on the single ladies
Posted: 21 Apr 2026, 01:02
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Article about on the single ladies:
The optimism of Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies is encouraging, but the book’s blindspots illuminate the limitations of contemporary liberal feminism. Moira
Not All the Single Ladies. The optimism of Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies is encouraging, but the book’s blindspots illuminate the limitations of contemporary liberal feminism.
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Moira Weigel &squarf, Fall 2016 Beyoncé performing in Seattle as part of the Formation World Tour, May 18, 2016 (Ronald Woan / Flickr) Feminism has now been trending long enough that you can evoke the resurgence with a set of shorthands. Sheryl Sandberg. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Beyoncé. Emma Watson. Tina Fey. Roxane homosexual. Mindy Kaling. In politics, as well as popular culture, girls run the world. Angela Merkel. Teresa May. Hillary Clinton. As Andi Zeisler, the co-founder of Bitch magazine puts it in her recent book, We Were Feminists Once, “Feminism, so long dismissed as the realm of the angry, the cynical, the man-hating, and the off-puttingly hairy, [is] officially a thing.” Or, as the artist Ann Hirsch recently joked, you can “put feminist in front of any activity and it will sound edgy. i.e. Feminist stargazing, feminist skiing, feminist gardening etc.” One important aspect of the feminism trend has been its focus on single women. In the past few years, representations of female life that center on friends and careers rather than heterosexual romance have proliferated. Think: Girls , Broad City , The Mindy Project , Orange Is the New Black , Jessica Jones , the new Ghostbusters . Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels became widely beloved for this reason, too. In these books, husbands and lovers come and go. For all the trouble they cause—see the spoiler-filled blog, “F*ck Nino Sarratore”—they remain secondary to the relationship between the female protagonists. In the midst of this feminist revival, stories about women living on their own tend to be charged with positive affect. By contrast, contemporary television makes coupled life look bleak. Consider: HBO’s Togetherness , which a recent BuzzFeed article aptly summarized with the headline “The Misery of Being White, Rich, and Married on TV.” Or the unsexy, soporific Jason Biggs plotline in Season One of Orange Is the New Black. Rebecca Traister’s new book has arrived at just the right time and resonates powerfully in this overall atmosphere of feminist celebration. Traister immediately sets the upbeat tone with her title: All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation . When it landed this spring, in the midst of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the book inspired enthusiasm from liberal feminists. When Power Woman Amy Powell and Paramount TV optioned the book earlier this spring, her producer described it as “a triumphant investigation into the lives of American women that deserves to be brought to the screen.” All the Single Ladies sets out to investigate a “dramatic reversal” in American marriage patterns that has taken place over the past decade. “Throughout America’s history, the start of adult life for women . . . had been typically marked by marriage,” Traister begins. “In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent.” There is no doubt that this shift is dramatic. “For young women, for the first time, it is as normal to be unmarried as it is to be married, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.” Traister argues that this “dramatic reversal” is tantamount to a “wholesale revision of what female life might entail,” and that that revision constitutes “the invention of independent female adulthood.” The book’s organization is thematic, rather than strictly chronological. But from the outset, Traister establishes that her narrative will be a forward march. “Today’s unmarried and late married women are walking a road toward independence that was paved by generations of American women who lived singly when it was far harder to do so than it is today,” she begins. By delaying or forgoing marriage, Traister argues, single women have always remade, and are currently remaking, the United States economically and politically. Their efforts, Traister says, have been world changing. “This is the epoch of the single women, made possible by the single women who preceded it.” Traister credits single women with a wide range of achievements. For instance, she argues that, “by demanding more from men and from marriage, it’s single women who have perhaps played as large a part as anyone in saving marriage in America.” The book concludes with an exhortation: “If our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and their unmarried compatriots, could envision the radical future in which we are now living, it is incumbent on us to honor the work they did and walls they broke down by adjusting our own lenses. It’s time to rebuild the world for the diverse women who live in it now, more freely, than ever before.” It is a compelling story. Yet it does not seem complete. While I find the