From Publishers Weekly
While historians have studied various subsets of women working class, professional, radical, etc., little attention has been paid to the single woman. As journalist Israel documents in this impressive history of single women in America from the Industrial Revolution to modern times, these women have maintained a flourishing subculture, despite attacks and ridicule by the media. While focusing primarily on white, middle-class Manhattan women, Israel draws on a variety of sources, movies, popular novels, magazine and newspaper features that shape the single-woman experience for the broader population. "B-girls" bachelor or bohemian, have always been with us, some from lack of marriage prospects, true, but many by preference. Israel says it's mainly the appeal of the companionship of other women and the desire for independence from marital suppression that keeps these women from tying the knot. Social acceptance of singletons has flip-flopped over the generations. Positive icons, including the emancipated New Woman, settlement house professionals, WWII's Rosie the Riveter, and liberated '70s "chicks," have alternated with scary images of frigid, lonely Old Maids staring at their used-up biological clocks. But even as social critics have changed their tunes about how much rope to allow these women, the women themselves brave factory girls, Bowery Girls, "shoppies," Greenwich Village bohemians, flappers, Murphy Browns and Bridget Joneses have been tough enough to have it "their way." Israel's witty and provocative look at a topic dear to many women deserves wide readership.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Journalist Israel (Growing Up Fast) writes wittily but reveals few "secrets" about single women in this chronicle of white, never-married women in New York City since the 18th-century. In describing settlement workers and immigrant factory girls, sales clerks and office workers, she draws copiously from standard secondary accounts, and from the popular press she gleans evidence of the derisive stereotypes that accompany the lived experience. As her narrative traverses the century, we encounter "Rosie the Riveter," the desperate women of the 1950s, the liberated witches of the second wave of feminism, and, finally, their disillusioned daughters. Although her bibliography is impressive, this popular history lacks specific citations, and some of her generalizations are misleading. More important, most of the women she discusses are not single so much as not yet married; she says little about the mature single woman, the divorcee, the widow, or the women who cohabit without marriage and virtually nothing about black women, who are more likely to live unmarried throughout adulthood. Still, libraries might consider. Morrow plans a major marketing campaign, and urban public libraries will likely experience a demand.
Cynthia Harrison, George Washington Univ., Washington, DCCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
