Next, a discussion on women and marriage featuring rebecca traister, author of all the Single Ladies unmarried women and the rise of an independent nation and kate bolick who wrote spinster making a life of ones own. Now it sounds like it is working. Thank you for coming. I have a set of rules and if i do dont it right i will have to leave. I want to welcome you and after the talk the authors will be signing books on the second floor. When they sign, some of the proceeds will be going to the San Antonio Library foundation which is near and dear to our hearts so i hope you will consider maybe buying one than one copy. Kate bolick is the author of spinster making a life of ones own she is also a contributing editor to the atlantic and host of touch stones at the mount. An annual literary interview the the literary series. Her work appeared in cosmopolitan, new york times, slate and other publications. She and rebecca both live in brooklyn. Both of these books are spectacular. Rebecca is the author of all the Single Ladies unmarried women and the rise of an independent nation she is the writer at large for new York Magazine and she is going to be covering the election so if you have any ted cruz gossip you would like to pass on you should do it now. She is a contributing editor at el, a National Award finalist and written about women in politics, media and entertainment from a feminist perspective and contributed to the nation, the new York Observer, the new york times, the washington post, vogue, glamour and marie claire and her first book was called big girls dont cry which is about women and the 2012 election. As i said before she lives in brooklyn. And i thought i would thank katie for picking be to be the hos host of this event because i have been married for 30 years so i barely remember being single but i thought we would start out with them talking about how they both came to write this book at a similar time. Thanks. Why dont you go first . Your book is first. Okay. What happened with me is i wrote a cover story for the atlantic also called all the Single Ladies and the assignment was to look at contemporary marriage trends and how the economy was shaping and changing them. While i was reporting and researching the story i came across the statistic of nearly half the population being unmarried and realized this was my way into the story. The atlantic asked me to write the story in the firstperson drawing on my own appearances as an unmarried woman of 38 or something at the time. So i ended up writing this story and it touched on single women as well as marriage trends. It went viral. I started hearing from women and men all over the country and the world and realized what had felt like a very private internal conversation i had been having for a long time about my own single life and where i fit into the world was a conversation a lot of people wanted to be having. Then i meet rebecca and we do an event together in new york which is when i discovered she had sold a book called all the Single Ladies and my overwhelming feeling was i felt terrible i had inadverntly stolen the title. But i was relieved because publishers were asking me to turn the article into a book and i thought it would be fascinating but it wasnt a book i wanted to write. I had a different idea of approaching the topic which is more personal and historical literary. So i was glad rebecca was writing this important book and i could write this other book. That is how that happened. My intent was the atlantic but me on the cover looking tough and scowling and it made be uncomfortable to be out in perp looking like someone i am not and who had it all figured out and didnt want this. I wanted to show, i, like many othershad grown up at a time with mixed and conflicting messages about what shape our lives should take and how to think about marriage versus not marriage. And that was confusing personal, economic, and psychological process. I wanted to make it as personal as i could to help the reader think about her own life and talk to me the way i was talking to the woman who were dead and i write about in my book. I blabbered on for too long but that is yeah. In my case, i was a journalist writing for the website salon and i have been writing for 78 years often once a week and sometimes 20 times a week depending on what the news cycle was like. And i had written i was unmarried and through most of my 20s and into my early 30s i was really unmarried. I didnt have boyfriends. Most of my friends who were also unmarried were in and out of relationships and i was in and out of one. Like really in and out of one relationship that wasnt wildly satisfying over a couple years in my 20s but i had not had a boyfriend in high school and college and most of my 20s and into my 30s. So i was acutely aware of my singlehood whereas some of my friends in and out of relationships were not. I had written about it as a journalist because i wrote about it so much. I wrote about the connections i made with my girlfriend that felt spousal and were the foundation and familiar relationships of my early adulthood. I covered the statistics in a dry way. Here is this news so many more women are living single. I covered them in post and news reports. I wrote a book about women and politics during the 2008 election and around the time that book came out and people were saying will you write another one and i didnt know whether i was or not but around that time i met a man and fell in love and was getting married. I was 35. In the months before i got ma marri married, i was doing a lot of thinking about my complexity of getting married deep into my adulthood and so many rituals are about starting your adult life and i was like, no, i have an adult life. I was so and this identity that stuck so firmly to me for more than a decade during which i built my career, friendhships and my own place in the city. It was tied to being on my own. And people were treating this like now it is really. I was very discomballilated by this. And in my social group, and we can tog talk about this, everybody was single. I knew few people getting married out of college and at 35 i was on the early end of friends. Most of my girlfriends were