NYMag writes a piece awesome enough to break my radio silence!

Sorry for the long quiet - I developed some health issues late last year that took a considerable amount of time and energy to get to the bottom of, and by the time I was back to wellness in January, my writing mojo over here had slipped. And you know how it is - you owe a friend an email, but you don't reply right away so you forget for a week or two, and then you feel guilty so you don't email in case your friend is mad, and suddenly it's five months later and you still haven't emailed, and you've stopped leaving your house just in case you run into said friend at the store, even though they live an hour away!

Anyway, my silence was a little like that. But I'm back! Or, that's the plan!

I have a few things to catch up on over here in (topics include: what to say to people who tell you you look great when your weight loss is due to a pretty crappy illness! How to deal with random fat jokes in childrens' books! OKCupid - why are you so literally panic inducing?!) but I'll start by just directing you all to this week's New York Magazine cover feature: The Single American Woman. It's a phenomenal piece by Rebecca Traister about the new political power of unmarried women (single, divorced, widowed, mothers and non) who made up a whopping 23% of the voting population in 2012. The political power of a group that large could be staggering.

(The story also inspired this kickass cover!)

Traister is very clear that this group is not a monolith - her historical exploration of the sexism that pushed white women into suburban kitchens in the 1950's and its stark contrast to the racism that kept black families (and black women) out of the suburbs and in the underpaid workforce is an especially good example of why intersectionality is so important when talking about feminism. But she also notes that other times when America has had more single ladies than it knew what to do with (after the Civil War, and again after WWI, for example), single women led the charge in social reforms, from abolition to sufferage to establishing a whole bunch of women's colleges. It would be amazing if we were on the edge of another wave of social reform like that - one that moved the focus of American politics away from the nuclear family. That was an ideal that barely held water in the '50s, and certainly isn't the norm today.

Overall Traister notes that there are many policies in discussion on the state and federal level - raising the minimum wage, universal health care, affordable child care, paid family leave, women's health funding (reproductive and otherwise) - that would benefit single women across economic boundaries. In fact, a bunch of those would make it easier for a single woman like me to make the decision to have kids on my own - a decision that Dan Quayle railed against in the Murphy Brown era, but that is much more common, and commonly accepted, today.

So here's to All the Single Ladies! (That's also the name of Traister's new book, which I may have to check out!)