success of All the Single Ladies encouraging, I believe that its limitations are worth discussing because they illuminate the limitations of contemporary liberal feminism. These are the limitations that feminists have to recognize and overcome if we want to create a movement for all women. All the Single Ladies is refreshingly and unapologetically ambitious. Traister surveys academic history and sociology, and quotes from dozens of interviews that she personally conducted. Her book features women from a range of race and class backgrounds. There are cameos by luminaries ranging from Letty Pogrebin, the New York publicist who helped make Helen Gurley Brown and Jacqueline Susann famous, to Anita Hill. Traister slips in autobiographical anecdotes, but treats her own experience as one among many. To insist on this scope, while exploring a topic that is often trivialized by being relegated to memoir status, is no small achievement. All the Single Ladies is something like the book I wanted Kate Bolick’s Spinster to be. As a demographic, Traister uses the Single Lady to reframe the history of the Second Wave. She points out that, for all that activists like Betty Friedan revolted against domestic life, they remained confined by it, defining their demands in opposition to the rituals of the suburban ranch house and kitchen, Gloria Steinem, by contrast, offered a “fetching vision of unmarried life.” All the Single Ladies highlights the disciplinary function that widely publicized stories about violence against women play. “The media messages about these crimes—always more breathless than coverage of tragedies that befall poor women or women of color, which is often nonexistent—have been clear,” Traister writes. “The women for whom cities increase economic and social empowerment are put at risk in these metropolises.” Traister offers a refreshing takedown of all the cultural messages that suggest that for a woman to remain single is “immature” or “selfish.” “When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it’s important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary.” Rather, she highlights the importance of friendship. “Female friendship has been the bedrock of women’s lives for as long as there have been women,” Traister asserts. In addition to telling the story of how she came to consider one of her female friends “my person,” she interviews two professional women who describe their separation by a cross-country move just as devastating as any break-up: Traister’s fellow New York magazine writer Ann Friedman and her friend Aminatou Sow, co-founder of the international listserv Tech LadyMafia.
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Article about on the single ladies:
The optimism of Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies is encouraging, but the book’s blindspots illuminate the limitations of contemporary liberal feminism. Moira
Not All the Single Ladies. The optimism of Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies is encouraging, but the book’s blindspots illuminate the limitations of contemporary liberal feminism.
>> ENTER THE SITE <<
Moira Weigel &squarf, Fall 2016 Beyoncé performing in Seattle as part of the Formation World Tour, May 18, 2016 (Ronald Woan / Flickr) Feminism has now been trending long enough that you can evoke the resurgence with a set of shorthands. Sheryl Sandberg. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Beyoncé. Emma Watson. Tina Fey. Roxane homosexual. Mindy Kaling. In politics, as well as popular culture, girls run the world. Angela Merkel. Teresa May. Hillary Clinton. As Andi Zeisler, the co-founder of Bitch magazine puts it in her recent book, We Were Feminists Once, “Feminism, so long dismissed as the realm of the angry, the cynical, the man-hating, and the off-puttingly hairy, [is] officially a thing.” Or, as the artist Ann Hirsch recently joked, you can “put feminist in front of any activity and it will sound edgy. i.e. Feminist stargazing, feminist skiing, feminist gardening etc.” One important aspect of the feminism trend has been its focus on single women. In the past few years, representations of female life that center on friends and careers rather than heterosexual romance have proliferated. Think: Girls , Broad City , The Mindy Project , Orange Is the New Black , Jessica Jones , the new Ghostbusters . Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels became widely beloved for this reason, too. In these books, husbands and lovers come and go. For all the trouble they cause—see the spoiler-filled blog, “F*ck Nino Sarratore”—they remain secondary to the relationship between the female protagonists. In the midst of this feminist revival, stories about women living on their own tend to be charged with positive affect. By contrast, contemporary television makes coupled life look bleak. Consider: HBO’s Togetherness , which a recent BuzzFeed article aptly summarized with the headline “The Misery of Being White, Rich, and Married on TV.” Or the unsexy, soporific Jason Biggs plotline in Season One of Orange Is the New Black. Rebecca Traister’s new book has arrived at just the right time and resonates powerfully in this overall atmosphere of feminist celebration. Traister immediately sets the upbeat tone with her