Hello, Guest!
Article about rebecca traister single ladies:
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.
>>> GO TO SITE <<<
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?
all the single ladies traister
all the single ladies rebecca
all the single ladies rebecca traister