Single Lives : Modern Women in Literature, Culture, and Film

__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. "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"-- Provided by publisher Contents Introduction: situating single lives PART I Singles Studies: archives and methods Chapter 1 Searching for Singles: archival approaches for singleness studies and black women’s collections Chapter 2 Reclaiming Single Women’s Work: gender, melodrama, and the processes of adaptation in the best of everything Chapter 3 Recovering Single Biography: Jane Armstrong tucker, illness, and the single life PART II Familiar Figures: representing and reforming the single woman Chapter 4 Becoming Single: gidget “betwixt and between” Chapter 5 F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Sinking Ship of Future Matrimony” the unmarried flapper in literature and on screen Chapter 6 Neither Betwixt nor Between: divorced mothers in the united states, 1920–1965 Chapter 7 Serves One: exploring representations of female singleness in American cookbooks PART III Singles at Home domestic labors Chapter 8 Feeling “Like a Queen” later-life single women at home in modern American short fiction Chapter 9 “Spinsters’ Rest”? the discomforts of home in british women’s short stories of the 1920s to the 1940s Chapter 10 All the Single Nannies: reforming elite domesticity and the cultural imaginary Afterword Acknowledgments Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index Inspired By The Current Public Fascination With Single Women, Single Lives Traces The Relationship Between Modern And Contemporary Representations Of Single Women. The Original Essays Collected Here Analyze A Broad Range Of Texts That Examine The Ways Films, Cookbooks, Archives, Popular Literature, And Other British And American Texts Express Norms, Ideals, And Challenges For Single Women And Their Relationship To Dominant Ideals Of Marriage And The Family. This Volume Looks Backwards To Constellate Existing Scholarship, Constituent Fields, And Unrecognized Single Voices And Forward To Consider New Methods For Interdisciplinary Singles Studies.