title: All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation . When it landed this spring, in the midst of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the book inspired enthusiasm from liberal feminists. When Power Woman Amy Powell and Paramount TV optioned the book earlier this spring, her producer described it as “a triumphant investigation into the lives of American women that deserves to be brought to the screen.” All the Single Ladies sets out to investigate a “dramatic reversal” in American marriage patterns that has taken place over the past decade. “Throughout America’s history, the start of adult life for women . . . had been typically marked by marriage,” Traister begins. “In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent.” There is no doubt that this shift is dramatic. “For young women, for the first time, it is as normal to be unmarried as it is to be married, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.” Traister argues that this “dramatic reversal” is tantamount to a “wholesale revision of what female life might entail,” and that that revision constitutes “the invention of independent female adulthood.” The book’s organization is thematic, rather than strictly chronological. But from the outset, Traister establishes that her narrative will be a forward march. “Today’s unmarried and late married women are walking a road toward independence that was paved by generations of American women who lived singly when it was far harder to do so than it is today,” she begins. By delaying or forgoing marriage, Traister argues, single women have always remade, and are currently remaking, the United States economically and politically. Their efforts, Traister says, have been world changing. “This is the epoch of the single women, made possible by the single women who preceded it.” Traister credits single women with a wide range of achievements. For instance, she argues that, “by demanding more from men and from marriage, it’s single women who have perhaps played as large a part as anyone in saving marriage in America.” The book concludes with an exhortation: “If our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, and their unmarried compatriots, could envision the radical future in which we are now living, it is incumbent on us to honor the work they did and walls they broke down by adjusting our own lenses. It’s time to rebuild the world for the diverse women who live in it now, more freely, than ever before.” It is a compelling story. Yet it does not seem complete. While I find the success of All the Single Ladies encouraging, I believe that its limitations are worth discussing because they illuminate the limitations of contemporary liberal feminism. These are the limitations that feminists have to recognize and overcome if we want to create a movement for all women. All the Single Ladies is refreshingly and unapologetically ambitious. Traister surveys academic history and sociology, and quotes from dozens of interviews that she personally conducted. Her book features women from a range of race and class backgrounds. There are cameos by luminaries ranging from Letty Pogrebin, the New York publicist who helped make Helen Gurley Brown and Jacqueline Susann famous, to Anita Hill. Traister slips in autobiographical anecdotes, but treats her own experience as one among many. To insist on this scope, while exploring a topic that is often trivialized by being relegated to memoir status, is no small achievement. All the Single Ladies is something like the book I wanted Kate Bolick’s Spinster to be. As a demographic, Traister uses the Single Lady to reframe the history of the Second Wave. She points out that, for all that activists like Betty Friedan revolted against domestic life, they remained confined by it, defining their demands in opposition to the rituals of the suburban ranch house and kitchen, Gloria Steinem, by contrast, offered a “fetching vision of unmarried life.” All the Single Ladies highlights the disciplinary function that widely publicized stories about violence against women play. “The media messages about these crimes—always more breathless than coverage of tragedies that befall poor women or women of color, which is often nonexistent—have been clear,” Traister writes. “The women for whom cities increase economic and social empowerment are put at risk in these metropolises.” Traister offers a refreshing takedown of all the cultural messages that suggest that for a woman to remain single is “immature” or “selfish.” “When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it’s important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary.” Rather, she highlights the importance of friendship. “Female friendship has been the bedrock of women’s lives for as long as there have been women,” Traister asserts. In addition to telling the story of how she came to consider one of her female friends “my person,” she interviews two professional women who describe their separation by a cross-country move just as devastating as any break-up: Traister’s fellow New York magazine writer Ann Friedman and her friend Aminatou Sow, co-founder of the international listserv Tech LadyMafia.
chat with single ladies on whatsapp
single ladies on youtube
single ladies on twitter