Rebecca Traister

Author Rebecca Traister was a powerful voice in the study of politics and culture, and how modern women had gained significant footholds in both, in such books as Big Girls Don't Cry (2010) and Good and Mad (2018). Born outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Traister was raised in a Jewish-Baptist household, and attended Germantown Friends School before enrolling in Northwestern University as an American studies major. After graduation, she relocated to New York City, where she began her career in journalism as an assistant at Talk magazine and fact checker for the New York Observer. After brief stints as a gossip columnist and film industry writer for the Observer, Traister moved to the Life section at Salon.com in 2003. There, she earned critical praise for coverage of women in media and politics, with special notice going to a series of profiles on the women involved in the 2008 presidential election - Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin. Those profiles would form the basis for her first book, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women. The book, which opined that the election was a galvanizing moment for the women's liberation movement, was named a New York Times Notable Book, among other laurels, and was followed in 2016 by All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. The book, a follow-up of sorts to her first publication, traced the history of women choosing to remain unmarried, and how that decision fomented considerable social change throughout the 20th century. It, too, earned rave reviews from the media, and was followed in 2018 by Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, which viewed how women have galvanized their frustration over decades of disregard into a potent political and social force. During this period, Traister also contributed to numerous publications, including The New Republic from 2014 to 2015; she also served as a writer-at-large for New York and a contributing editor at Elle.