174 Quotes by Rebecca Traister

The truer story is that even the most intense waves of backlash have rarely fully undone the progress made previously.

I was a grown-up: A reasonably complicated person. I’d become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself.

Clinton was the first candidate for the job of first lady to have a life that reflected post-second-wave America and the many working women who made their careers and raised their families here.

There is an assumption, put forth by everyone from greeting card companies to Bruce Springsteen, that nobody likes to be alone, least of all women. But many women, long valued in context to their relations to other people, find solitude- both the act of being alone and the attitude of being independent- a surprisingly sweet relief.

It is true that when single, I swiftly chased off any men whose threatened disruption of my Saturday mornings, which I set aside for breakfast on my own and a ridiculous apartment-cleaning ritual that involved dancing, I found too irritating to bear.

Of course it’s not a waste to fight for justice, to work to right wrongs; but it is an extra tax on those already working from power deficits.

Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s earliest and most vociferous accusers, recalled being asked “in a soft NPR voice, ‘What if what you’re saying makes men uncomfortable?’ Good. I’ve been uncomfortable my whole life. Welcome to our world of discomfort.

What becomes clear, when we look to the past with an eye to the future, is that the discouragement of women’s anger – via silencing, erasure, and repression – stems from the correct understanding of those in power that in the fury of women lies the power to change the world.

In figuring out how a woman might win within a system that had not been designed with her in mind, Clinton had set herself up to lose.