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In this week's episode, I talk to journalist and author, Rebecca Traister.

Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York magazine. A National Magazine Award winner, she has written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon and has also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She is the author of Good and Mad, and All The Single Ladies, both New York Times best-sellers, and the award-winning Big Girls Don’t Cry.

Topics that Rebecca & I cover are:

how it took getting engaged for Rebecca to feel called to write a book about single women;
how she spent the majority of her twenties and early thirties as a single women;
Rebecca’s frustration at marriage still being regarded as the beginning of ‘real’ adulthood;
how other people’s reactions to her getting married made her very curious about the history of single women;
the increase in the median age of marriage over the years;
the reasons for the move away from marriage that begun in the late 19th century;
how marriage has been used as a way of organising power, and controlling reproduction, throughout history;
how women were often forced to ‘attach’ themselves to a man for economic reasons;
how marriage wasn’t built around the notion of love;
how the advent of teaching became one of the ways for women to earn money;
how women in the 19th century often feared being within a marriage because of the very real dangers of pregnancy and childbirth at that time;
the challenge, even now, of getting people to accept and acknowledge that life outside of marriage is valid and full;
how the victory is not in unmarried life vs married life, but in securing options besides the one and only path of marriage;
the frightening idea that the conservative right in the US are looking to return us to a place where women are economically and socially dependent on men;
Roe v Wade and birth control;
how progress and regress are always happening in tandem.

Follow Rebecca on Twitter:
@rtraister

Follow Rebecca on Instagram:
@rtraister1

Rebecca’s Website:
https://rebeccatraister.com/

UK Link to Rebecca’s book, All The Single Ladies:

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