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5c671d6
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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."
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Rebecca Traister |
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2b879df
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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" --
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Rebecca Traister |
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a4abdee
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Anyone who wants power within a white male power structure has been asked to quell anything that sounds like wrath, to reassure that they come in cooperative peace and are not looking to mete out repercussion against those who have oppressed or subjugated them.
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Rebecca Traister |
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1efcaa9
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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.
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Rebecca Traister |
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bfe1dd8
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Men literally have no idea how to even legitimately recognize or name our anger--largely because we don't either. This is new territory for everybody. Women's rage has been so sublimated for so long that there's simply no frame for what happens when it finally comes to the surface. --Sara Robinson
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Rebecca Traister |
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159dcdf
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In many ways, the emotional and economic self-sufficiency of unmarried life is more demanding than the state we have long acknowledged as (married) maturity. Being on one's own means shouldering one's own burdens in a way that being coupled rarely demands. It means doing everything--making decisions, taking responsibility, paying bills, cleaning the refrigerator--without the benefits of formal partnership. But we've still got a lot of hardw..
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Rebecca Traister |
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21ebc1e
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The other side of the anger is the hope. We wouldn't be angry if we didn't believe that it could be better.
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Rebecca Traister |
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7a22fc2
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Gay marriage, inherently and ideally based on love and companionship, and not on gender-defined social and economic power, will be key to our ability to re-imagined straight marriage.
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Rebecca Traister |
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ecd75a0
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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.
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Rebecca Traister |
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d64ad6e
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The women's movement is a movement not of an oppressed minority, but of a subjugated majority. Majorities, by the very nature of their scale, are bound to include groups with varying--and warring--priorities and goals. By dint of size, a majority has the power over a minority--unless its foundations are eroded. The cheapest way to weaken and undermine a mass movement is to use its differences to divide it, and thus maintain power over it.
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Rebecca Traister |
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b69e08f
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I know there still are barriers and biases out there, often unconscious," she finally said, and the room roared in relief and affirmation. "You can be so proud that, from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States." She paused. People screamed. "And that is truly remark..
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Rebecca Traister |
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fda6c3e
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Because while it surely felt cathartic to see it all laid bare, even briefly, the view did not undo the damage. We could not go back in time and have the story of Hillary Clinton be written by people who had not also pressed their erections into the shoulders of young women who'd worked for them. We could not retroactively resituate the women who'd left jobs and whole careers because the navigation of the risks, of the daily abuses, drove t..
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Rebecca Traister |
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e693a66
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We are never forced to consider that rage--and not just stoicism, sadness, or strength--were behind the actions of the few women's heroes we're ever taught about in school, from Harriet Tubman to Susan B. Anthony. Instead, we are regularly fed and we regularly ingest cultural messages that suggest that women's rage is irrational, dangerous, or laughable.
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Rebecca Traister |
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a84b576
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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.
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Rebecca Traister |
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e304167
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Humor can be such a good way to hide anger at racist, sexist degradation and to challenge white male authority sideways--without risking as much direct blowback--that it perhaps shouldn't be a surprise that the comedian Tina Fey wrote jokes about Harvey Weinstein's sexual predation--lines about being pinned under Weinstein, and turning down sex with him--that aired on her show 30 Rock in 2012, years before his behavior could be reported str..
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Rebecca Traister |
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b1caede
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Anyone who lived through the 1960s should have known that the younger generation wins.
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Rebecca Traister |
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4e51532
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Men, including a former senator, told me of how shaken they were to hear from their wives and friends and mothers and coworkers about the ubiquity of sexual assault and harassment, how they had had their hair blown back by the anger they hadn't even known had been pent up.
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Rebecca Traister |
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7654071
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For if single women are looking for government to create a "hubby state" for them, what is certainly true is that their male counterparts have a long enjoy the fruits of a related "wifey state," in which the nation and its government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Men, and especially married wealthy white men, have a long relied on government assistance. It's a government that has historically supported white men's home a..
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Rebecca Traister |
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d565686
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Putting aside the fact that graveyards also contain large numbers of wives and mothers, Mills was wrong on another front: A job may very well love you back. It may sustain and support you, buoy your spirits and engage your mind, as the best romantic partner would, and far more effectively than a subpar spouse might. In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection.
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Rebecca Traister |
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da63d0c
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This book is about how anger works for men in ways that it does not for women, how men like both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can wage yelling campaigns and be credited with understanding--and compellingly channeling--the rage felt by their supporters while their female opponents can be jeered and mocked as shrill for speaking too loudly of forcefully into a microphone.
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feminism
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Rebecca Traister |
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d286eb5
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Bill Clinton told the story in 2015, he had to ask his girlfriend to marry him, and come to Arkansas where he was pursuing a political career, three times before she said yes. He recalled telling Hillary Rodham, "I want you to marry me, but you shouldn't do it." Instead, he urged her to go to Chicago or New York to begin a political career of her own. "Oh, my God," he remembered Hillary responding at one point. "I'll never run for office. I..
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Rebecca Traister |
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247671f
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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.
