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I'm Anne Strange Champs. It's to the best of our knowledge. And today, an entire generation of young millennial women is choosing independence over marriage. They're creating a whole new chapter of life. Five or ten or even more years of living young, single, and free. What's happening and why? Rebecca Traster explains in a new book called All the Single Ladies.

One of the remarkable things I found while doing research for this book

is that plenty of women have always found marriage unappealing,

which I sort of didn't realize how much popular discourse there had been about it.

In the press, throughout the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th century,

you know, in the book, I actually cite a 1904 column that is just

so excruciatingly sharp on the inequities of marriage written by somebody who called herself

The Bachelor Maid. And it's from 1904, and it could be written any time now. I mean, it's just so,

oh, you know, she talks about how she herself rejects marriage

because as soon as, and she cites all these examples of married women she knows who are smart

and passionate and have wonderful careers. She's talking mostly about teachers and scholars,

and then as soon as they become somebody's wife, they are confined to the house and they never

leave the house again.

And they just have children and all of their passions and intellectual pursuits are subsumed by the duties of wifeliness and maternity.

But even prior to that, the kind of, I didn't realize Louisa May Alcott was this incredibly sharp critic of marriage.

It's so ironic because, you know, she wrote Little Women in which all those girls get married,

though I have to say her, the character that most girls like best, Joe March, the independent one,

was so disappointing when she gets married.

Well, I felt the same way. And in fact, my book opens with a sort of rumination on my childhood despair at the fact that all my child, my beloved childhood heroines, that their stories end with marriage, including Laura Ingalls, including Joe March, including Anne Shirley.

The stories got turned over in some cases to sort of these pallid follow-ups,

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