All the Single Ladies (Traister) - Author Bio

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.)