Now, we kick up the with the politics of marriage. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] , like to welcome you all. Thank you for coming. My very good friend will give me a set of rules to impart to you and i know if i dont do it right i want to read leave right away. I have already welcomed you. I will tell you on the second floor after this session the authors will be signing books and your authors are gentoo and kate bolick. When they signed some of the proceeds will go to the library foundation, which is near to all of our hearts, so hope you consider buying maybe more than one copy. Kate bolick is the author of spencer, making a life of ones own. Shes also a contributor editor to the atlantic and host of touchstones, and annual literally interview series. I would like to come next year. In august, preferably. Her work has appeared in cosmopolitan, the New York Times, among other publications and Sheila Rebecca both live in brooklyn. Rebecca is the author both of these books are spectacular. I just wanted to add my editorial opinion. Rebecca is the author of all the Single Ladies she is a writer at large for new York Magazine and she will be covering the elections, so if you have meathead crews gossip you would like to pass along, do it now. Shes a contributing editor at bell, National Award finalist. She has written often about women in politics and entertainment from a feminist perspective. Has also contributed to the nation, new York Observer, New York Times, Washington Post, vogue, glamour and marie claire and her first book was called big girls dont cry. It was a new New York Times notable book 2010 and she, as i said before, lives in brooklyn. Relative thing katie for picking me to be the hostess 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 both of them just talking about how they came to write these books. Similar times, interesting. Thinks. Why dont you go first. Your books first. I wrote a cover story for the atlantic and 2011 also called all the Single Ladies and of the assignment was to look at contemporary marriage trends and how that economy was shaping and changing them and while i was supporting and researching the story i came across a statistic that was new to be the time, nearly half the population being unmarried and i realized this was my way into the story because they had asked me to write this story in the first person to write on my own experiences as an unmarried woman of 38 or something at the time. So, ended up writing this story and touched on single women as well as marriage trends and it went viral. I started hearing from women and men also all over the country and all of the world and realized what had felt like a very private idiosyncratic internal conversation that i had been having for a long time about my own single life and life in the world was the fact that a lot of the people wanted to have. And will so common that i meet rebecca and we do an event the other in new york, which is when i discovered she had just not too long before so they book called all the Single Ladies and my overwhelming feeling was i felt terrible i had inadvertently stolen her title in this article. I stole it back. A lot of publishers were asking me to turn the articles back into the book and i thought it would be a great fast same book, but its was a book i wanted to write myself. I had a different idea about how wanted to approach this, which was more idiosyncratic and personal, so i was glad rebecca was writing this book and i could write another book. Thats how that happened and my intent the atlantic put me on the cover of the magazine looking like a really tough like unlike scalia and then like marriage can of thing and its made me very uncomfortable to be out in public looking like someone i am not and looking like someone who had it all figured out and didnt want this and i wanted to show that i like many other people had grown up at a time with a lot of mixed and conflicting messages about what shapes our lives and how to think about marriage versus not marriage and its a confusing personal and social and economic and historical event, so i wanted to make it as personal as i could in a way to help the readers think about their own life and talk to me the way that i was talking to the women who world that that i write about it might book. I blabber on for too long, but thats how i yeah. So, in my case i was a journalist writing for the website and i had been writing for probably seven or eight years, often once a week and sometimes 20 times a week depending on what the news cycle was like and i was unmarried and through most of my 20s and into my early 30s i was really unmarried in my personal life, like i didnt have boyfriends. Most of my friends who are also unmarried were in and out of relationships, but i was in and out of one like really in and out of one that was not wildly satisfied, but mostly i had not had a boyfriend in high school and college for most of my 20s and into my 30s, so i was perhaps acutely aware of my single that in a way that some of my friends who were in and out of monogamous relationships were not. I had written about it as a journalist because i was writing so much. I had written stories about the role free milf friendship has played in my life. The connections i made with some of my girlfriends that had felt like spousal, without being sexual that had been the foundational positive relationship of my early adulthood. I also covered some of the statistic cicadas talking about. I cover them in kind of a dry way. Hears this news that semi more women women are living single. I covered them in coats and little news reports of stuff and i was aware of all that stuff, but none of it coalesced. I wrote a book about women in politics and the 2008 election and around the time that looking out and people started to say are you going to write another one and i didnt know whether i was or not, but around that time i had met a man and fallen in love and was getting married and in the months before i got married i was doing a lot of thinking about the way people were responding to the fact i was getting married, about my complexity of getting married, sort of what i felt seem to be about your starting your adult life and i was like, no, i have an adult life. You know. This identity that had stuck so firmly to me form of than a decade during which the my career, made my friendship, made my home in the city had been an identity that was content with me being on my own at romantically. Here was this pete the people were treated like well, now its real and i was very discombobulated by this. I thought, you think i want to write and i was also by new york standards in my social group and we can talk about this, no one was married. In my social Group Everyone was single. 