. >> im rebecca traister and i wrote a book called "all single ladies."lause] [cheers and applause] thank you. it's interesting we all do have three totally different genres and approaches here. my book is a nonfiction look and they really contentious turn that can mean a whole bunch of different things. in my day job i'm a journalist. i write about politics and culture from a feminist. i cover women and politics and i intended this book, which i started five years ago to be a book of contemporary journalismn about the swiftly expanding population of women who are to blame for forgoing traditional hetero marriage. this is a population of six loaded over the past few decades. there are now more married people in the united states and there are married people by a hair, which is unprecedented. when i started doing research of the book and i began to look a little bit of history, is realized in fact there was this fascinating story, a history of single women and the united states that we have all around race and class and osha movement. so the book why not b

there's rebecca traister's all the single ladies, labor of love -- [inaudible] and there are all these sort of explorations of what it means to be a single woman in the modern day. i know both of you have written about this also over the years, and i'm wondering why do you think we're in another moment of examining the phenomenon of the single girl? [laughter] >> should i take this one? um, that's a great question that i don't really know the answer to. i mean, why are we in a moment of -- yeah. i'm not sure. i mean, i agree that we're in a moment, maybe it's a moment in terms of book publishing. i think that, you know, you might argue that there are moments in television and movies and have been for some time, although most television and movies that feature a single woman, she usually ends up with a man. even sex and the city. after all those years. >> yeah. >> i think it's, i mean, i assume that it's just demographics, and in a certain, you know, hunger by the part of authors and editors who buy their books to talk about what it's like to be single and to be okay with being single a

i don't know if folks in this room are familiar with a, a book called "all single ladies" by rebecca traister. it is worth a realize as we think about the trajectory that the single woman has, has seen over the course of the last few hundred years. she argues that for many, many centuries husbands had a -- and men -- had a wifey state and that my colleague, heather, at the washington center for equitable growth would go further and argue that american business for a long time had a silent partner in the stay-at-home mom and wife. and a lot has changed. we're no longer living in the "mad men" era, and that's why a lot of what we need to be having a serious conversation about is updating our public policy so that we recognize that we now have, in many cases, two parents working or we have a single head of household who is working who is that mother. so it isn't, i would argue that we need to think about both sides of that coin. >> i mean, i think it's actually a very important question. you know, there's no doubt in my mind that if we completely eliminated the welfare state, if we eliminated as