single and not getting married and i felt like a child bride at 35. I began to think i dont think there has been enough serious attention paid to this topic because, again, as a reporter writing about politics, one year, i believe it was 2004, there was a thing about sex and city voters, now known as beyonce voters, and they are unmarried women. They are not an acute subset. I wrote about them and this has been made cutesy and i dont know that anybody is really taking these seriously as a fundamental alteration in what we conceive of in womens adult lives. The map seems to be reorganized and i dont think if anybody thought about that. That is when i started putting together the proposal for the book and sold the book under the title all the Single Ladies. I then had a baby and was out of it for a couple months. As it turns out. As advertised it can throw you off. When i came back and started to write the book a friend called and said have you seen the cover of the atlantic and there was a moment of sheer terror for me. It is such a good story and doing one one of the motivations for writing the book is nobody took it seriously and i will. And then the cover of the atlantic had this wonderful piece that was 13,000 words taking this topic seriously and it was beautiful written and thoughtful. I did have the same headline in my book and i was like uhoh. Then i read it and said this is a massive nation altering shift in how women live, in how men live, how families are defined, and what our social policies need to do and what our attitudes about sexuality and friendship. I loved every word of kates piece. 150 people can write books about john kennedy. I think a lot can write about this as they should. I ran into that. Spinster came out last year and because okay. I to had this feeling it wasnt being taken seriously. It was about the way single women were writing about themselves and in a selfdepricating way. It felt uncomfortable and then in 2000, i found a journalist named leaf boy who wrote an article called the bachelor girl about a decision to never marry. She was writing in this appealing, sharp, funny and critical voice that didnt sound like the contemporary single woman and it showed me there had been a public critique of marriage and thinking about womens lives at a time in history i didnt know existed. We were having similar feelings, the both of us. I dont live in a political space and wasnt thinking about the larger political picture. I was thinking about how women think and talk about themselves and how that is shaped by the culture and era in which we live. I want to go back to what kate said about the period. The marriage patterns began to shift really in the 90s. We can talk more about the timeline of how it happened but on political victories of the mid20th century, the womans movement, civil rights movement, gay rights movement, which were all political revolutions. And combined with the sexual revolution and revised attitudes about adult sexualation and the legalization of Birth Control and abortion. All of these things created conditions that enabled this mass behavioral shift away from marriage but that started in mass numbers in about the early 90s which is when both of us were coming of age. We are about three years apart. That was when we were sort of young adults. It was happening and the numbers were shifting but there wasnt a real consciousness there were shift. There was a lot of discomfort and i write about that in my book and about the role anita hill played and how her testimony was uncomfortable for people and alan simpson said watch out for that woman. There was a sense of threat women were coming who were not like women we had known before and they would be florida position to challenge male power or their nomination to a supreme court. They were maybe detached from institutions like marriage. There was dan quail riing into the murphy brown the Fictional Television character who had a child outside of wedlock. Before i was writing about feminism i worked for the new York Observer and wrote about film financing. It was like who is funding independent features and very dry actually and i was paid very little. I needed freelance work but every freelance assignment coming my way, despite my history was about film, all of the freelance offers were can you write about your sex life and i had no sex life. But it was like a cartoon and someone looking at a cow and the thought bubble is a hamburger. I thought to be a young professional woman with a pen, the height of sex and the city, i was a hamburger except the hamburger is the young woman who might have an interesting sex life. Even though i did not. People didnt know what to make of the women living in different patterns except to hypersexualize them. And later than kate i had already sold my book, you know, many years later i sold my book about a contemporary phenomenal. Here are these numbers that are unprecedented and it never happened in american history. I had a few sentences like i will look at the history of the single women in the United States which i am sure had to do with the salem witch trials. I sold the book and it would be written in a year. As i began to do research and d discovered most of the witches were single or widowed. There was this tremendous history, in terms of scope and size, it is unprecedented, but there is this history that came came through to the writers she connected to so profoundly as a young writer herself, but i came to when i started looking into the history of marriage patterns and discovered at the end of the 19th century there was a population of middle class white women because so many men move west and were killed in the war there was a husband shortage and you had these women living independently and their lives, which were no longer maternal responsibilities, they devoted energy to movements like abolition, suffrage, the labor movement, the creation of more Higher Education and teaching and nursing professions in which women could better earn their living. So my theory about the contemporary generation which is we are reshaping the nation was true in the 19th century and i didnt know that and that is why the book took fives years to