SARAH BRONZITE

IN 2010, aged 35, Rebecca Traister got engaged. Friends and family were delighted, but their reaction made her feel uncomfortable. “Some of the social approval I was getting really bothered me — the hearty congratulations — as if getting married was the greatest thing,” she says.

Traister grew up on a farm, daughter of a Jewish father and a Baptist mother. She wasn’t raised in either tradition, but “the family celebrated lots of holidays… Not religiously: secularly, familial-ly.” She was the only Jewish child at her mostly Catholic primary school. “I was acutely aware of my own Jewishness,” she remembers. “I had tremendous identity as a Jewish kid. It made me singular and unusual.”

After college, Traister moved to New York where, for 15 years, she remained single. This, too, felt unusual to her. Indeed, many of the unmarried women whose stories are threaded through her fascinating and timely book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation feel as if they are on the outside. But they are not. As Traister tells me, “it doesn’t feel normal to be unmarried — but it is.”

All across America, urban women are postponing or avoiding marriage. Why? Because they are no longer dependent upon it for financial, social, sexual or reproductive gain. As Traister says in quiet understatement, “women have come to understand that marriage, as a binding legal commitment entered into at the start of adulthood, may not be an institution that best serves their needs.”

From the mid 19th century onwards, greater access to employment and higher education gave women more economic autonomy. However, as Traister documents, true independence came in the 1960s and 1970s, when women gained access both to reliable contraception and to assisted conception. In addition, rising divorce rates significantly reduced the stigma of being single and of open cohabitation. So, by the end of the