Café Scientifique with Caroline Young at Waterstones Sauchiehall St

The Science of a Stereotype: The Dangerous Single WomanWhat is it about single women that makes them such a threat? Why are they blamed for everything from falling birth rates to social decline, and why do periods of feminist progress so often coincide with a backlash?Across history, depictions of single women in pop culture and social commentary have shifted with wider social change. When populations were unbalanced, or when gender roles were in flux, unmarried and childless women were frequently cast as the problem.
In Single & Psycho: How Pop Culture Created the Unstable Single Woman, author Caroline Young explores how the stereotype of the damaged or dangerous single woman has been shaped across film, literature, and music.
Spinster tropes, witch trials, and nineteenth-century diagnoses of hysteria all reveal how independent women were treated in society. In the 1940s, the femme fatale warned that women should return to domesticity after wartime freedoms. The 1980s ‘bunny boiler’ cast single, child-free women as a threat to the idealised family.
In the wake of the Me Too movement, conversations about gender and equality came into sharper focus. At the same time, concerns about fertility rates and a male mental health crisis have fuelled renewed scrutiny of women’s choices. Tradwives promote fulfilment through domestic roles, while others argue it is selfish to bring children into an uncertain world.
In this talk and discussion, Caroline draws on historical studies and recent data to explore what drives these narratives, why they resurface at particular moments, and how they shape contemporary debates around the manosphere, feminism, and cultural expectation.

About Caroline Young

Caroline Young is an author from Edinburgh, Scotland, specialising in film, fashion and popular culture. Her works include Single & Psycho: How Pop Culture Created the Unstable Single Woman, Fashioning Hitchcock, The It Girls, and Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror, which was nominated for both a Rondo Hatton Award 2023 and the 2022 Richard Wall Memorial Award.

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