How did marriage affect your sense of self? It's startling to suddenly discover, Oh, this is why people think this is a good thing.
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I was 32 when we met, and I had really never been in a functional relationship before, had never been deeply in love. The real shocker was falling in love with the man I'm married to. "Marriage" was not that big a deal, to be honest! I mean, it makes life easier for technical reasons: insurance, next-of-kin stuff, joint tax filing, etc. And here I'd had 14 years in which I'd made my career, become economically independent, lived my life in the city. My mother had been married at 21, days after she graduated from college it was the beginning of her adult life. I was deep into my adulthood, and I identified as single. I wasn't remotely ambivalent about marrying the person I was marrying, but I was 35. Rebecca Traister: I came up with the idea in the weeks before I was getting married. What made you want to write about being single?
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With All the Single Ladies, she brings her trademark intelligence and wit to bear, interspersing her own experiences and observations with dozens of interviews with women all over the country, plus historical context, from so-called Boston marriages (the nineteenth-century name for women who lived together) and the Brontë sisters to Murphy Brown and Sex and the City. Her first book, Big Girls Don't Cry, examined the 2008 presidential election and its cultural and political consequences via the cycle's cast of female power players, including women voters, Hillary Clinton, and Sarah Palin. Traister has built a reputation as one of America's preeminent feminist voices through her work for Salon, the New Republic, ELLE (where she is a longtime contributing editor), and now New York magazine. The book is wonderfully inclusive, examining single women from all walks of life-working-, middle-, and upper-class women women of color and white women queer and straight ones. In 1960, 59 percent of American adults between 18 and and 29 were married in 2011, it was just 20 percent. "For young women, for the first time, it is as normal to be unmarried as it is to be married, even if it doesn't always feel that way," Traister writes, noting that there were 3.9 million more single adult women in 2014 than there were in 2010.
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In Rebecca Traister's new book, All the Single Ladies(Simon & Schuster), which borrows both the refrain and the feminist spirit of that song, she chronicles the rise of unmarried women in America and the different people we're becoming because of it. In Beyoncé's ring finger–wagging 2008 anthem, "Single Ladies," she celebrates independent women who would rather be single than settle.