235 i was kind of on the early end of my friends. Most of my girlfriends for single and not getting married and i felt like it child bride at 35. I began to think, i dont think theres been enough serious attention paid to this topic because again, as a reporter writing about politics one year i believe it was in 2004, there was a big thing about sex in the city voters. What it means is unmarried women who by the way in 2012, comprise about a quarter of the electric, so they are not the cute subset that you could just call beyonee voters, but i read about them and i was like what a minute this is all cutesy and trend story, but i dont know anyone has really taken this seriously as a fundamental alteration in what we can see of and what we expect a female adult life. The map of what womens lives or slows to like as an adult should be fundamentally reorganize and output anyone thought about that. Thats why put together the proposal for the book and i sold the book with the title all the Single Ladies naa i then had a baby and i was out of it for a couple of months. As it turns out, as advertised, it can throw you off. Then when i sort of came back and started to write this book, a friend who called me and was like using the coverup of of the atlantic, but and there was her me a moment of sheer terror because it is such a good story and it was doing the one of the motivations or me up writing this book is no had taken this seriously and im going to take it seriously. Then, the cover of the atlantic had it is incredible piece with 16 13000 words soon i 16000, ladies and gentlemen taking this topic very very seriously and it was beautiful written on top of it at the same headline that my book, but then i read it and i was like wait a minute we are talking about some of the same phenomenon. This is a massive nation altering shift. And how women live, and how men live, and how families are defined, and what parcels role policies need to do and what are attitudes about sexuality and friendship and i loved every word of kates piece and it was totally different the only thing it had in common besides the title was that we were both trying to make sense of it and put it into context and id like wait a minute, 150 people can write books about john kennedy i think like there are a lot of people who can write, as they should, but there should be 150 more books on these topics. I run into that. Since spencer came out last year okay, okay, i too had this feeling of this not being taken seriously, but for me it was more about the ways in which single women were writing about themselves and writing in a voice that was very selfdeprecating and focused only on sex life and dating life and thats how women were writing about themselves and publications were tantalizing single women and cyprus hyper sexualizing to the women in this also very it felt uncomfortable and then i just in 2000, i found this journalist who lived in the 19th century and had written an article for vogue magazine in the year 1898, called the bachelor girl that her decision to never marry and it blew my mind on a lot of levels. She was writing in this very appealing, funny, sharp, craig zero voice and that was not at all selfdeprecating that didnt sound like the contemporary single woman and showed me there had been a public critic of marriage and then you that womens lives at a time in history that i had not known existed. So, thats how started we were having a similar feelings, the both of us because i dont live in a political space and was not thinking about the larger Political Action or. I was thinking about how women think about talk about themselves and how it shapes the culture in which you live. I want to go back to a kate said about the way that for this time because marriage patterns begin to shift in the 90s and we can talk more about the timeline of how that happened, but in part based on selfconscious political victories of the mid20th century the womens limit, gave rights movement, all of which were political revolutions and combined with the sexual revolution and revised attitudes about what women adult sexuality might entail. And the legalization of the Birth Control and abortion. All of these things had created conditions that then enabled this mass behavioral shift away from marriage. Thats really started in mass numbers in about the early 90s, which is when both of us happen to be comingofage. That was when we were sort of young adults, but there was it was happening in the numbers were shifting, but there was not a real consciousness that there were shifts. There was a lot of discomfort and i write about that time in my book and i write about the role that anita hill played and how her testimony was so discomforting so were so many people one of the things that our simpson said about her was watch out for that woman that there was a sense of threat, that there were women coming that would there were not like women that we had known before and they would be in a position to challenge male power or the nomination through Supreme Court they were maybe detach from institutions that had been historically comp rentable to us like marriage. There was also dan quayle ripping into murphy brown, the Fictional Television character who had a baby out of wedlock. As a