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Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation
Simon & Schuster
March 2016
On Sale: March 1, 2016
352 pages ISBN: 1476716560 EAN: 9781476716565 Kindle: B010MHAHQC Hardcover / e-Book
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Self-Help | Non-Fiction History
A nuanced investigation into the sexual, economic, and
emotional lives of women in America. In a provocative,
groundbreaking work, National Magazine Award finalist
Rebecca Traister, “the most brilliant voice on feminism in
the country” (Anne Lamott), traces the history of unmarried
and late-married women in America who, through social,
political, and economic means, have radically shaped our nation. 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.
No awards found for this book.
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