write. I talk about the culture amnesia that takes place and we can only remember history as far as back as our parents and grandparents go. All of us are Walking Around thinking marriage is like it was in the 1950s when in fact that was an absence period. I make a word graph in my book where i show in the 1890s, 34 of women were unmarried and that number goes down until midcentury and it is 17 of women unmarried and now we are at 53 . It is radical and enormous and hard to dig in because history has been so pushed back into the past. We tend to think those victorians have nothing to do with that. Although, i would also argue since one of the arguments in my book is that one of the reasons people freak out about single women is married has been a useful organizing institution especially organizing gender power and who has economic and political power. In the 1950s, i do think what you are saying is absolutely right. We have short memories that extend as far back as our grandparents and that is it. But there are a lot of culture forces in play that made the 1950s and the mid20th century an era of white, middle Class Nuclear family that the government in many ways underwrote the creation of that white middle class and the push of women to marry early again after some decades marry later and less often. It happened to be the moment where american took a selfie. But i think for nonbenign reasons. It was white, a lot of the same Government Forces that had created the white middle class worked to cut off black families from educationalal resources that were bolstering the white community. And they were pushing women out of the colleges and professions they made their way into. It was the most comfortable stricture of patriots. And then we decided to say this is what america looks like. I think that is why it looms so large. I have a question for you. When you got the 53 figure how does that break down into women never married, divorced, widowed. All of them. Do you know a third is younger women . Is it i think i cannot breakdown that particular specific but offer others. One of the reasons the marriage rate is down is because the marriage age is rising. We dont know because we are still in flux, but there are some people, including you know, Stephan Stephanie koontz said this, people guess 85 of people are going to wind up married. It is just a question of when. Some of the most telling statistics about unmarried, 1829, only 20 . That is compared to 60 in the same bracket in 1960 which was the height of the early marriage movement. 46 under the age of 34 are unmarried. It is almost as likely under the age of 34 that you are never married than that you are. I see it as reshaping the politics. New york city state passed paid family leave legislation which was monumental and revolutionary. It becomes the fifth state although washington hasnt enacted theirs. As i said, marriage was useful organizing institution. Our government, our social policie policies, economic and civic. They enable their husbands p participation in the public sphere by taking care the rest of their life and depresses their own ability to compete in those public spheres. That is not how we live anymore. We dont live in early married hetero units. We may live in some for parts of our lives and they maybe married, samesex partnerships, women are increasingly earners and closer to equal earners, increasingly we see single parenthood as a norm for women under 30. More than 50 of births to women under 30 are to unmarried mothers. We dont have the social and economic support for how americans are actually living as posed to how they used to live and the policies being talked about in the president ial election on the democrat side, things like raising the minimum wage, this is key. Two 3rds of minimum wage women are women and many single mothers. 42 of single mothers live below the poverty line and raising the minimum wage would have a huge deal. And it is not mandated paid leave after adopting a child or if you need to care for an aging parent. The family leave that passed in new york has to do with taking care of ill family members. Equal pay protections that would better enable women who are participating in the public sphere and economy to not have their work discounted on because of gender. Reproductive rights that enable women to exert control over if, when and under what circumstances they have children. We hear in the president ial election about the shift to the left and people say this is Bernie Sanders coming in and she is drawing everybody left. It is my belief that Bernie Sanders is a conduit that is driven by practical need. We need social and economic policies that will better support how americans live and that is with women as far more equal participants in the public sphere than every before and men as far more equal in the domestic field. Good luck with that. I know. The policy in new york covers paid leave for men and women. 12 weeks. If you are talking about traditional hetero married household the woman could take 12 weeks and then the man takes 12 weeks. Think of the impact that has on family finances. You dont have to put your kid in daycare until six months versus days after they are born which is true for so many lowincome parents right now. Another thing i loved about your book was finding these rolemodels in their work as opposed to you are told find a mentor at your company. I thought i can remember when i discovered and i thought i can write the way i want. Can you talk about that . In my book i talk about the lives of five women who lived at the turn of the last century who influenced by own thinking about marriage versus not marriage through their lives and their work. Originally, i was doing this as a hobby. Reading what they wrote and talking to them in my head. As i describe in my book, my mother died at 52 of Breast Cancer suddenly and i was 23. We were very close and talked about everything. Entering my adulthood without her was terrible in a million ways but one was i didnt have anybody to talk to about do i take this job . Marry this guy . I plucked mother sarigates out of history. I thought it was visually appealing or different enough from the time period i w