174 Quotes by Rebecca Traister

Some choices about remaining unmarried were made expressly to escape the unhappiness of an earlier generation of married women. “When you think of your mother as helpless, unable to choose her own life, you become determined to never become vulnerable.

I wound up happily married because I lived in an era in which I could be happily single.

When we cast, as we so often do, the choice not to permanently partner as a failure or as a tragedy, we assume partnership as a norm to which everyone should or must aspire.

The irony, as Slate’s Amanda Marcotte has observed, is that conservatives are surely maddest at and most threatened by powerful single women – the privileged, well-positioned women who earn money, wield influence, enjoy national visibility, and have big voices: Anita Hill, Murphy Brown, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham.

By the time some women find someone to whom they’d like to commit and who’d like to commit to them, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night.

Today’s free women, as Gloria Steinem might say, are reshaping the world once again, creating space for themselves and, in turn, for the independent women who will come after them. This is the epoch of the single women, made possible by the single women who preceded it.

We have no good blueprint for how to integrate the contemporary intimacies of female friendship and of marriage into one life.

The women’s movement is a movement not of an oppressed minority, but of a subjugated majority. Majorities, by the very nature of their scale, are bound to include groups with varying – and warring – priorities and goals. By dint of size, a majority has the power over a minority – unless its foundations are eroded. The cheapest way to weaken and undermine a mass movement is to use its differences to divide it, and thus maintain power over it.

This book is about how anger works for men in ways that it does not for women, how men like both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can wage yelling campaigns and be credited with understanding – and compellingly channeling – the rage felt by their supporters while their female opponents can be jeered and mocked as shrill for speaking too loudly of forcefully into a microphone.