Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

by Rebecca Traister
Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

by Rebecca Traister

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Overview

Journalist and Salon writer Rebecca Traister investigates the 2008 presidential election and its impact on American politics, women and cultural feminism. Examining the role of women in the campaign, from Clinton and Palin to Tina Fey and young voters, Traister confronts the tough questions of what it means to be a woman in today’s America.

The 2008 campaign for the presidency reopened some of the most fraught American conversations—about gender, race and generational difference, about sexism on the left and feminism on the right—difficult discussions that had been left unfinished but that are crucial to further perfecting our union. Though the election didn’t give us our first woman president or vice president, the exhilarating campaign was nonetheless transformative for American women and for the nation. In Big Girls Don’t Cry, her electrifying, incisive and highly entertaining first book, Traister tells a terrific story and makes sense of a moment in American history that changed the country’s narrative in ways that no one anticipated.

Throughout the book, Traister weaves in her own experience as a thirtysomething feminist sorting through all the events and media coverage—vacillating between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and questioning her own view of feminism, the women’s movement, race and the different generational perspectives of women working toward political parity. Electrifying, incisive and highly entertaining, Big Girls Don’t Cry offers an enduring portrait of dramatic cultural and political shifts brought about by this most historic of American contests.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781439150290
Publisher: Free Press
Publication date: 06/07/2011
Pages: 352
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York magazine and a contributing editor at Elle. A National Magazine Award finalist, she has written about women in politics, media, and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon and has also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Glamour and Marie Claire. She is the author of All the Single Ladies and the award-winning Big Girls Don’t Cry. She lives in New York with her family.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Hillary Is Us 11

2 Spousal Supports 35

3 Campaigning While Female 63

4 Five Days in January 85

5 The Most Restricting Forces 107

6 All About Their Mothers 137

7 Boys on the Bus 165

8 Things to Do in Denver If You're Female 199

9 Enter Palin 221

10 Pop Culture Warriors 239

11 The Next Wave Is Here 269

12 The Aftermath 285

Acknowledgments 301

Note on the Author's Use of Her Previously Published Work 303

Selected Bibliography 305

Index 317

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Traister does a fine job in showing that progress does not proceed in straight lines, and, sometimes, it's the unlikeliest of individuals who initiate real change." —-Publishers Weekly

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