The annual reception immediately follows author Rebecca Traister’s visit to Grand Rapids on March 13 discussing her book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. The GGRWHC will add to the conversation by complicating the relationship between singledom and progress for women. To Traister’s examples we will add vivid anecdotes about our own “single ladies” in Grand Rapids – single for so many different reasons – and we will lift a glass to favorite married ladies for their contributions to social reform and massive change in Grand Rapids’s history. Honoring them we honor our researchers who have brought them back into the light.