Single women and holidaymaking

Abstract

My interest in understanding female singlehood and holidaymaking started in 2001 when I, at the age of 37, for the first time travelled alone. During the one-week stay in a Turkish beach resort, I started to reflect on why I did not enjoy this holiday much, I felt lonely, self-conscious and vulnerable. At that time in my career, as an applied tourism researcher, I had never thought about notions such as familism, ageism and singlism in relation to holidays (DePaulo & Morris, 2005; Gordon, 1994; Sandfield & Percy, 2003), concepts that later inspired my thinking.<p>

<p>My feminist research on gender and tourism started with my PhD in 2003. The focus was on the interrelationships between the holiday experience and social identities of gender, singlehood and midlife (Heimtun, 2007c). At that point, other dissertations had focused on similar issues (Jordan, 2004; Simmons, 2003; Small, 2002; Wilson, 2004) and a few studies had explored the market potential of older single women (Chirivella Caballero & Hart, 1996; Stone & Nichol, 1999), none of them, however, had the spotlight on midlife single women. Based on my PhD, I later conducted a survey among young single men and women. In 2016, I interviewed midlife single women about holidays with aging parents. Later in this chapter, I will explore these studies in some detail. Before doing this, I will present some of my methodological and theoretical underpinnings.