5 Questions with Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies
Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York Magazine and a contributing editor at Elle. A National Magazine Award finalist, she has written about women in politics, media and entertainment from a feminist perspective for many reputable publications including The New Republic and Salon. Traister’s first book, Big Girls Don’t Cry, about women and the 2008 election, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and the winner of the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. We asked her a few about her latest book, All The Single Ladies, out March 1, that looks at the history of unwed women in America.
- What interested you in the subject of single women in America to begin with?
I think it was me trying to wrestle with the meaning and weight and fullness of my life as an unmarried woman, just before I got married at 35. I didn’t feel at all ambivalent about marrying my husband, but I did feel like I didn’t want to just leave behind the person I’d become on my own without acknowledging what a remarkable experience it was, becoming an adult outside of marriage. Especially given wedding fetishization, I wanted to make clear that getting married wasn’t validating my life; my life was very valid on its own. Falling in love was a lovely thing that happened during that life, and that was in fact enabled by the life I’d made on my own, but it wasn’t then that my adult life began. So I think the impetus for the book was very self-interested, but as soon as I considered writing about the subject of unmarried women, it became about way more than just my own (relatively cossetted!) experiences. I wanted to write about how independent life for women intersected with issues of wealth and poverty and economic stability, of class and race and politics and social messaging, the roles that friendships and cities and children play for single women, how singlehood as a norm changes marriage dynamics, and the definition of families. And then I began doing research and also realized that there was this remarkable history of unmarried women in America.
2. In your research, have you found a clear trend in the way the phenomenon of single women is discussed in the media? Do you think discussion about it is more or less common now than in the past, or how has it changed?
One of the thrilling, surprising things about doing the historical research was learning how long there has been conversation in the press (some would say conflagration in the press) over the question of whether or not women might reasonably live outside of marriage. So this is two sided: yes, there is a lengthy pattern of denigrating women who wind up unmarried, by choice and by happenstance, and there is also a long, rich history of unmarried women making powerful arguments on behalf of their own autonomy and individual value.
3. In the course of your research, what was the most interesting or surprising thing you learned about single women in America through history?
That there were so many of them in the 19th century! I’d never before really thought about how events like the Civil War and westward migration had an impact on the marriage patterns of women on the east coast, especially middle class white women. I knew about “Boston Marriages” but had never really considered the fact that their proliferation signaled that a population of women had shifted traditional patterns of marriage, partnership, and economic stability.
4. What is one piece of advice or insight that you would offer single women in the US today?
Don’t let anyone try to convince you that you are in some practice round for an adulthood that will really begin when you get married (or have a child). Single life is real life, very real life, full of responsibilities and pleasures and disappointments and love and loneliness and commitments and passions. It’s adulthood, it has its own richness and meaning and counts just as much as any alternate reality in which you were married according to an older model.
5. In an interview with NPR, you commented that the delaying of marriage until later in life — or eschewing it altogether — can be seen as a destabilizing force on society. Why do you think this particular choice seems so threatening?
Because society has been organized for a long time around a particular set of power dynamics, in which men had professional, public, economic, sexual and social power and women were made subsidiary to them. Marriage was an institution that helped to establish control over women by keeping them domestically subservient, economically dependent. Once women break out of the early marriage model as the only model, they threaten men’s exclusive grip on all these kinds of power, and they stop being dependent, which carries the threat of making men more expendable. It’s not the end of men! By any stretch. But it might be the end of making men the central organizing force of female life, and that’s destabilizing.
BONUS: Do you have any exciting feminist book recommendations?
I can’t wait to read Shrill by Lindy West, Hunger by Roxane Gay, and Sex Object by Jessica Valenti. I have recently read and loved Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein, and of course Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik’s Notorious RBG and Linda Hirshman’s Sisters in Law.
All the Single Ladies is on sale March 1 from Simon & Schuster. Get your copy here!
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