Single lives : modern women in literature, culture, and film / edited by Katherine Fama, Jorie Lagerwey.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-218) and index.

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

"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"--