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Review: Rebecca Traister’s “All the Single Ladies” is a validation of feminine history, thought and experience. A family member claims to know the percentage of women had erotic dreams about Bill Clinton while he was in office. A Georgia boy chews tobacco on the plane and argues harshly with the flight attendant about putting his seat tray up during takeoff.
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“Bitch,” I hear him mutter. Later, at baggage claim, he kisses his girlfriend. A writer at a party tells us there isn’t enough “pussy” in his novel told from the perspective of a young woman. “I hope you’re not offended,” he says only to me and not to my long-time partner and recent husband, who is equally insulted though maybe the comment doesn’t rub quite as deeply against a boiling forest of scar tissue. Sometimes I cry when I feel men say these things. Sometimes I pity them in their blatant inability to see all the bodies around them. Sometimes I snap back at them, “Every person should be offended by a comment like that.” Sometimes I think of the book I’m reading. The book I’m reading, Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies , coincidentally sits on the table at the party with a bouquet of yellow Post-it notes spilling over its edges. What does it mean when a book can recognize you as a living being, can recognize women as living beings with an intensely complex, often misunderstood history, but a person cannot? Is it shocking? No, says a chorus of bodies that surround me, bodies that are women and bodies that are not women. Rebecca Traister. Image courtesy the author. Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies thoughtfully traces and parses out the multitudinous life of (primarily heterosexual, cis) single women throughout America’s young, troubled past. What brought us to this contemporary point in which many women don’t choose to marry or delay having children or a downright plethora of in-betweens? Have we arrived to a point in which women wield more societal power than ever? What is collective about that power? What isn’t? What about this power precedes us? The history of women is soaked in darkness, in wounds, in confusion, in questions. The idea of women deeply examining and speaking something closer to their true history, or rather, their lived history, their mother’s or grandmother’s lived history, the lived histories they intimately share with friends, is new and perhaps frail, though, in this sense, that word has nothing to do with “weakness.” What I mean is a blossom still smoking in the morning light, the energy of emergence or survival. “As the millennium dawned,” Traister explains, “it was impossible to watch out for all the women who were coming to change America.” All the Single Ladies begins by examining the particular period most US readers associate with the birth or the rocket launch of feminism in the 1960s to the present: the rise of Gloria Steinem, the flames of second and third wave feminism fanning and critiquing each other, women nodding along to Anita Hill’s testimony of sexual harassment, a bold swell of “sluts,” “Welfare Queens,” “prostitutes,” female voters, single mothers, women trying to secure contraception, women with educations, women with careers. We look at this time as the point where women suddenly woke up. The rigid 1950s were ground into a fine, Wonder Bread dust. What rose from this ash? A body that thought it might now speak. It’s a familiar space for many of us now and a purposeful place to begin for Traister. It allows both the newly arrived person and the seasoned or burgeoning feminist to begin to consider the narrative they know and what richness could be added to it. Traister sets a generous precedent in the earliest pages of the book that follows and shapes the entirety of its strategy. Traister consistently pushes the reader to consider any category or shade of female life or history more expansively. For example, it is immediately clear that straight, middle-class white women are not at the center of any account of female progress or female marginalization.
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