Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction --
Ch. 1. Watch out for that woman: the political and social power of an unmarried nation --
Ch. 2. Single women have often made history --
Ch. 3. The sex of the cities: urban life and female independence --
Ch. 4. Dangerous as Lucifer matches: the friendship of women --
Ch. 5. My solitude, my self: single women on their own --
Ch. 6. For richer: work, money, and independence --
Ch. 7. For poorer: single women and sexism, racism, and poverty --
Ch. 8. Sex and the single girls: virginity to promiscuity and beyond --
Ch. 9. Horse and carriage: marrying-and not marrying-in the time of singlehood --
Ch. 10. Then comes what? And when? Independence and parenthood.

In 2009, award-winning journalist Rebecca Traister started All the Single Ladies about the twenty-first-century phenomenon of the American single woman. It was 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.

But over the course of her vast research and more than a hundred interviews with academics and social scientists and prominent single women, Traister discovered a startling truth: the phenomenon of the single woman in America is not a new one. And historically, when women were given options beyond early heterosexual marriage, the results were massive social change – temperance, abolition, secondary education, and more. Today, only twenty percent of Americans are married by age twenty-nine, compared to nearly sixty percent in 1960.