Singles Equality | Singles Bill of Rights

The U.S. SBR project was started by Tracy Houston. The structure and content was developed by Christina D. Campbell and Madeleine Crown. This August 2025 version of the SBR was written by Christina D. Campbell. The website was designed by Carrie Osgood.

Acknowledgments: This research has been compiled by non-subject-matter experts. We are singles advocates working to create a greater awareness of the singlism that pervades the laws, policies, and social norms of our country. We focus almost exclusively on the U.S., because we are U.S. citizens, and because the U.S. is particularly singlist among nations. We rely extensively on the external expertise of an ever-growing group of singles advocates to help expand and evaluate the research cited in this living document. We also rely on subject matter experts to evaluate the limited proposed solutions and promote their development and implementation into laws and policies. 

We wish to particularly acknowledge LGBTQ activist Thomas Coleman, founder of Unmarried and Single Americans Week and Unmarried America and author of The Domino Effect: How Strategic Moves for Gay Rights, Singles’ Rights, and Family Diversity Touched Millions of Lives, who initially proposed an Unmarried Person’s Bill of Rights in 1972 to the American Bar Association. 

We also thank the following subject-matter experts for reading initial drafts of the SBR: 

Joan DelFattore, Ph.D., writes about singles in American health care. Her articles have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Washington Post, and Psychology Today, among others, and she has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and on numerous podcasts. She currently has a book under contract with Yale University Press. 

Bella DePaulo (Ph.D., Harvard) is the author of the award-winning Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life, as well as other books and more than 150 scholarly publications. She has been described by Atlantic magazine as “America’s foremost thinker and writer on the single experience.” Her TEDx talk, “What no one ever told you about people who are single,” has been viewed more than 1.7 million times. She has been writing the “Living Single” blog at Psychology Today since 2008 and the blog for Unmarried Equality since 2015. Professor DePaulo has bylines in the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York magazine, Atlantic magazine, Time, NBC, CNN, Slate, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many others. Her website is BellaDePaulo.com.  

Erin S. Lavender-Stott, Ph.D. is a singlehood scholar and associate professor of human development and family science. 

Gordon Morris was a board member of Unmarried Equality since 2009. The organization became dormant in 2015. Mr. Morris kept it alive until 2025 when he was able to find a dedicated group of new board members willing to work towards restarting the organization as Singles Equality. He will remain on the board as long as needed to be sure the organization survives and grows.

Carrie Osgood is a creative communications strategist and part-time university professor at multiple universities. Her picture books for all ages include the Data Atlas of the World, Path to the Palace and Escapades in Caves. Learn more at CarrieOsgood.com, CLO-Communications.com and YourStoryGPS.com.

Jill Summerville, Ph.D. has her doctorate in Theatre History, Dramatic Literature, and Theatre Criticism.

Donna Ward is a writer, author and advocate. She is the author of She I Dare Not Name: A Spinster’s Meditations on Life, a founding member of the International Singles Studies Association, and the CEO of Singlehood Australia. Find out more about her at donna-ward.com.au, and more about Singlehood Australia at singlehoodaustralia.org.

Craig Wynne, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, DC. He’s been engaged with singles studies and singles advocacy since 2015, when he discovered the work of Bella DePaulo. He’s written articles in venues like Writer’s Digest, Psychology Today, and Inside Higher Ed.  He’s also the author of the book How to be a Happy Bachelor and co-editor of the collection Singular Selves: An Introduction to Singles Studies.

Thanks to all our contributors!

— Christina Campbell, Madeleine Crowne, and Tracy Houston

Please see our bios below:

Christina D. Campbell is the author of the U.S. Singles Bill of Rights. Long before singles’ rights were cool, she co-founded the widely-cited singles’ advocacy blog Onely.org. Her essays about singlism have appeared in The Atlantic and elsewhere. She also writes about body and brain health challenges; her in-process memoir about chronic illness contains award-winning essays. She lives in Northern Virginia with her infrared sauna and two semi-geriatric cats. Her website, ChristinaDC.com, is not the most sophisticated, but she’s working on it.

Tracy Houston, the visionary of the SBR, brought fire, flavor, and fuel to begin the mission. Her drive for change comes from real-world, hard-won experience in leadership. Houston has provided strategic counsel at congressional, state and local levels with appointments that include the presidential task force that developed Colorado’s Report on Race Relations, Energy Advisory committee in the Office of the United States Congressman Coffman, Economic Development Advisory Committee in the office of United States Congressman Beauprez and Colorado’s Statehouse Small Business Report. She founded her board consulting and coaching business after being one of the nation’s youngest women to sit on a board in the electric utility sector, where she provided leadership during a period of industry change driven by deregulation, privatization, technology and globalization forces. She is the past chairman of the board of the International Center for Appropriate and Sustainable Technology. Together, her board roles span evolutionary to revolutionary decision-making environments. In 2008 she was inducted into one of Colorado’s local women’s hall of fame groups.

Madeleine Crown is a Project Specialist at an engineering firm. She holds a B.S. in Communication, with a focus on gender and communication, and has been a super secret singles advocate (unknown even to herself) for the majority of her life. Roused by Dr. Peter McGraw’s podcast in 2020, entranced by Dr. Bella DePaulo’s rhetoric by 2021 (thanks to Peter), and incensed by Tracy Houston’s fire (thanks to Peter’s Solo Community) while fueled by Christina Campbell’s research (also thanks to Peter’s podcast and community), Madeleine emerged as an intentional singles advocate.