Look at somebody like Margaret Sanger, who was married young and had kids but then left her husband and wound up living a kind of single life as she got into the founding of what would become Planned Parenthood. – Rebecca Traister
Women’s roles in the movies remain, for the most part, girlfriends, mothers, wives. – Rebecca Traister
In 2008, I started the election season as a critic of Hillary Clinton, a fan of Barack Obama, and a supporter of John Edwards. But by the end of Clinton’s historic drive toward nomination, the gendered rhetoric used against her – as well as the way so many men in my own party diminished the value of electing a female president – had radicalized me. – Rebecca Traister
Roseanne was a huge groundbreaking comedian. Margaret Cho. Ellen DeGeneres, and then on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ the era of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler sort of helped to bring in an awareness of a new generation of women comedians, often women who were feminist in their comedy, who were unafraid – and this came from the genre of show that was emerging. – Rebecca Traister
Throughout America’s history, the start of adult life for women – whatever else it might have been destined to include – had been typically marked by marriage. – Rebecca Traister
Plenty of the women who were single in the nineteenth century wrote about their desire to evade marriage. Marriage was scary in a lot of ways. It often involved having a lot of kids, losing your autonomy, being in service to a husband and children who were often born at an unremitting pace without the benefit of modern medicine. – Rebecca Traister
‘The End of Men’ was an incendiary title, but the actual book was very sympathetic to men. It was very invested in a lot of the challenges men are facing with unemployment and the economy changing because of technology. – Rebecca Traister
After Emancipation, black women married earlier and more often because they were legally free to do so for the first time, and that was true until after World War II. But middle-class white women married less and later. – Rebecca Traister
My favorite moment of the 2012 election was the debate question where they asked Romney and Obama what they would do to stem gun violence, and Romney’s answer was you should marry someone. – Rebecca Traister
The first big impact that feminism in the 1960s and ’70s had was a big divorce boom in the ’70s and ’80s. That, in part, had an impact on how the children of that divorce boom viewed marriage. – Rebecca Traister
Yes, there have been women in comedy. Moms Mabley was one of the earliest. She was an African American comedian; she often dressed up as an older, disheveled woman. – Rebecca Traister
In some ways, privileged women who are closer to power wind up being able to exert their influence in ways that change public policy in ways that women with less power don’t have access to. – Rebecca Traister
I wasn’t remotely ambivalent about marrying the person I was marrying, but I was 35. I was deep into my adulthood, and I identified as single. – Rebecca Traister
I’d spent my whole adult life considering myself an independent entity, my life filled by work and friends and family. Suddenly I had a male partner, someone I woke up with and went to sleep with every night. – Rebecca Traister
The vast majority of women who marry still take their husband’s name. And I’m not vilifying that behavior! But that’s a pattern where women are truly still taking on their husbands’ identities. – Rebecca Traister
I think that technology – computers and smart phones and 24-hour availability – often leaves me, and others I know, feeling blank and depressed at the end of a day. I also believe that hyped expectations for raising children leaves many women and men feeling as if their days are a blur of carpools and play-groups and tutors. – Rebecca Traister
I think a lot of divisions of perspective and experience that happen within feminism are very natural. Any movement that represents the interests of 51 percent of the population is covering such divergent experiences, perspectives, and priorities that, if you’re doing it right, people are going to be arguing within it. – Rebecca Traister
‘The Daily Show,’ which was created by women, Lizz Winstead and Madeleine Smithberg, has earned quite a bit of ink for the fact that it’s written mostly by men. – Rebecca Traister
Marriage has been a way of attempting to ensure the replication of power and wealth from one generation of another, passing it down from men to men. – Rebecca Traister
Up until 1920, women couldn’t vote. Until 1974, married women couldn’t get their own credit cards or, in some cases, their own loans. Basically, the husband’s professional, social, and economic identity covered the individual identity of the wife. – Rebecca Traister
‘Marriage’ was not that big a deal, to be honest! I mean, it makes life easier for technical reasons: insurance, next-of-kin stuff, joint tax filing, etc. The real shocker was falling in love with the man I’m married to. I was 32 when we met, and I had really never been in a functional relationship before, had never been deeply in love. – Rebecca Traister
When I say, ‘The choice to not marry,’ that doesn’t always translate into, ‘I am a woman, and I am deciding that I am not going to get married,’ or ‘I am rejecting marriage.’ – Rebecca Traister
Changing professional expectations and technological tools have created an impossibility of balancing work and life. – Rebecca Traister
The contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders offered such a bright and bracing contrast to all those professional wrestlers emerging from the RNC’s clown car. – Rebecca Traister
In 2008, Clinton and Obama were similar politicians. Obama was definitely advertised as the more progressive candidate, and that’s part of why more progressive people – including women – went for him. – Rebecca Traister
Since the late 19th century, the median age of first marriage for women had fluctuated between 20 and 22. This had been the shape, pattern and definition of female life. – Rebecca Traister
One of the things that gets confused often is the difference between marriage and good marriage. Marriage is a theoretical concept of the institution, and ‘you should be married,’ is actually meaningless. Marriage is pretty meaningless without the notion of having a specific person to whom you are married. – Rebecca Traister
Women are living independently, but we don’t yet have the social and economic policies behind us to support that independence. – Rebecca Traister
Our government and its social policies, its tax breaks, the way school days work, so much of the country we live in is built for married couples with a male breadwinner and a female domestic laborer. Government needs to be massively altered in order to serve this population. – Rebecca Traister
There are all kinds of ways in which women, together, change the world. And I don’t mean that in a cheesy way. I’m not somebody who believes all women should support each other. I believe very strongly in women critiquing each other, just not critiquing each other more intensely because they’re women. – Rebecca Traister
