Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women | 2010 | Rebecca Traister | Buy |
| 2 | All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation | 2016 | Rebecca Traister | Buy |
| 3 | Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger | 2018 | Rebecca Traister | Buy |
Rebecca Traister’s three nonfiction books are rooted in American political history and its effects on women’s lives. Big Girls Don’t Cry, published in 2010, analyzes the 2008 presidential election — specifically, how Hillary Clinton’s and Sarah Palin’s candidacies changed the terms of American political life for women.
All the Single Ladies (2016) grew out of Traister’s observation that for the first time in over a century, fewer than half of American women were married, and the median age of first marriage had risen substantially. The book is part social history, part reporting, and part cultural analysis. Good and Mad (2018) followed two years later, examining women’s anger as a political force from the abolitionist era through to the post-2016 resistance movements. All three books work individually but gain additional context when read together.