“Young women today no longer have to wonder, as I did, what unmarried adult life for women might look like,” writes political journalist Rebecca Traister in her latest book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. In it, she charts the increasingly common trend among American women of delaying or opting out of marriage—not because they’re all living inside a Cathy comic (ACK!!!), but because marriage is no longer the entry point into adulthood that it once was.
This is a revolutionary idea, with revolutionary implications. And though their numbers have increased, Traister clarifies that unmarried women aren’t some modern blight invented by Helen Gurley Brown, but have long played an essential role in our country’s most important social movements, from the abolition of slavery to current battles over equal pay—in part because unmarried women, free from the gendered obligations that historically accompanied marriage, have had the time to be politically engaged. (It was enough to make Susan B. Anthony dream of an “epoch” of single women.)