Big Girls Don't Cry

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 todays America.

The 2008 campaign for the presidency reopened some of the most fraught American conversationsabout gender, race and generational difference, about sexism on the left and feminism on the rightdifficult discussions that had been left unfinished but that are crucial to further perfecting our union. Though the election didnt 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 Dont 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 countrys 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 coveragevacillating between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and questioning her own view of feminism, the womens movement, race and the different generational perspectives of women working toward political parity. Electrifying, incisive and highly entertaining, Big Girls Dont Cry offers an enduring portrait of dramatic cultural and political shifts brought about by this most historic of American contests.