All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Rebecca Traister
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1476716579
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The New York Times bestselling investigation into the sexual, economic, and emotional lives of women is “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” (The New York Times Book Review).
In 2009, award-winning journalist Rebecca Traister started All the Single Ladies 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 married by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960.
“An informative and thought-provoking book for anyone—not just single ladies” (The New York Times Book Review), All the Single Ladies is a remarkable portrait of contemporary American life and how we got here, through the lens of the unmarried American woman. Covering class, race, sexual orientation, and filled with vivid anecdotes from fascinating contemporary and historical figures, “we’re better off reading Rebecca Traister on women, politics, and America than pretty much anyone else” (The Boston Globe).
one hand, the United States still lacks paid parental leave, anything resembling early maternal support from the government; many workplaces don’t have rooms where new mothers can breastfeed when they come back to work; and in the House of Representatives, women only got their own ladies’ room in 2011. And yet, the determination of American women to push through toward independence and parity, despite these systemic challenges, has produced an unquantifiable shift in attitude and behavior. We now
could not do. She forged a new and improved relationship with him. “For the first time in my life, I’m a daddy’s girl!” she remembered telling her therapist. “Reconnecting with my father and feeling a kind of special love from him was wonderful. It happened late.” At no point, Giles said, could she imagine having had children on her own. Sisters Doing It for Themselves But there are lots of women who do it. Pamela, a twenty-four-year-old senior at City College, got pregnant accidentally, when
the birth places of the later labor movement, a correspondent named Betsey claiming to be “one of that unlucky, derided, and almost despised set of females, called spinsters, single sisters, lay-nuns . . . but who are more usually known by the appellation of Old Maids” argued that it was “a part of [God’s] wise design that there should be Old Maids,” in part because “they are the founders and pillars of anti-slavery, moral reform, and all sorts of religious and charitable societies.”28 Here was
going through what Morris called its “Renaissance as black Hollywood.” The city, with a high concentration of historically black colleges and big universities, drew young, ambitious students and was cementing itself as a center for African-American entrepreneurs, artists, activists, and educators. “There were black people everywhere,” said Morris, “and they were doing big things, and no one was surprised.” Morris’s life soon filled with friends, museums, theater, clubs where women got in free
Mexico and lived on the border of a Navajo reservation where poverty, racism, and lack of opportunity commingled to create an explosive, often unhealthy, social and sexual atmosphere. “I entered a scene with people far younger and wilder than I am,” she said. “I’d thought my twenties were wild, but my early thirties were the wildest time of my life sexually. There were orgies, multiple partners, threesomes, women, men.” Kristina enjoyed this sybaritic period, but realized, in retrospect, that