The New York Times best­selling inves­ti­ga­tion into the sex­u­al, eco­nom­ic, and emo­tion­al lives of women is ​“an infor­ma­tive and thought-pro­vok­ing book for any­one — not just the sin­gle ladies — who want to gain a greater under­stand­ing of this piv­otal moment in the his­to­ry of the Unit­ed States” (The New York Times Book Review).

In 2009, award-win­ning jour­nal­ist Rebec­ca Trais­ter start­ed All the Sin­gle Ladies about the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry phe­nom­e­non of the Amer­i­can sin­gle woman. It was the year the pro­por­tion of Amer­i­can women who were mar­ried dropped below fifty per­cent; and the medi­an age of first mar­riages, which had remained between twen­ty and twen­ty-two years old for near­ly a cen­tu­ry (1890 – 1980), had risen dra­mat­i­cal­ly to twen­ty-sev­en.

But over the course of her vast research and more than a hun­dred inter­views with aca­d­e­mics and social sci­en­tists and promi­nent sin­gle women, Trais­ter dis­cov­ered a star­tling truth: the phe­nom­e­non of the sin­gle woman in Amer­i­ca is not a new one. And his­tor­i­cal­ly, when women were giv­en options beyond ear­ly het­ero­sex­u­al mar­riage, the results were mas­sive social change — tem­per­ance, abo­li­tion, sec­ondary edu­ca­tion, and more. Today, only twen­ty per­cent of Amer­i­cans are mar­ried by age twen­ty-nine, com­pared to near­ly six­ty per­cent in 1960.