All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation - Rebecca Traister

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.

PRAISE
"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."
-- New York Times Book Review

“We're better off reading Rebecca Traister on women, politics, and America than pretty much anyone else.”
-- The Boston Globe

"Traister is a triple threat--essayist, journalist, and polemicist--bringing a seismic shift to light, hunting down its implications, and showing how it changes politics, and how policy needs to change to reflect it. Her book demands not just reading but discussion and debate.
-- Boris Kachka, Vulture

"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, blowing open the institutions of marriage and parenthood... This rich portrait of our most quietly explosive social force makes it clear that the ladies still have plenty of work to do."
-- Slate

"A monumental study of the political, economic, social, and sexual consequences of the rise of unmarried women."
-- NewRepublic.com

"Traister wants single women to recognize themselves as political force and to celebrate unmarried life for what it can be: an excellent choice."
-- People Magazine, People's Picks

"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...[Traister] brings her trademark intelligence and wit to bear."
-- Elle

"No husband, NP...In All the Single Ladies, an exhaustive examination of independent women and how they shaped the world we life (and date) in today, Rebecca Traister explodes the centuries-old notion that marriage is compulsory to living a happy, fulfilled life and reveals the inestimable power of being blissfully unattached."
-- Cosmo

“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, starred review

“This fast-paced, fascinating book will draw in fans of feminism, social sciences, and U.S. history.”
-- Library Journal, starred review

“All The Single Ladies is a nuanced investigation into the sexual, economic, and emotional lives of women in America.”
-- Publishers Weekly

“I can’t begin to count the number of conversations I’ve had in my adult life about my lack of enthusiasm to marry… Thankfully, with the publication of Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, I can stop explaining and buy her book for all the busy bodies in my happily unmarried life. Traister blends history, reportage and personal memoir to propose that the notion of marriage in American life has been and will be written by unmarried women.”
-- Guardian (US)

"A wide-ranging, insistently optimistic analysis of the role of single women in American society."
-- Chicago Tribune

"Part social and cultural history, part anthropological and journalistic investigation, part memoir, and total investigation into the phenomenon and political power of single womanhood."
-- Flavorwire