Taylor Swift and Other Pawns

At the emotional centre of Lisa Whittington-Hill’s new essay collection sits a single question: What is an unmarried, childless, middle-aged woman for? It’s Gen X’s version of the second-wave feminist Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name”— and a timely issue to contemplate.

North American women now enjoy more freedom and more autonomy than women in any other period of history. Mainstream culture encourages us to cast off societal expectations and to embrace our independence. A great many of us are not getting married, and, as Canada’s plummeting birth rate attests, fewer and fewer of us are having children. But critics like Louise Perry, author of The Case against the Sexual Revolution, and Mary Harrington, author of Feminism against Progress, have persuasively argued that we are not necessarily happier for it. Lydia Perović captured this collective angst in...