive social force makes it clear that the ladies still have plenty of work to do.
slate
Wonderfully inclusive, examining single women from all walks of life—working-, middle-, and upper-class women; women of color and white women; queer and straight ones…With All the Single Ladies she brings her trademark intelligence and wit to bear.
Roxanne Gay - Elle
Incorporating a lively slew of perspectives of single ladies past and present, Traister....sticks to her central argument that the world is changing and policies need to catch up to the social reality. The result is an invigorating study of single women in America with refreshing insight into the real life of the so-called spinster.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) This fast-paced, fascinating book will draw in fans of feminism, social sciences, and U.S. history.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Exploring all aspects of single life—social, economic, racial, and sexual—Traister’s comprehensive volume, sure to be vigorously discussed, is truly impressive in scope and depth while always managing to be eminently readable and thoughtful.
Booklist
A feminist journalist argues that single women, who now outnumber married women in the United States, are changing society in major ways.... An easy read with lots of good anecdotes, a dose of history, and some surprising statistics, but its focus on one segment of one generation of single women is a drawback.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for All the Single Ladies...then take off on your own:
1. If you are a single woman, does this book resonate with you? If married, does it?
2. Why, according to Rebecca Traister, has the resistance to independent women been so intense? She compares the growth of single womanhood as powerful as the sexual revolution and abolition of slavery. Do you agree—in other words, does Traister make a convincing case?
3. How does Traister draw distinctions between privileged women (uwually white) and underprivileged women (usually women of color)? How, for instance does each subset of women view the role of work in their lives?
4. Do you agree with Traister's assessment that one of the "unacknowledged truths of female life is that women's primary, foundational, formative relations are as likely to be with each other as they are with men"? is that true for you or for other women you know? Is it true of men, as well?
4. Is marriage still the end goal for most women...or not? What does Traister think...and what do you think, on both a personal and cultural level?
5. Talk about one of the book's major premises—that the rise of the median age for a woman's first marriage, which has risen to 27, has had a momentous effect on the American cultural landscape.
6. Traister examines the lives of unmarried women throughout history who worked as abolitionists, fought for voting rights, who wrote for a living, or even ran countries. Which profiles do you find most interesting or most impressive?
7. How did literature once treat unmarried women (e.g., Wharton's Lily Bart or Dickens's Miss Havisham)? How are they treated in today's media (e.g., Sex and the City, Damages, or Scandal?)
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)