[music playing] From the new women of the 1920s to all the single ladies of the current millennium, feminism has endured in literature across time in ways that are not typically talked about.

I mean, think about it.

In the late 18th century, Mary Wollstonecraft challenge of patriarchy imprint and warned that limiting women's access to education and opportunity would not make women more subordinate to men.

Au contraire, mon frere.

It would ignite the feminist consciousness.

Two centuries later, Alice Walker, by way of Celie, would echo this warning in "The Color Purple."

The jail you plan for me is the one you're gonna rot in.

DOMINIQUE TAYLOR: Suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton once said that the movement for women's voting rights needed a feminist equivalent to "Uncle Tom's Cabin," because that book did more to rouse the national conscience against slavery than all the glowing appeals and constitutional arguments that had been staged over half a century.

If books can rouse the national conscience, I wonder what literature has been lighting the way for feminism.

As I began to search for defining moments of feminist awakenings in print, I uncovered a literary underground railroad of feminism.

And I discovered that the stories of many literary heroines-- those behind the pen and those on the page-- were anchored in the marriage plot.

The marriage plot is a narrative structure that chronicles the courting arc of a couple that ends with nuptials.

It was popularized in the literature of the 18th and 19th century with books like "Jane Eyre" and "Emma."

And it reinforced gender roles by rewarding proper femininity with marriage and security, while presenting improper femininity or bad behavior as a cautionary tale that often ended in exile or death.

[record needle scratches] The point I spelled out in "Writing Beyond the Ending" is that, in 19th century narrative, where women heroes were concerned, quest and love plots were intertwined.

Quest for women was thus finite.

We learned that any plot for self-realization was at the service of the marriage plot and was subordinate to the magnetic power of that ending.

But now, society and social norms have changed, and marriage has evolved.

And we've seen how much women have accomplished outside of and independent of marriage.

Is this a growing trend?

To help put the marriage plot and modern and future day perspective, today, we're going to talk with Rebecca Traister about the research she reported in her bestseller, "All the Single Ladies."

There were very few popular models for singlehood.

I mean, if you look in terms of literature, you go way back and you have, for example, "The Scarlet Lettee."

In earlier eras, when women were economically dependent on men in different ways and, sexually dependent on men, before a sexual revolution, before a feminist movement, there was a sense in which marriage had to be a central goal for so many women.

You sort of had to be attached to somebody who could make the money.

And that kind of person in the United States, for a very long time, was a man.

You couldn't have a socially sanctioned sex life outside of marriage.

You couldn't have a family outside of marriage.

All these things that now are possible, up until very recently, in terms of the historical record, they were not possible for women.

And so you have all these stories of the women who lived outside, either rebelliously or by accident.

And often, they end up very tragically.

That's true in "House of Mirth."

It's true, certainly, in "The Scarlet Letter," in "Sula."

I mean, there are all of these narratives of what happens to women who don't attach themselves to men.

Was there a bit of irony though?

Because let's go look at "Jane Eyre," for example, and how Bronte was this independent woman, and it was marriage that-- Well, that's the story of Austen too.

So Jane Austen actually died single.

She never married.

And her books are all about, I mean, a critical look at the imperatives of the marriage plot.

And her heroines, as she gets older, grow increasingly anxious about their fate.

Are we going to be able to have a house?

Are we going to be able-- You know, you see it in "Sense and Sensibility."

By the time she gets to "Persuasion," it's a really dark book.

It's very sad.

For all that Austen is credited as being a comedian and, you know, sort of taking note of this the social absurdities of this marriage market, she's also painting really stark picture of the fact that there were no other options.

And she was sort of a living embodiment of it.

She was dependent on her male relatives.

Charlotte Bronte is an example.

Yes, the stories of love-- I mean, I always thought "Jane Eyre" was kind of a pretty dark story about love.

And I don't think Mr. Rochester was, like, the catch of the century.

[laughs] That's what I-- I've never understood that.

I was just like, do you see this man, Jane?

Like, get it together, girl.

Yeah.

I wish she would had this book, because she would have, like, raised the bar on the kind of man that, you know, you would fall in love.

Right, but she couldn't.

And one of the things about Charlotte that's so fascinating is, she winds up marrying this curate who takes care of her father.

And she does it-- she does it so that she and her father will be economically stable.

And she says, I now know from experience what I would have said before, which is, wait.

The era of independent womanhood can't exist without social policies.

And in fact, we still lack many of them.

When you see an attack on health care, when you see an attack on reproductive rights, what you're doing is seeing-- A pushback to this institution.

A pushback and a systemic removal from women of the kind of rights that enable their independence.

What inspired the movement that you started research for "All the Single Ladies?"

I knew, just as a reporter, that there was a shift in marriage patterns happening in the United States.

And I knew that this was a thing that was mathematically true.

And then, personally, I was unmarried through my 20's, into my 30's, and, actually, had thought a lot about my own life as a single person, because, unlike many of my friends, who were also unmarried during those years, I really wasn't in any kind of romantic or committed sexual relationship.

I wasn't really even in uncommitted sexual relationships.

I was single.

I was, like, nun single through my 20's.

And then I had actually-- I fell in love in my early 30's.

And I was getting married in my mid-30's, which I was very thrilled about.

I was an adult.

A whole person.

A whole person.

And it was lovely that I had fallen in love and that I was getting married.

And yet, the fact that I was getting married still provoked this lingering sense that this made me a valid adult.

And so that prompted me to do an exploration of-- I thought I was going to do a book of contemporary journalism and interview women around the country-- which I did.

I did wind up doing this-- about their experiences of singlehood.

But then the thing that I discovered, as I started to write that book of contemporary journalism, is that there was this rich history of single women in the United States, and the ways that single life for women-- life independent of marriage, and, in earlier eras, often, from motherhood, when marriage and motherhood were so intimately linked.

I'm reminded with this and, like, "Bad Feminist," and a lot of the literature that's coming out, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's whole thing to push forward, that women need to rise up and create the literature that will rouse the national conscience.

What role do you think literature needs to play right now and the literary heroines that we need to see?

I don't know yet what the contemporary fiction is going to be that sheds light on this period.

I think this period is-- we're still in shock.

We were moving in this one direction and then it came to this abrupt halt.

And at the same time, that halt is producing an explosion of investment and activity.

And I think it's just imagining one kind of future versus imagining an entirely different kind of future.

And I don't know what the literature's going to be that comes out of it.

But it is my hope that it will be powerful.

As women have stepped out of their domestic roles and sought more professional and political opportunities, we can look at how marriage patterns and gender roles in marriage have changed, liberating women and men.

This has allowed us all to be more human and to excel at what we're good at.

Reframing the expectations and dependency on marriage has had a significant impact on revolutionizing our society and our cultural narrative about who we are, what policies we enact, and how we create a more perfect union, as individuals, couples, and a nation.

That's all we have for today.

Join us next week for another episode of "Read Awakening," where we'll take another field trip through the literary world.

Until then, remember to read or be read.

"The Great American Read" is a new series on PBS about our most beloved books.

It leads to a nationwide vote on America's favorite novel.

So head over to PBS.org/GreatAmericanRead to vote for your favorite novel today.

Check the link in the description box for more details.