Single Lives is a collection of singleness studies essays from the interdisciplinary humanities that explores the last two hundred years of literature and popular media by, about, and for single women in the US and the UK. Independent women have always been a center around which social anxieties and excitement coalesced. Moving between the family home and domestic independence, between household and public labor, and between celibacy and a range of sexual relations, the single woman remains a literary and cultural focus, as she has been from the 19th to the 21st centuries. This collection offers readers the opportunity to uncover the social, political, economic, and cultural connections between the "singly blessed" women and "bachelor girls" of the 19th and early 20th century and "all the single ladies" of the 21st century. Essays read singleness across genre and field, offering new approaches to studying modern and contemporary single women in literature, film, and history. Authors engage scholarship from wide ranging fields of social history, women's studies, queer theory, and Black feminism. The collection reads familiar texts against the grain, rethinking archival resources, revisiting familiar figures, and exploring new sources: cookbooks, ephemera, personal documents, recovered film histories, and forms of domestic space and labor.This is a book for scholars of gender and sexuality, social history, feminist film and media scholars, and literary historians, and reflects the urgent contemporary interest in single women as a political, economic, and cultural force.
Introduction: Situating Single Lives by Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey
Part I: Singles Studies: Archives and Methods
Chapter 1: Searching for Singles: Archival Approaches for Singleness Studies and Black Women’s Collections by Andreá N. Williams
Chapter 2: Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: Gender, Melodrama, and the Processes of Adaptation in The Best of Everything by Jennifer S. Clark
Chapter 3: Recovering Single Biography: Jane Armstrong Tucker, Illness, and the Single Life by Elizabeth DeWolfe
Part II: Familiar Figures: Representing and Reforming the Single Woman
Chapter 4: Becoming Single: Gidget “Betwixt and Between” by Pamela Robertson Wojcik
Chapter 5: F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony:” The Unmarried Flapper in Literature and on Screen by Martina Mastandrea
Chapter 6: Neither Betwixt nor Between: Divorced Mothers in the United States, 1920-1965 by Kristin Celello
Chapter 7: Serves One: Exploring Representations of Female Singleness in American Cookbooks by Ursula Kania
Part III: Singles at Home: Domestic Labors
Chapter 8: Feeling “Like a Queen:” Later-Life Single Women at Home in Modern American Short Fiction by Katherine Fama
Chapter 9: “Spinsters’ Rest?”: The Discomforts of Home in British Women’s Short Stories of the 1920s to the 1940s by Emma Liggins
Chapter 10: All the Single Nannies: Reforming Elite Domesticity and the Cultural Imaginary by Ann Mattis
Afterword by Benjamin Kahan
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
KATHERINE FAMA is an assistant professor of American literature in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin in Ireland.
JORIE LAGERWEY is an associate professor in television studies at University College Dublin in Ireland. She is the author, with Taylor Nygaard, of Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precarious Whiteness and Postfeminist Celebrity and Motherhood: Brand Mom.