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Rebecca Traister |
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c4094be
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The irony, as Slate's Amanda Marcotte has observed, is that conservatives are surely maddest at and most threatened by powerful single women--the privileged, well-positioned women who earn money, wield influence, enjoy national visibility, and have big voices: Anita Hill, Murphy Brown, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham.
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Rebecca Traister |
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25b3986
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Letisha also misses New York, and what it offered her as a single mother, even at the same time that it made it impossible for her to stay. "In New York, everybody on the corner knew who I was," she said. "Oh, that's the brown woman with the baby and the dog." This sense of community was comforting, and felt safe, even in the neighborhoods that she understood to be unsafe. One of her apartments, Letisha recalled, was "right next to a shady ..
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Rebecca Traister |
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140ab0b
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One year later, the court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion was legal. The decision affected married and single women equally.
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Rebecca Traister |
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5566396
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Between 1934 and 1962, the government subsidized $120 billion in new housing; 98 percent of it for white families.
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Rebecca Traister |
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6f3bead
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Cities have long provided safer harbor for, and have in turn been shaped by, single women.
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Rebecca Traister |
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b31837d
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As another philosopher, Myisha Cherry, has recently argued, "I want to convince you that there are types of anger that are not bad." In particular, she is interested in anger at injustice, regarding it as a wholly appropriate response to inequity. "Here are some of the features of the anger at injustice: it recognizes wrongdoing. This recognition is not mistaken; this person is not delusional or making this up in their head. It is not selfi..
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Rebecca Traister |
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fb82647
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They seemed to confirm Simone de Beauvoir's observation about real life women, which I would also, eventually, uncover: that, by definition, we "are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being."
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Rebecca Traister |
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75c9993
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metropolises like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Denver boast single-dwelling households that comprise more than 40 percent of their total populations. According to Census data,1 Susana's Atlanta has the highest share of residents living alone, at 44 percent; Washington D.C. and its surrounding suburbs clock in at about the same. According to sociologist Eric Klinenberg's book, Going Solo, in Manhattan, the percentage of so..
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Rebecca Traister |
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eab557e
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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 ea..
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Rebecca Traister |
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1e6cbd5
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the wholesale revision of what female life might entail is also, by many measures, the invention of independent female adulthood. The
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Rebecca Traister |
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9e26a1e
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When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it's important to remember that the very acknowledgment that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary.
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Rebecca Traister |
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1e84f18
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One Reformation-era proverb, which would be cited in different forms by John Donne and William Shakespeare, proclaimed that women who died unmarried were doomed to "lead apes in hell."
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Rebecca Traister |
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ae9c083
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Yes, in a bad economy, grown children live with their parents. However, that's not a new familial configuration; historically and across classes, adult children have very often lived with their parents. We just didn't consider them quite so adolescent when they were married and had children dwelling with them in the multigenerational unit.
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Rebecca Traister |
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9938f87
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Among the largely unacknowledged truths of female life is that women's primary, foundational, formative relationships are as likely to be with each other as they are with the men we've been told since childhood are supposed to be the people who complete us. Female friendship has been the bedrock of women's lives for as long as there have been women.
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Rebecca Traister |
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6fe4f5a
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those assumptions are often undergirded by an unconscious conviction that, if a woman is not wed, it's not because she's made a set of active choices, but rather that she has not been selected--chosen, desired, valued enough.
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Rebecca Traister |
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bcf20cc
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If there are broad distinctions to be made between the nature of same-sex female pairs versus heterosexual ones, it's that the same-sex unions have not entailed one of their members being automatically accorded more power, status, or economic worth based entirely on gender.
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Rebecca Traister |
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323d5a3
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In part, surely, it's because power is always more rigidly patrolled than powerlessness: When money and status are at stake, lines around who may access and transmit them (white men) and who is barred from them (women and people of color), remain firm. Marriage, historically, has been one of the best ways for men to assert, reproduce, and pass on their power, to retain their control.
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Rebecca Traister |
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0bed4f4
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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 of their relations to other people, find solitude--both the act of being alone and the attitude of being independent--a surprisingly sweet relief.
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Rebecca Traister |
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31a06e3
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When Susan B. Anthony began earning a salary as an elementary school teacher, at twenty-six, she had already turned down two marriage proposals in her quest to remain unmarried. She purchased for herself a fox-fur muff, a white silk hat, and a purple wool dress and wrote home, wondering if her peers might not "feel rather sad because they are married and can not have nice clothes."
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Rebecca Traister |
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37d4c1a
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America's first voters were not just white men, but white men who owned property; in England in 1869, unmarried women with property had been granted the right to vote in local elections.
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Rebecca Traister |
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59ff922
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The Comstock Act of 1873, along with a series of state laws implemented soon after, made it illegal to distribute any materials deemed "obscene," including birth control and educational material about contraception. States were outlawing abortion, which until then had been legal under some circumstances; by 1880, the procedure was mostly prohibited, except to save the life of the woman."
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Rebecca Traister |
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fd90ec4
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In the same period, scientists around the world were working to justify the continued subjugation of women and nonwhites by making medical claims as to their inferior capabilities.
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Rebecca Traister |