Rebecca Traister > Quotes

“I think some men love the idea of a strong independent woman but they don’t want to marry a strong independent woman,”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“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.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“In part, that's because when we delay marriage, it's not just women who become independent. It's also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“But I say this to all the women reading this now, and to my future self: What you are angry about now - injustice - will still exist, even if you yourself are not experiencing it, or are tempted to stop thinking about how you are experience it, and how you contribute to it. Others are still experiencing it, still mad; some of them are mad at you. Don’t forget them; don’t write off their anger. Stay mad for them. Stay mad with them. They’re right to be mad, and you’re right to be mad alongside them. Being mad is correct; being mad is American; being mad can be joyful and productive and connective. Don’t ever let them talk you out of being mad again.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it's important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary. A true age of female selfishness, in which women recognized and prioritized their own drives to the same degree to which they have always been trained to tend to the needs of all others, might, in fact, be an enlightened corrective to centuries of self-sacrifice.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs. It was often at just the moment that their educations were complete and their childhood ambitions coming into focus that these troublesome, funny girls were suddenly contained, subsumed, and reduced by domesticity.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“I wound up happily married because I lived in an era in which I could be happily single.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection. In fact, it's high time that more people acknowledged the electric pull that women can feel for their profession, the exciting heat of ambition and frisson of success.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“On some level, if not intellectual then animal, there has always been an understanding of the power of women's anger:that as an oppressed majority in the United States, women have long had within them the potential to rise up in fury, to take over a country in which they've never really been offered their fair or representative stake. Perhaps the reason that women's anger is so broadly denigrated--treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational--is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn the very systems that have sought to contain it.
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.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“I confess that I am now suspicious of nearly every attempt to code anger as unhealthy, no matter how well meaning or persuasive the source. I believe Stanton was correct: what is bad for women, when it comes to anger, are the messages that cause us to bottle it up, let it fester, keep it silent, feel shame, and isolation for ever having felt it or re-channel it in inappropriate directions. What is good for us is opening our mouths and letting it out, permitting ourselves to feel it and say it and think it and act on it and integrate it into our lives, just as we integrate joy and sadness and worry and optimism.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“To be clear, the vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom. The revolution is in the expansion of options, the lifting of the imperative that for centuries hustled nearly all (non-enslaved) women, regardless of their individual desires, ambitions, circumstances, or the quality of available matches, down a single highway toward early heterosexual marriage and motherhood.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“But, mostly, I didn't pursue people I wasn't crazy about because I was busy doing things that I enjoyed more than being with men I wasn't crazy about.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“By the time I walked down the aisle—or rather, into a judge’s chambers—I had lived fourteen independent years, early adult years that my mother had spent married. I had made friends and fallen out with friends, had moved in and out of apartments, had been hired, fired, promoted, and quit. I had had roommates I liked and roommates I didn’t like and I had lived on my own; I’d been on several forms of birth control and navigated a few serious medical questions; I’d paid my own bills and failed to pay my own bills; I’d fallen in love and fallen out of love and spent five consecutive years with nary a fling. I’d learned my way around new neighborhoods, felt scared and felt completely at home; I’d been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored. 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. I was not alone.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Here’s the validation that I hope it can offer: that those who are furious right now are not alone, are not crazy, are not unattractive.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“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.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“Here is the nexus of where work, gender, marriage, and money collide: Dependency.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Americans who might have exerted more energy to oppose Trump or support Clinton—especially white women—were goaded into inaction by the assurance that sexism and racism were things of the past, and that to work themselves up about either would look silly, would be unnecessary exertions on behalf of an imperfect candidate.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“The British feminist Laurie Penny tweeted in July 2017, “Most of the interesting women you know are far, far angrier than you’d imagine.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“For young women, for the first time, it is as normal to be unmarried as it is to be married, even if it doesn't always feel that way.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“The solution, she advises, is, “when you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you look better.” Marital”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Any time women do anything with their lives that is not in service to others, they are readily perceived as acting perversely. Historian”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“By 1996 Nora Ephron was telling a graduating class at Wellesley, “Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back.… Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“As Amanda Litman... has written, 'Instead of resisting (anger) or avoiding it, let your fury push you to action. Embrace your anger and put it to work.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“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”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“anger is often an exuberant expression. It is the force that injects energy, intensity, and urgency into battles that must be intense and urgent if they are to be won. More broadly, we must come to recognize our own rage as valid, as rational, and not as what we’re told it is: ugly, hysterical, marginal, laughable.”
― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

“The fact is, being married to your job for some portion or all of your life, even if it does in some way inhibit romantic prospects, is not necessarily a terrible fate, provided that you are lucky enough to enjoy your work, or the money you earn at it, or the respect it garners you, or the people you do it with. Earning,”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“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”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“It's not such a bad thing to always have something to do, someone to meet, work to complete, trains to catch, beers to drink, marathons to run, classes to attend. 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.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“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.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation