From the Second-wave to Postfeminism: Single Women in the Mediasphere

In this chapter, as a way of contextualizing the more detailed textual analysis in those that follow, I provide an illustrative snapshot of how single women have been figured in the Western public imaginary since the early 1960s. Though by no means an exhaustive account, I attend to key texts, including newspaper articles, books, films, and television, with the most significant cultural reverberations from over the past 50 years.1 As Betsy Israel remarks in Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century (2002): ‘More so than any other living arrangement, the single life is deeply influenced — haunted may be a better word — by cultural imagery. And the single woman herself has had a starring role in the mass imagination for many years’ (2, original emphasis). It is the various ways in which this ‘starring role’ has been played, especially over the past two decades, that concerns me throughout this chapter and indeed this book. Commencing my analysis with the present, and engaging especially with journalistic constructions of women’s singleness from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, I work backwards to consider some of the most prominent single women in Western popular culture’s history. I do this as a way to disrupt the common teleological narratives of progress that often mark critical discussions of how single women, and women more broadly, are represented in media culture. Often embodying precisely the types of feminine subjectivity for which feminism fought (independent, financially autonomous, ambitious, sexually fulfilled), the figure of the single woman, as I have suggested, is a key nodal point in the increasingly complex interactions between feminism and popular culture.