True, much of the dated advice (as well as the politically incorrect title itself) is now amusingly camp, but the potential thrill of being single still saturates each page.

Ms. Brown writes on Page 5 of her book: "The single woman, far from being a creature to be pitied and patronized, is emerging as the newest glamour girl of our times." (But then again, what would you expect from the woman who invented the Cosmo girl?) Contrast that to the same page of "Solitaire." Ms. Fraser writes that the single women she interviewed "spoke frankly about virginity, celibacy, masturbation, money, abuse, secret sex lives and fear of illness and death." Which book would you rather read? This air of celebration applied to men and women in the '60s, why do you think Austin Powers has been so popular?

Despite their authors' consciousness-raising intentions, these books, in their earnest effort to explain an exploding demographic, to sympathetically explain the who, how and why of single women, do anything but. They treat the subject as an unresolved issue rather than a de facto element of contemporary culture. They continue to argue the case for single women, as if their growing numbers weren't argument enough.