“All the Single Ladies” readalong: Chapters One and Two

Welcome to our readalong of  “All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation” by Rebecca Traister. We think this is the perfect book to read for Women’s History Month. You can find our reading schedule here.

Traister’s main point of the book is that single women have always played a vital role in the making of the world – and we get a historical overview of single women’s role in history in chapters one and two.

Throughout the course of time, many single women were stuck in jobs as midwives and caretakers and then, as the industrial revolution took place, teachers or nurses.

But single women were “coalescing around a handful of social movements that would alter the future of a nation,” including the abolitionist movement. As technology advanced, women had more jobs opportunities and roles in the labor movement. They led in the shaping of the 14th, 15th, 18th and 19th Amendments.

Traister notes that the second feminist wave of the 1970s had the “ironic side effect … that single women had almost no place in the underpinnnings of the movement.” Second Wave feminists like Betty Friedan were married, but the movement “did not assume (or even consider) that marriage was a problematic element, or that it might be optional for women.”

But Gloria Steinem was unmarried and, although she had relationships, “she just really enjoyed being free.” Women were beginning to understand they could be free, too, as new laws and Supreme Court decisions and the divorce boom made it more common to be single.

This is an interesting overview of single women in history. Traister points to famous single women, including Queen Elizabeth I; activists Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams and Dorothy Height; painter Mary Cassatt; poet Emily Dickinson; and doctors Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell. Who is your favorite single woman in history?