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.
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