Rebecca Traister graduated from Northwestern University in 1997 and worked briefly at Talk magazine before becoming a film critic at the New York Observer for four years. She then spent eight years as a senior staff writer at Salon, covering issues of women in politics and the media. Her first book, Big Girls Don’t Cry (2010), focused on Hillary Clinton’s first campaign for the presidency. It was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize in 2012, the same year Traister was honored with the Jewish Women’s Archive’s Making Trouble Award and a Mirror Award for Best Commentary in Digital Media for two essays she wrote for Salon and one for the New York Times. Her second book, All the Single Ladies (2016), discussed the financial and social reasons why women’s median age at first marriage recently jumped by five years for the first time in over a century, and the ways in which single women in other eras used their freedom to lobby for massive social changes. She won a National Magazine Award in March 2018. Later that year, Traister published her third book, Good and Mad, chronicling a history of women’s anger in sparking political change in America and unpacking societal condemnation of female rage. The book was released the same week that Christine Blasey Ford testified at Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings; upon his confirmation, parts of Good and Mad were read into the Congressional record. As of 2023, Traister works as a freelance writer and journalist and as a writer for New York Magazine.