Integrity Score 294
No Records Found
No Records Found
This is one of my all-time favourite works of non-fiction. Thank you for a wonderful review of the book, and I hope it will get more people to read it. :)
Thank you ❤️ It’s definitely one of my favorite nonfiction books as well!
Journalist Rebecca Traister started writing All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation in 2009, while marriage rates were declining and the average age of first marriage for women was climbing. She conducted interviews with more than a hundred single women, and the resulting book examines the lives of single women in historical and contemporary contexts.
I’m a hard sell on audiobooks—I don’t usually have the attention span for them—so it says something that I stuck with this one. Traister is a compelling writer and isn’t afraid to let her own attitudes about certain topics shine through. She explores topics such as Boston marriages (when two single women lived together to keep their careers and avoid heterosexual marriages in the 19th century) and the types of close friendships single women form as opposed to their married counterparts, among many others.
This book does not pretend that single women are a new phenomenon or a problem, which is a refreshing change from the finger-wagging, panic-inducing articles that circulate around social media every once in a while. Traister challenges the status quo of the nuclear family and the expectations that beset unmarried women—that is, the expectations that they need to settle down, and that all women want to. In addition, she lays out the practical costs and benefits of women being single versus being married. For instance, studies show that heterosexual marriage increase a man’s life expectancy but decrease a woman’s, a worrying statistic that asks us to consider what might be going wrong.
In All the Single Ladies, Traister asserts that women living their lives completely independent of men is nothing new, nothing problematic, and certainly nothing to panic about. In fact, single women are simply carrying on a long-held tradition of other academic and career-minded women throughout history, which means that even if they’re not married, they are still in good company. 9/10.