Single and Psycho: How Pop Culture Created the Unstable Single Woman

From the single ladies of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift songs to Phoebe Waller-Bridge's irreverent, eponymous Fleabag (2016–2019) to as far back as Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861), the stereotype of the damaged single woman has long pervaded music, books, television, and Hollywood movies. Spinster tropes, witch burnings, and nineteenth-century diagnoses of hysteria have reflected and continue to inform the stories told about society's singletons, most notoriously in the original bunny boiler, Fatal Attraction (1987), and popularized more recently in Single White Female (1992) and Promising Young Woman (2020).

Description

In Single & Psycho, author Caroline Young explores how broader social trends such as the antifeminist backlash of the 1980s, contemporary debates about “fertility privilege,” and the absence of single women of color on-screen shape the way women are (mis)perceived and (mis)treated. Young weaves the history of a stereotype with her own fight against stigma as a single woman as well as her struggles with infertility, infusing incisive analysis with personal experience in this approachable, savvy exposé of one of mainstream media’s most enduring clichés.

Single & How Pop Culture Created the Unstable Single Woman is a dynamic addition to the ongoing dialogue surrounding the #MeToo movement and societal expectations of women.

Publishing in North American June 10th 2025 by University Press of Kentucky.