All The Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister – Various Links to Reviews or Commentary About the Book and Its Issues
There are currently a million links about the new book “All the Single Ladies” by Rebecca Traister
Up til now, I have made individual blog posts about that book – reviews, commentaries that reference it, or interviews with its author.
I no longer feel like devoting that much effort into blogging about it, so here is a lone thread crammed with links about it.
This post may be edited in the future to add new links about this book as I find them.
Some of these links might only be tangentially related to the book. I only have one life to live, and I don’t want to spend it blogging about this one book.
It sometimes takes me a long time to put a single blog post together – especially hunting through the “Categories and Tags” area of the blog area, having to skim through a long list of tags. It’s a time consuming pain in the ass.
One thing you will notice in many of these articles is how often Traister points out that men do not usually face as MUCH social stigma or penalties as often in life -or employment- as single women do for being single. Which is true.
As I have written of before, (Link): Men are not hounded, judged, or shamed nearly as much as women are for remaining celibate, single, and/or childless.
The fact that a woman author had to write a book discussing singleness among women speaks to how much singleness is different for women than it is for men – it is far more socially acceptable (and among Christians) for a man to remain single and childless than it is for a woman.
Do some segments of culture harass men over being single or kid-free or question their manliness? Yes.
I am not saying that life or church is a cake-walk for never married or childless or childfree men. But as a matter of comparison, on a scale of one to ten, with one being “awesome and great” and ten being “terrible and hellish” single and childless men get treated to about a, I don’t know, a four on that scale, while women get a nine or a ten.
Because women have vaginas, they are expected to have babies. There is far more stigma attached for a woman to be single and without children than there is a for a man, because church and society do not expect having babies to be necessary for a man to be fully a man socially or biologically. Not near as much as it is for women.
Women get pressured for more often and more severely to marry and have babies than men ever do or ever will.
I am not saying men get ZERO pressure, only that they get a 1 or a 2 in pressure, where-as women get a 9 or 10 in pressure on the scale of marriage and natalism.
It is far easier to drift thru life as a single bachelor dude with no kids than it is for a woman to go through life with no husband or no kids – you won’t get judged as much by family, church, politicians, conservative think tanks, over this stuff as a woman does over it. And it’s sexist bullshit.
Here are the links (more might be added to this post in the future as I find them):
(Link): The Single American Woman via NY Magazine
- Yet in spite of these harsh truths, All the Single Ladies is celebratory, the stories of real women who are single a reassuring balm to the rhetoric that surrounds us. Traister asks, by outlining the ways women can succeed when their societies support their choices, to consider what we really mean when we tell women to marry for better or worse.
- Her argument – that our public policies are what need to change, not the rate at which we marry or the age we do it – prioritizes equal pay over joint accounts, better health-care provisions over shared plans, comprehensive child care instead of Mommy-and-Me clichés, and other tangible solutions instead of abstract platitudes.
(Link): Rebecca Traister’s ‘All The Single Ladies’ is a singularly triumphant work
(Link): Single Women are Quietly Remaking Our World
- By Emily Simon
- “Single women are taking up space in a world that was not designed for them.”
- That sort of statement – at once radical and obvious – is characteristic of Rebecca Traister: a happily married mother of two who is currently encouraging us to recognize the cultural and political power of single women.
- Single women are trending. Their numbers are increasing, and an essay-length version of Traister’s new book “All the Single Ladies” is a cover story this month in New York Magazine, Traister’s current employer. The story focuses in part on the impact single female voters will have on our upcoming presidential election (in short: way more than you probably think).
- …”Among the largely unacknowledged truths of female life is that the women’s primary, foundational, formative relationships are as likely to be with each other as they are with the men we’ve been told since childhood are supposed to be the people who complete us.”
(Link): The rising influence of “all the single ladies” by Rebecca Lee – Feb 29, 2016
- More and more women are getting married later in life, if at all, and it is changing “everything about the way the nation works.”
- That’s according to New York Magazine writer Rebecca Traister, who explores the rising influence and independence of unmarried women in her new book, “All the Single Ladies.”
- Between 1890 and 1990, the median age of first marriages for women fluctuated between 20 and 22. That number has now soared to 27. In 1960, 60 percent of young women were married, compared to just 20 percent today, according to the Pew Research Center/U.S. Census Bureau.
- Traister says women have historically become “automatically dependent on their husbands,” once they’ve entered marriages.
- “I mean our government and our social policies and civil institutions are all built with one kind of society of citizenry pattern in mind – that’s the married, still hetero married pair in which you have a male earner and a female domestic laborer – and that’s not that way the world works anymore,” Traister told “CBS This Morning” Monday.
- But Traister says the “new pattern for adult female life” is giving women an “unprecedented level of economics, sexual and social independence that calls for a shift in our social policies, from taxes to housing.
