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Article about all the single ladies rebecca traister:
Jessica Valenti interviews author Rebecca Traister about how she uncovered rich accounts of social progress intertwining with changing marriage patterns – and single women were at the front and center of change. Rebecca Traister: ‘The story of single women in America is at the heart of a lot of our history.’ Photograph: H Armstrong Roberts/Corbis. Rebecca Traister: ‘The story of single women in America is at the heart of a lot of our history.’ Photograph: H Armstrong Roberts/Corbis.

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R ebecca Traister, author and writer at large for New York magazine, is one of the foremost feminist writers in the country. Her 2008 book, Big Girls Don’t Cry took an in-depth look at Hillary Clinton’s last presidential run and how it marked a watershed moment in feminism. Her new book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, was released this week. She took some time out from her book tour to talk with the Guardian. Jessica: You wove some of your own personal story of single (and married) life throughout this book – tell me a little bit about how the idea for this book came about and how your own story influenced you. I had thought a lot about unmarried life during my years as an unmarried woman – which was all during my 20s and into my 30s. I was someone who didn’t have a ton of relationships as a single person – and so I had a sharp identification with singlehood. Then much to my surprise, I fell in love in my early 30s. I got married at 35 and I was acutely aware of how people were responding, and how marriage for me was going to mean something different than it was for my mother. I grew up thinking marriage was the beginning of adulthood . and this was not the beginning of my adulthood. And so I was compelled to write about women’s adulthood independent from marriage because for so much of our history women’s adulthood has been equated with marriage, with husbands. The book is so expansive, did you set out to write this kind of historical analysis? I was going to write a contemporary book, but when I started doing research, I realized there was this incredibly rich complicated history of women having lived outside of marriage. And when I uncovered all of this, I realized the history of social progress in this country has overlapped and intertwined with changing marriage patterns – and that the story of single women in America is at the heart of a lot of our history. You’re careful in talking about how when you write about ‘single women’, it doesn’t mean women who don’t necessarily want to be married or who will never be married. Why is the clarification so important? Because the danger is that when we talk about single life v married life that we think of it as one binary, as if there are two possibilities for how life might go: you might be a single person or you might be a married person, but of course that’s not at all the case. Marriage was a necessity for so long for women. They were reliant on marriage for economic stability, they were reliant on marriage as a way to have a sex life that was socially sanctioned or to have a family that was socially sanctioned. But when you take that one model off it’s not like you get some opposite alternative, you get an infinite variety of alternatives. It may lead them to happiness, unhappiness, partnership, solitude, may lead them to sex, celibacy and messes of all these things intertwined with each other: women who have promiscuous sex lives, women who have lives who are not having sex for years or at all, women who are in monogamous relationships, women who get married early, late, women who divorce, women who marry other women, women who have children before marriage, women who have children and wind up raising them with friends. You write a bit about Betty Friedan and the way, in The Feminine Mystique, she didn’t take into account of the role of black women and other women who didn’t have a choice about working outside the home. What other ways did race and class impact the way we think about single women? As has been the case with regard to many kinds of social liberation, a lot of disruptive behaviors have originated with economically disadvantaged women, often women of color who do things like work outside the home in response to economic conditions. And then when their behavior does disrupt assumptions about who has power and what kind of power, they’re mimicked by more privileged women and it works its way up to wealthier populations. And then you have wealthier women who are engaging in the same behavior but with more resources on hand to make the behavior a lot more appealing because suddenly you’re doing it with a lot more money and it becomes a more easily glamorized set of choices. Then it becomes discernible as politicized liberation. And that’s how you get this weird thing where women of color have been working outside the home for wages forever, and it was an economic necessity but when white middle class women started to do it in the 1970s we regard that as . Sadie Alexander. Photograph: Creative commons. Political revolution? Right! We call Betty Friedan the mother of second wave feminism even though Sadie Alexander, who was a black lawyer from Philadelphia, made these arguments about women of color in the 1930s. And that’s not to say that white women’s behavior isn’t revolutionary. In some ways privileged women who are closer to power wind up being able to exert their influence in ways that change public policy in ways that women with less power don’t have access to. And you write that this goes beyond politics. Living Single was on in early 1990s – the show about Queen Latifah living with a bunch of friends. And then there’s Friends, and that’s called the groundbreaking show about unmarried adults living in New York! I really liked what you wrote about how delaying marriage is not just good for women’s independence but for men’s as well – that they “learn how to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes and iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.” I don’t focus on men in the book, but it’s true that more men are living singly just as women are – when marriage rates fall that works for both genders. But the reason I focus on women is that it’s always been far more possible and more acceptable for men to live independently in the world. They’ve been able to support themselves economically, they’ve enjoyed more sexual liberty – in part because reproduction doesn’t take part inside their bodies! Men have always had more freedom, and been considered – especially white men – the de facto adults in this country. They are our leaders, our business men – they are the vision of what an American citizen looks like. It’s a white man. Ironically enough, marriage was also an institution that also treated them like children – there was always someone to cook and clean for them like their mothers had. But now men are becoming more domestically capable. How are single women shaping the presidential election? Well, there’s been a lot of talk about how far left the Democratic primary has moved.













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