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 More Quotes by Rebecca Traister More Quotes From 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 school-days government work school 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 look single husband life I had thought a lot about unmarried life during my years as an unmarried woman - which was all during my 20s and into my 30s. I was someone who didn't have a ton of relationships as a single person - and so I had a sharp identification with singlehood. Rebecca Traister woman someone thought life Changing professional expectations and technological tools have created an impossibility of balancing work and life. Rebecca Traister professional expectations work life Camille Hanks, whose upper-middle-class parents both had college degrees, was a student at the University of Maryland planning on a teaching career when she met Bill Cosby, who was seven years her senior. Rebecca Traister student parents university college 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 good you confused marriage 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 service women marriage children It's important to remember that, while poverty certainly makes single life harder, it also makes married life harder - so much harder that single life might be preferable. Rebecca Traister poverty important remember life Being able to control your reproduction is essential to women's ability to flourish in the United States. Rebecca Traister control your ability women 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 she woman women comedy During childbearing years, changing jobs - even for a fundamentally better gig - can be a very bad idea. Those prime childbearing years - mid-twenties to early forties - overlap precisely with prime professional years. This is when employees are most attractive to new employers, when they should be able to zip up ladders with the most alacrity. Rebecca Traister professional new better bad 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 away need women men Women are living independently, but we don't yet have the social and economic policies behind us to support that independence. Rebecca Traister behind independence women support 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 woman i-am choice marriage 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 deep person adulthood single '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 marriage love relationship life 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 women marriage men war 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 woman women marriage work When lawmakers start to make laws that hurt single women, often the women that they're hurting the most are not the economically powerful ones. They're not Sandra Fluke. They're not Lena Dunham, who conservatives hate more than anybody. They're hurting low-earning single mothers. Rebecca Traister start women hate hurt 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 marriage education time people
