174 Quotes by Rebecca Traister

Always choose yourself first. Women are very socialized to choose other people. If you put yourself first, it’s this incredible path you can forge for yourself.

And in order for a new white wokeness to be integrated effectively into a contemporary movement, it must not take it over; there must be acknowledgment that white women are late to the party.

One year after Donald Trump had faced no repercussion for having admitted to grabbing women nonconsensually, women appeared hell-bent on ensuring that other men would be forced – at long last – to accept some consequence.

As journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has sensibly observed, “human beings are pretty logical and generally savvy about identifying their interests. Despite what we’ve heard, women tend to be human beings and if they are less likely to marry today, it is probably that they have decided that marriage doesn’t advance their interests as much as it once did.”60.

Anyone who lived through the 1960s should have known that the younger generation wins.

For women under thirty, the likelihood of being married had become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are wed,4 compared to the nearly 60 percent in 1960.

In the New World, “spinster” gained a more precise meaning: in colonial parlance, it indicated an unmarried woman over the age of twenty-three and under the age of twenty-six. At twenty-six, women without spouses became thornbacks, a reference to a sea-skate with sharp spines covering its back and tail. It was not a compliment.

The realization that a bad marriage might be bad enough to cause a painful split provided ammunition to those women who preferred to abstain from marriage than to enter a flawed one. What.

The ability to feel the anger and convey it to others is itself the transformative experience for many women. Women’s anger spurs creativity and drives innovation in politics and social change, and it always has.