Rebecca Traister

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Rebecca Traister
Rebecca Traister.jpg
Traister at the JWA Making Trouble/Making History luncheon, 2012
Born1975 (age 4950)
Education Northwestern University (BA)
GenreNonfiction
Notable worksBig Girls Don't Cry
All the Single Ladies
Good and Mad
Spouse
Darius Wadia
(m. 2011)
Children2

Rebecca Traister (born 1975) is an American journalist who has covered U.S. politics, with a focus on issues affecting women. She is a writer-at-large for New York magazine and has been a frequent guest commentator on cable news networks. She is the author of two bestsellers, All the Single Ladies (2016) and Good and Mad (2018).

Contents

Early life and education

Born in 1975 to a Jewish father and Baptist mother, Traister was raised on a farm. [1] She attended Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia, and did her undergraduate work at Northwestern University. After college, she moved to New York City. [1]

Journalism career

Traister began her journalism career in the 2000s at Salon and The New York Observer . For over a decade, she was a freelance writer for Elle magazine, and was eventually named one of its contributing editors. [2] In early 2014, she was hired as senior editor at The New Republic and wrote numerous essays and articles for the magazine over the next eighteen months. [3] In summer of 2015, she became writer-at-large for New York magazine and its website The Cut . [4]

Writings

Traister's first book, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women (2010), is an account of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign from a feminist perspective. [5] The book examines prominent women in the campaign, including Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, and Elizabeth Edwards, and the media coverage of them. Big Girls Don't Cry was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010. [6] It later won the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize from Women's Way. [7] [8] [9]

Traister's second book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (2016), grew out of research she initiated in 2009, "the year the proportion of American women who were married dropped below fifty percent; and the median age of first marriages, which had remained between twenty and twenty-two years old for nearly a century (1890–1980), had risen dramatically to twenty-seven." [10] She argues in the book that contrary to media depictions, the phenomenon of single women in America is not new. She chronicles social movements in U.S. history—including temperance, abolition, and secondary education—in which single women, who "were given options beyond early heterosexual marriage", [10] played a significant role. All the Single Ladies became a New York Times bestseller. [11] Gillian White described it as a "well-researched, deeply informative examination of women's bids for independence, spanning centuries." [12]

In 2018, Traister published another bestseller, [13] Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger . [14] In a New York Times profile, Hilary Howard said the book "traces the complicated history of female fury, and what that fury has meant for social progress, starting with the suffragist and abolitionist movements of the 19th century and ending with the resistance to the Trump administration." [15] In her New Yorker review, Casey Cep criticized Good and Mad for its tendency to juxtapose "isolated episodes of anger among progressive women of various races, classes, and eras" without building a coherent political argument tying the episodes together. [16] Cep also faulted the book for not paying sufficient attention to the fact that "anger knows no political persuasion. For every Maxine Waters, there's a Michele Bachmann; for every Gloria Steinem, a Phyllis Schlafly." [16]

Awards and recognition

Traister received a "Making Trouble / Making History Award" from the Jewish Women's Archive in 2012 at its annual luncheon. Longtime activist Gloria Steinem was the presenter. [17] [18]

Also in 2012, Traister won a Mirror Award for Best Commentary in Digital Media for two essays that appeared in Salon ("'30 Rock' Takes on Feminist Hypocrisy–and Its Own," and "Seeing 'Bridesmaids' is a Social Responsibility"), and one that was published in The New York Times ("The Soap Opera Is Dead! Long Live The Soap Opera!"). [19]

Personal life

In 2011, Traister married Darius Wadia, a public defender in Brooklyn. [20] [21] The couple live in New York, with their two daughters. [22] [23]

Books

References

  1. 1 2 Bronzite, Sarah (April 14, 2016). "Women no longer need to be married". The Jewish Chronicle. London.
  2. Levy, Nicole (May 15, 2014). "Elle hires Rebecca Traister, Amanda Fortini". Politico.
  3. "Rebecca Traister All Articles". The New Republic . Retrieved July 26, 2025.
  4. Pompeo, Joe. "Rebecca Traister leaving T.N.R. for New York". Politico . Archived from the original on September 5, 2015. Retrieved September 3, 2015.
  5. "Rebecca Traister | Official Publisher Page". Simon & Schuster. Archived from the original on June 30, 2016. Retrieved September 3, 2015.
  6. 100 Notable Books of 2010. 24 November 2010. Retrieved 27 October 2010.
  7. "WOMEN'S WAY Book Prize Honorees". Women's Way. Archived from the original on 12 March 2016.
  8. "2012 Women's Way Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize". Philly.com. October 22, 2012. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015.
  9. "WOMENS WAY EDB Prize Winner Honored by WPVI-TV 2012-03-16 5AM - Rebecca Traister". YouTube. Archived from the original on 2016-02-03.
  10. 1 2 "All the Single Ladies | Official Publisher Page". Simon and Schuster. 2016.
  11. "Hardcover Nonfiction". The New York Times. March 20, 2016.
  12. White, Gillian B. (March 1, 2016). "'All the Single Ladies,' by Rebecca Traister". The New York Times . [H]ow do women view their own trajectory, and have society and cultural expectations caught up to what the statistics show is actually happening? Traister is certainly not the first writer to delve into these questions, but she skillfully advances the conversation with this book. A mix of interviews and historical analysis, All the Single Ladies is a well-researched, deeply informative examination of women's bids for independence, spanning centuries. The material can threaten to be overwhelming at times, but Traister provides a thoughtful culling of history to help bridge the gap between, on the one hand, glib depictions of single womanhood largely focused on sexual escapades and, on the other, grave warnings that female independence will unravel the very fabric of the country.
  13. "Hardcover Nonfiction". The New York Times. October 28, 2018.
  14. Tuttle, Kate (October 19, 2018). "A book for all the angry ladies". Los Angeles Times .
  15. Howard, Hilary (September 28, 2018). "'The Tail of the Anita Hill Fury Got Us to #MeToo'". The New York Times . The print version of the article was titled "Women Are Furious, and She Has an Idea Why".
  16. 1 2 Cep, Casey (October 8, 2018). "The Perils and Possibilities of Anger" . The New Yorker.
  17. Goodman, Elyssa (March 21, 2012). "The Sisterhood: Seeing Beauty in 'Making Trouble'" (online blog). The Jewish Daily Forward . Retrieved April 16, 2012.
  18. "Making Trouble / Making History | Jewish Women's Archive" . Retrieved May 7, 2016.
  19. Garcia, Carmen (June 18, 2012). "Traister wins Mirror Award". Salon . Retrieved September 3, 2015.
  20. "New York Institute for the Humanities | Featured Fellow: Rebecca Traister". Archived from the original on March 17, 2016. Retrieved March 18, 2016., New York institute for Humanities, December, 2011.
  21. Heinis, John (December 1, 2011). "Judith Wadia, 73, of Weehawken, an artist and environmental activist". The Jersey Journal. New Jersey Online. Retrieved November 27, 2017.
  22. Hoder, Randye (March 11, 2015). "This little-seen MSNBC interview has big implications for working moms". Fortune. Retrieved June 3, 2017.
  23. Wieberg, Steve (June 16, 2017). "FYI Book Club: 'All the Single Ladies' celebrates the trend away from marriage". The Kansas City Star .

Further reading