Young Journalist and i was before i was writing about feminism i worked at a weekly newspaper in new york city called the new York Observer where i wrote about film financing. My beach was like money, whose funding independent features and was very dry, actually. Yet, i was paid very little, so i needed freelance work. Every freelance time it became that came my way despite the fact my professional had been about like Harvey Weinstein and movie producers and who is paid money, all of my freelance offers work any write about your sex life and i had no sex, first. Is sadistic and conversation the other night it was like a cartoon were like someone is looking at a cow and that level is like hamburger. I felt like to be a young professional women and it was the head of sex in the city, i was a hamaker except the hem of her was a young woman who might have eight interesting sex life. No, i did not. So, its like people did not know what to make of women living in each different patterns except to hyper sexualized them. Like kate, i came to well, in fact later than kate i had already sold my book and sold it to the book about a contemporary for gnome and on, hear these numbers come unprecedented, never happened before in American History and in my book proposal i think i a few sentences that were like and i will look at the history of single women in the us, which im sure had to do with the salem witch trials and that was like the history chapter. That i sold the book and it was going to be written in a year. Then, as i began to do some research and discovered in fact the rich dutch witches in salem salem, most of them were married there was this tremendous history. In terms of scope and size this phenomenon is unprecedented, that there is this rich history, which kate connected to so profoundly as a young writer herself. But, i came to when i start to look in the history of marriage patterns in the us and discovered at the end of the 19th century there was a population of largely middleclass white women because selling men had moved west in so many had been killed in the civil war there was a husband shortage and you have these women living independently for longer and their lives, which were no longer take with wifely and maternal responsibilities, they devoted their energies to move website evolution, suffrage, the labor movement, the settlement house movement, the creation of more Higher Education and teaching and nursing professions in which women could better earn their living and so my theory about the contemporary generation, which is that was true in the 19th century, also. I do not know that and thats why my book took five years to write. I talk about that a bit in my book about the culture amnesia that takes place that we can only remember as far back as our parents and grandparents go. So, all of her Walking Around thinking that marriage is exactly like it was in the 1950s, when it fact that was in aberrant. I make a word graph in my book ratio in the 1890s, 34 of women were unmarried. Satsuma goes down, down, down until you get to mid century and its 17 of women unmarried and they goes up, up, up, to 53 took its enormous and how to take in when because history has been so pushed back into the past and we tended to think that 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 because marriage has been a useful organizing institution especially went organizing gender power and who has power. The 1950s come i dont think its just i do think what you are saying is right that we sort of have short memories that extend far back as our grandparents and i thought it, but there are also a lot of cultural forces in play that made the 1950s. And the mid 20th century, an era of white middleclass patriarchal nuclear family. The government in many ways underwrote the creation of that white middleclass in which the push of women to marry early against after decades of them marrying later less often and often it was the moment at which a lot of our pop culture, the kinds of recorded culture came to television and the ways that america sort of in a sense took a picture of itself and is that this is the best kind of america. That was the postwar it really was this a blip in which people were married earlier and more often and had more kids, the baby boom than they had another time, but it happened to be the moment when mike america took a selfie. I like that. I think for not benign reasons. I think it was a version it was white. A lot of the same Government Forces that had created the white middle class had also worked to cut off black families from a lot of economic and Educational Resources that were helping to bolster the white middleclass in the middle of the 20th century and that white middleclass was reliant on the unpaid labor of wives and pushing women out of the colleges they had recently made their way into and out of the professions. It was a way it was the most comfortably organize white patriarchal power structure, really probably have a couple centuries and that was the moment when we decided to say this is what america looks like. Norman rockwell, painter picture. I think that is why that looms as a large. Ive a question for both of you. When you talk that 53 figure, how does that breakdown into women who never married, women who are divorced, women who are widowed . All of them. Is like a third of a younger women . I think i cant print down that specific, but i can offer others. One of the reasons the marriage rate is down is because the marriage age is rising. So, we dont know yet because we are still in flux. There is some people including Stephanie Kuntz who is a brilliant marriage historians has said this and recently again cited this to me, people still guess that around 85 of people 80 to 85 of people will wind up buried. Its just a question of when, so some of the most telling statistics about unmarried people are about young people, so today amongst americans 18 to 29, only 20 of married. So, only 20 basically under 29 unmarried. Thats compared to 60 in the same br