All the Single Ladies

I was really excited to read this book on why women aren't getting married any more. But I wasn't wowed. I found Traister's treatment of the subject to be very superficial – focusing on what she and her friends were experiencing, with pretty limited deeper analysis. When she did turn to statistics, she employed a lot of motivated reasoning including interpretation of statistics that I didn't believe were significantly different. It was clear sometimes that she had a pet theory that she couldn't let go of, for instance, when she talked about how urbanization made single life easier, brushing off that the woman in her exemplary anecdote had to move out of NYC to Virginia to survive as a single mother. Also, her work really focused on singleness among highly educated, affluent white women. She had a chapter on African American women, but the breezy anecdotal tone of the book really didn't translate well to this. Even more than other chapters it felt like she interviewed one black woman (Nancy Giles) and generalized from there in favor of her hypothesis. Traister herself is married and waited until she was married to have children, and she really resists acknowledging that the postponement of both marriage and children among highly educated, affluent women is a different beast socially, psychologically and from a woman's liberation perspective than the childbirth before (and instead) of marriage among less privileged women. She references [b:Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage 73305 Promises I Can Keep Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage Kathryn Edin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438872307l/73305.SY75.jpg 1500229] a few times, but keeps returning to “my life is great! I have a career and female friends and a husband and kids. Isn't single life amazing for women?!