Betsy Israel > Quotes

“Everyone loves the single girl. She is the adorable needy human equivalent of a stray pet others want to domesticate.”
― Betsy Israel, Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century

“We are never allowed to forget what the billboards, television, movies and the press would have us remember. From Mademoiselle 1955”
― Betsy Israel, Bachelor Girl: 100 Years of Breaking the Rules - a Social History of Living Single

“the singular cry of the wild: hey! get your stroller off my sidewalk!”
― Betsy Israel, Bachelor Girl: 100 Years of Breaking the Rules - a Social History of Living Single

“Tabitha is classical spinster—similar to Tituba, the Caribbean servant at Salem, Massachusetts, who allegedly taught the spells and charms that led Sarah Good and nineteen others to be burned or hanged for witchcraft. And “Tabitha” would be long associated with single women—tabbies, tabby cats, would become common nineteenth-century single nicknames—and with witches.”
― Betsy Israel, Bachelor Girl: 100 Years of Breaking the Rules—A Social History of Living Single

“No to marriage proposals, in which the concept of “forever,” as Florence Nightingale famously said, slid into “never.” As in never being wholly oneself; never being permitted to make up one’s own mind; never to be able to move about freely.”
― Betsy Israel, Bachelor Girl: 100 Years of Breaking the Rules—A Social History of Living Single