In the nineteenth century, in part because a ton of American men moved west, in part because of the Civil War, and in part because of trepidation about marriage, which was then a very confining institution, there was a big population of women – mostly middle-class white women on the East Coast – who didn’t marry. Rebecca Traister Read Quote
There are a whole bunch of structural and systemic factors we need to address in order to move away from the model in which women really are still dependent on men. Rebecca Traister Read Quote
Women are living independently, but we don’t yet have the social and economic policies behind us to support that independence. Rebecca Traister Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
There is a kind of woman who is economically powerful, professionally powerful, who threatens a white male grip on power that has a long historic precedent in the country. Independent women living outside of marriage threaten all kinds of things about the way power is supposed to work. Rebecca Traister Read Quote
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 Read Quote
One of the favorite conservative themes is that the cure for poverty is more marriage and earlier marriage. We hear that all the time; there have been billions of dollars now, between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, which has continued the marriage education program, on trying to get more people to get married. Rebecca Traister Read Quote
All the epic allusions contribute to the difficulty Clinton has long had in coming across as, simply, a human being. She is uneasy with the press and ungainly on the stump. Catching a glimpse of the ‘real’ her often entails spying something out of the corner of your eye, in a moment when she’s not trying to be, or to sell, ‘Hillary Clinton.’ Rebecca Traister Read Quote
