Rebecca Traister: ‘Single women are less likely to vote conservative’

“Good and Mad is one of the best accounts I have read of the cumulative anger women feel, coming up against their centuries-old subordination,” writes the radical feminist author Vivian Gornick about Rebecca Traister’s book, which explores the power of women’s anger — a sentiment that has long been dismissed as “unfeminine.” The author of New York Times bestsellers All the Single Ladies (S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books, 2016), which discusses the power of single women as a revolutionary force, she has written for New York Magazine, The New York Observer, and The Washington Post about women’s roles in politics, the media, and the entertainment industry from a feminist perspective.

Q. Why has women’s anger been silenced?

A. I think there are a million reasons, but the most comprehensive explanation is that women’s anger is a challenge to men, who still have all sorts of patriarchal power. Women’s submission is very useful within a patriarchy: women’s dependence on men means that they can be paid less, can be tasked with domestic and familial labor, can be sexually objectified and their bodies policed, all in ways that augment male power, that enable men to be earners and have public, political, economic and sexual dominance. But if women get angry about any of these conditions, it makes it more complicated. Of course women’s anger isn’t always about gendered inequality: angry women have often been at the heart of all kinds of power shifts: the labor and environmental and gay rights and civil rights movements. But that is sort of the point: every one of those movements has upended power structures and made it more complicated for those in authority to maintain their authority, within a white capitalist hetero-patriarchy.

Q. Could we say that unmarried women are a revolutionary force?

A. In the United States, the fact that unmarried women are a revolutionary force is evident in how directly the right wing is making a point of vilifying and blaming social collapse on them. In our presidential election this year, the vice presidential candidate (and VP-elect) J.D. Vance called single women “childless cat ladies” and argued that they were “sociopathic.” The right wing is trying to reverse no-fault divorce laws that made it easier for women to leave marriages; the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and the threats to contraceptive access are about removing the tools of liberation that women used to live outside of marriages. So yes, those changed marriage patterns have been key to revolutionary politics, and the conservative factions in this country understand that very well.

Q. Some data suggests that the closer white women are to white men via their marriages, the more likely they are to vote for conservative policies. Why is that and has that changed in the last elections?

A. White women have always voted for conservative policies — even against their own enfranchisement, back when women were being asked to vote on suffrage in the early part of the 20th century. But it’s also true that when you break it down, single white women are less likely to vote for conservatives than married white women. There could be a lot of reasons for that, including the possibility that conservative women are more likely than liberal ones to get married, or that proximity to white patriarchal power makes it more appealing for white women, who of course benefit from it as white people, and via their closeness to white men. Again, this is something that conservatives understand instinctively. In the United States, on the conservative Fox News network, a news anchor named Jesse Watters said after the 2022 midterms in which Democrats did very well, “Single women are breaking for Democrats by 30 points...So we need these ladies to get married. And it’s time to fall in love and just settle down. Guys, go put a ring on it.”

Q. Rage is taken seriously or considered politically valid depending on many factors, but it is not valid when it comes from powerful white men, right?

A. Yes, in men rage is seen as a natural emotion, and can be linked to bravery, passion, leadership, pride, all qualities that augment certain kinds of masculinized signals of strength.

Q. Simone de Beauvoir said we as women “are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being”. Why is our life supposed to be always linked to marriage?

A. Historically, gender inequity made women dependent on marriage: for economic stability, for a socially sanctioned sex life, for legitimacy. This is because marriage was an institution that organized power: men were earners whose lives in the public sphere were made possible by unpaid women who would do their domestic labor and raise their kids. Women who were not in the public sphere needed men for a roof over their heads. All this led to all kinds of social attitudes: that to not have a husband was a reflection of a lack of worth, that certain kinds of husbands (high earners) were more valuable than others. Entire social attitudes were built around this, leading women’s value to be weighed on a scale that was built largely around male-defined ideas about their appeal to men. When these were the scales, the amount of preparation that went into getting women ready to be wanted by a man, maritally, began in childhood. And the question of whether a woman was married so defined her that we had different honorifics — in English, Miss or Missus — to signal what her status was. So I imagine when an entire world was built around these assumptions, in which the course of a woman’s life, including questions of her parenthood, her worth, her economic stability, her social standing, were all driven by her marital status, would have created the conditions De Beauvoir describes.

Q. The sociologist Maike van Damme speaks about the male deficit, claiming there are no available partners for many educated, feminist women. Do you agree?

A. Yes, many people have observed this. Of course, this comes from the mash-up of recently changed mating and life patterns (more women who are educated and working and economically independent) with older, hard-to-shake assumptions about how status should be distributed in hetero couples, so it feels unnatural for a woman with an advanced degree to be matched with a man with less education. But why should it? If we were to in fact successfully unknot our assumptions about gender and power, that would be just as reasonable as the eons in which women with less educational or earning status partnered with men with more.

Q. In fact, many women decide to stay single because of that. Do you think society still condemns single women?

A. Yes, society still is hard on single women, and there are all kinds of penalties they pay, but it’s much easier to live unmarried now than it was even 20 or 30 years ago.

Q. What do you think about the popularity of tradwives?

A. I think this fad is not much different from previous iterations of backlash to female independence: holding up traditional modes of subservience as idealized and trendy and even hip. But as with past iterations, it’s all built on a lot of lies. Many of the tradwife influencers on social media are in fact bringing in a lot of money, just as anti-feminist crusaders like Phyllis Schlafley preached about the benefit of women being home with their kids as she herself was on the road working as a political leader to defeat liberal feminism.

Q. You are married. Would you say marriage has changed you or your life?

A. Marriage, the institution, has not changed my life, except insofar as how I file my taxes and the ease of sharing health insurance benefits. But meeting the man who I married definitely did change my life and I’d never pretend otherwise: I love being in love, and though as a single person I had planned to try to have children on my own, it is unquestionably easier to have done it with a partner. But as I write in my book, the fact that I have a good and equitable marriage is itself a product of the ability to live single: had I married the men I was dating in my early twenties, which was the expectation and norm for generations, those would not have been good matches. Because I had the freedom to leave those relationships, to live independently through my twenties and into my thirties, I was had become my own person by the time a good match came my way.

Q. There’s an important rise in the number of unmarried women. Where do queer women fit in this phenomenon?

A. The gay rights movement was crucial to displacing early hetero marriage as the only norm for legitimacy when it comes to adult romantic and sexual bonds. Before marriage equality, the fight to see and recognize and not stigmatize queer relationships had a huge role in the revelation that straight married commitment was certainly not the only way to have committed relationships. And while there certainly were LGBTQ+ activists who objected to the fight for marriage equality — noting that there was no reason why gay and lesbian couples should take on this retro conservative institution as a legitimizing framework for their relationships — what marriage equality did was wholly redefine what marriage could mean, if there was no automatic patriarchal hierarchy at its core.

Q. Single women are still sometimes described as spinsters, while men are desirable bachelors…

A. Yes, the double standards will persist, and likely worsen, as backlash continues to build. I think we’re in for a bumpy couple of decades in which women are harshly judged for not marrying. But I also think, and this is probably my unstoppable optimism, even in the face of desperate regressions, that you cannot put this genie back in its bottle. Women who have tasted sexual, educational, professional, social and economic liberation from early heteromarriage as the only legitimizing norm for adult life will not so easily be stuffed back into it.

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