As Women’s History Month comes to a close, this week’s staff pick is a fascinating, well-researched look at the growing population of single women. Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies takes a new look at how these women are shaping the future and leading economically, socially and professionally liberated lives. An empowering book for anyone interested in feminism or the social sciences.
“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.” —Amazon
