Rebecca Traister: Life and the single woman

Journalist Rebecca Traister's book All the Single Ladies, about the power of single women, is running up the charts and garnering applause from book critics nationwide. She describes herself as a "boring married."

She lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, ground zero of what famous fictional singleton Bridget Jones called the "smug marrieds." Traister, 40, has two children and a husband and is not unaware of the irony.

Traister is a writer at large for New York Magazine and a contributing editor at Elle magazine. She was single for most of her life and holds strongly to the memory of that time. But she says she's not trying to pretend things haven't changed.

All the Single Ladies focuses on changing marriage patterns and why women are choosing more and more to break away from the long- required paths of wife and mother. Traister will speak at the Penn Book Center on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.

The image of a "single lady" has changed a lot over the years, but there's still a lot of stigma to it. Do you think it'll ever go away?

Not in our lifetime, no. I believe we're in the very middle of doing it, and the shifting patterns are key to rearranging our power structure when it comes to gender, but it's a very long process.

When I read the words "single lady," I think of someone who is not partnered. But you mean unmarried - the focus of the book is really about women who choose not to get married but most of them are still with men. How does that change the perspective?

The definition of single is very loose. It can mean any number of things; it's not just this binary choice. The argument I'm making is that if you remove the early heterosexual married model as a social imperative for women, the alternative is not some inverse of that; it's a variety of outcomes and paths. And those paths may wind around love, sex, partnerhood, divorce, celibacy, and friendship, all in different rates and patterns.

To be honest, a lot of my friends disappeared as soon as they got married, and evaporated when they had kids. They didn't need me anymore. You write a lot about the tight bonds of female friendship, but marriage changes that.

It's difficult to navigate. I write about the role that friends play, and the nearly spousal role that our good friends can play for us.

You say that New York City was almost a spousal partner to you and other women you interviewed.

It was a partner to me and I had a chemistry with it. Cities have an infrastructure that helps you be single. There are small spaces and more communal living setups. They offer diversion, and there are more jobs and more people to meet as lovers, friends, and colleagues.

Are there media role models for unmarried women anymore, particularly those in their 40s, 50s, and 60s? There's no "Sex and the City."

A lot of people are excited about Broad City [which runs on Comedy Central], but that is about younger women. There is Kerry Washington. There was The Mindy Project. There were shows that had strong friendships, like Meredith and Cristina on Grey's Anatomy, but Sandra Oh left the show. A lot of people have recommended The Good Wife.

Is the pressure to get married going away?

There's more pressure, in some ways. When I talk to people, they talk about the social-media pressure - the endless pictures of engagement rings and weddings and proposals flung far and wide. There's increasing pressure on black women. Look at Steve Harvey - Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man - if you don't have a man, it's because something is wrong with you as a black woman. Women are attacked for being independent, and if you're lonely or unhappy, it's because you don't have a man, or you've made selfish choices. Many married women are also lonely or unhappy.

What surprised you about writing this book?

I didn't know the remarkable history of unmarried women in the U.S. and hadn't thought about the political, social, and economic policies that were affected, about the intertwining reality of gender bias, and how much America's history was wound up with unmarried women. And I'm surprised at the speed at which the perspective on single life is shifting. When my friends and I didn't get married in our 20s and headed into our 30s, we weren't scared not to get married. It wasn't doleful, it was like: "Huh. What's going to happen now?" It was a curious kind of perspective.

Now I talk to women who are 15, 20 years younger, and they are so much firmer on their early adulthood not including marriage. They think it would be crazy to marry at 22.

Dawn Fallik is a former Inquirer staff writer and currently a professor at the University of Delaware.

Rebecca Traister: "All the Single Ladies"

6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Penn Book Center, 130 S. 34th St.

Admission: Free.

Information: 215-222-7600, www.pennbookcenter.com