- “Even the way the schools let out at three in the afternoon and have big summer vacations – the assumption is there’s some number of our population who are going to be home to take care of those children, and the assumption has always been that they’re women,” Traister said.
- The powerful impact of single women also plays out in the world of politics. In 2012, unmarried women made up 23 percent of the electorate and voted for President Obama 67 to 31 over his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.
- ..As with women, men are also pushing off marriages to later on in life, but the impact is not the same due to historical differences, Traister said.
(Link): Inside The New York Times Book Review Podcast: ‘All the Single Ladies’
(Link): Rebecca Traister: how All the Single Ladies gets at the heart of US history
Excerpts:
- 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
- [The author speaking – she says she was single in her 20s and part of her 30s]:
- 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.
- …I really liked what you wrote about how delaying marriage is not just good for women’s independence but for men’s as well – that they “learn how to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes and iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.”
- I don’t focus on men in the book, but it’s true that more men are living singly just as women are – when marriage rates fall that works for both genders.
- But the reason I focus on women is that it’s always been far more possible and more acceptable for men to live independently in the world.
- They’ve been able to support themselves economically, they’ve enjoyed more sexual liberty – in part because reproduction doesn’t take part inside their bodies!
- Men have always had more freedom, and been considered – especially white men – the de facto adults in this country. They are our leaders, our business men – they are the vision of what an American citizen looks like. It’s a white man.
- Ironically enough, marriage was also an institution that also treated them like children – there was always someone to cook and clean for them like their mothers had. But now men are becoming more domestically capable.
(Link): 10 reasons single women should be mad by Heather Long
Excerpts
- That’s the warning to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and the rest of the field from Rebecca Traister, author of a new book titled (Link): “All the Single Ladies” that’s getting a (Link): lot of buzz.
- Candidates can’t ignore that the power of the single ladies bloc is growing — (Link): 53% of adult American women are now single. Democrats (Link): count on the support of unmarried women to win.
- Many voters are upset with the status quo this year, but single women have an especially long list of reasons to be mad. Simply being born female in the United States means you’ll probably (Link): earn less than your male peers and pay more for life’s basic necessities.
- Traister argues that this is “a revolution,” yet the U.S. government and many businesses are still operating with a 1960s mentality.
- Here are 10 ways unmarried women get crushed financially.
- 1. You get paid less than men
- American women get less money than men. Females earn 84 cents for every dollar a male does, according to Pew Research. PayScale says the gender gap is even worse: women make only 77 cents for every dollar that men do.
- Some of the gap is explained by the fact that more women work in lower paid jobs such as administrative assistant and social work. But the gap exists even when women and men have the same jobs and qualifications.
- For the exact same work, women earn only 97 cents for every $1 that their male peers do, according to an extensive PayScale study. The bottom line is women, especially single women, are living on less.
- 2. You typically pay more for shampoo
- Women face a double whammy financially: they get paid less but they often have to pay more for basic items like shampoo, razors and jeans. The phenomenon has been dubbed the (Link): “pink tax.”
- A recent study by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs found that haircare products for women cost on average 48% more than the same items marketed to men.
- 3. Singles pay more for car insurance
- Not being married is a major strike when it comes to getting car insurance, especially in your 20s. Both unmarried men and unmarried women pay higher premiums than their friends who have tied the knot, according to (Link): InsuranceQuotes.com.
- Some question whether insurers need to re-do their calculations, especially now that the median age that women marry has (Link): jumped from 22 in 1980 to over 27 now. Hawaii is the only state that prohibits insurance companies from considering marital status in rate calculations.
- …The bottom line
- The bottom line is women earn less than men, yet women have to pay more for many basic life expenses. Unmarried women are at an even greater disadvantage since they have to carry all the financial burden on their own — and pay more for things like car insurance.
- And this is before anyone even talks about the lingering stigma of being a single woman “of a certain age.”
- But change may come quickly.
- “I think there’s clearly political pressure that was not present before,” says Budson at Harvard. “We have both men and women speaking out in politics and the entertainment industry and in day to day conversations about the wage gap.”
- Traister agrees. “Huge numbers of women are saying…We are a changed nation and we require a different relationship with our government.”
(Link): Scary Single Ladies: Rebecca Traister Explains Why Single Women Frighten The Hell Out Of The GOP
(Link): Don’t Underestimate Single Women Voters by A. Smith
(Link): Why Single Women Have Baby Fear Of Missing Out – by L. Crocker – via Daily Beast
(Link): ‘Marriage Changes When You Don’t Just Need A Warm Body and a Paycheck’: A Talk With Rebecca Traister
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Related Posts:
(Link): Male Entitlement and Adult Virginity: Who has it worse, Male Vs. Female?
(Link): Stop Telling Women Their Most Valuable Asset Is Their Youth (From Time)
(Link): Creepy, Wrong, Immature and Pathetic: Older Men Chasing After Much Younger Women
(Link): Family as “The” Backbone of Society? – It’s Not In The Bible
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