Single & 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). 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 wi