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In 1634, a bill was introduced to the House of Delegates in Maryland proposing that land owned by a spinster must be forfeited, should she fail to marry within seven years.7 Almost
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Rebecca Traister |
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William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England interpreted coverture as meaning that "the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing. . . . A man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would suppose her separate existen..
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Rebecca Traister |
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Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, "a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen." Yet for all of this, women kept on not marrying and they kept on bucking for change. The"
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Rebecca Traister |
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Some women went west themselves. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller reports that prior to 1900, around 10 percent of land claims in two Colorado counties were filed by unmarried women, some of whom--like South Dakota homesteader "Bachelor Bess" Corey--were more interested in the land-grab than the man-grab. When Oklahoma's Cherokee Strip was opened to homesteaders in 1893, Laura Crews raced her horse seventeen miles in under an hour to claim th..
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Rebecca Traister |
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And many women, whether or not they are politically active, ideologically committed feminists, or whether they have simply considered the lives of their mothers and foremothers, understand, under their skin, that at the heart of independence lies money.
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Rebecca Traister |
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Friends did not form isolated dyads but were normally part of highly integrated networks
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Rebecca Traister |
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And as writer Nora Ephron explained in a 1996 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, about her own graduating class of 1962: "We weren't meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren't meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect." Both"
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Rebecca Traister |
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Suffragists had often staged political "pageants" in which they wore sashes emblazoned "Votes for Women." But 1921, the year following the ratification of the 19th Amendment, brought a perversion of this display: the debut of the Miss America pageant, in which unmarried women showed off their decidedly apolitical attributes in competition against, as opposed to collaboration with, each other.57 The"
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Rebecca Traister |
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While marriage rates for middle-class white women soared through the 1940s and 1950s, for black women, mid-twentieth century conditions were very different. Since emancipation, black women had married earlier and more often than their white counterparts. In the years directly after World War II, thanks to the return of soldiers, black marriage rates briefly increased further.66 However, as white women kept marrying in bigger numbers and at ..
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Rebecca Traister |
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In 1969, University of Chicago sociology professor Marlene Dixon wrote that "the institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women . . ."
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Rebecca Traister |
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black women were working all day (often scrubbing the homes of white women), it was impossible for them also to fulfill the at-home maternal ideal for which white women were being celebrated. If black men had a harder time getting educations and jobs, earning competitive wages or securing loans, it was harder for them to play the role of provider. If there were no government-subsidized split-levels to fill with publicly educated children, t..
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Rebecca Traister |
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feminist Sheila Cronan wrote, "Since marriage constitutes slavery for women . . . Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage."
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Rebecca Traister |
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Andrea Dworkin famously commented that "Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice." In"
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Rebecca Traister |
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The only way some feminists were able to absorb the notion of a woman who didn't necessarily want to marry a man was to understand her as homosexual. At
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Rebecca Traister |
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Steinem's most powerful gift was her ability to synthesize radical sentiments into appealingly pithy, era-defining sound bites.
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Rebecca Traister |
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More sharply, Steinem argued that marriage rendered women "half people,"
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Rebecca Traister |
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the recognition that Americans' rights should neither be circumscribed nor made more expansive based simply on whether they were wed.
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Rebecca Traister |
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Note on Interviews and Attribution
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Rebecca Traister |
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You want women around to reflect their experiences and see a female candidate through their particular prism.
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Rebecca Traister |
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In the late 1860s, Myra Bradwell petitioned for a law license and argued that the 14th Amendment protected her right to practice. The Illinois Supreme Court rejected her petition, ruling that because she was married she had no legal right to operate on her own. When she challenged the ruling, Justice Joseph Bradley wrote in his decision, "It certainly cannot be affirmed, as a historical fact, that [the right to choose one's profession] has ..
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Rebecca Traister |
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For young women and men who had never seen blatant misogyny before, who had never heard a woman called a "cunt" or seen the size of a senator's thighs referred to on a T-shirt, these in-your-face examples of gender-based resistance to Hillary were eye-opening."
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Rebecca Traister |
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In fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions -- its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage -- that has allowed marriage to evolve, to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.
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Rebecca Traister |
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Yesterday, a beautiful day... I was talking to [an older] woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now. HILLARY RODHAM, Wellesley commencement speech, 1969
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Rebecca Traister |
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As we gather here today," Clinton said, "the fiftieth woman to leave this Earth is orbiting overhead. If we can blast fifty women into space, we will someday launch a woman into the White House."
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Rebecca Traister |
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other colonies "began to recognize that giving land to women undermined their dependent role"
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Rebecca Traister |
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It's true that increasing one's number of sexual partners almost certainly increases the risk of sexually transmitted disease and of unintended pregnancy. It increases the chance of having your soul stomped on, and of having really bad sex. It also, I should add, increases the odds of finding someone with whom you have terrific sex, and learning more about what turns you on and what turns you off, how your body works and how other people's ..
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Rebecca Traister |
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In 2013, science writer Natalie Angier gave the centrality of female friendship a zoological boost, pointing out that, "In animals as diverse as African elephants and barnyard mice, blue monkeys of Kenya and feral horses of New Zealand, affiliative, long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships between females turns out to be the basic unit of social life."
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Rebecca Traister |
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Yes, many women who had pursued careers and not families experienced loneliness. But the question of whether that loneliness would be ameliorated by marriage --
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Rebecca Traister |
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In a 2011 study, researchers at the University of Missouri explored the pressures faced by middle-class, never-married women. They found that these women experienced a heightened sense of deviant visibility within their families and communities (especially at events like weddings, even more especially during bouquet toss) and that, conversely, they were made to feel invisible and inconsequential in social environments in which the default e..
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Rebecca Traister |
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In his 1873 Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for the Girls, Harvard professor Edward Clarke argued that the female brain, if engaged in the same course of study as the male, would become overburdened and that wombs and ovaries would atrophy.43 Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, "a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen." Yet"
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Rebecca Traister |
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a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen." Yet"
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Rebecca Traister |
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Of course, some people's "decadence" is other people's "liberation;" the exhaustion with child-bearing a child-rearing that Douthat finds so troubling is the weariness of women who've borne the children and, until very recently, raised them largely on their own, their "basic sacrifices" the sacrifices of individual identity, social relationships, or the pursuit of equality in the world."
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rebecca traister |
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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.
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Rebecca Traister |
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Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Western territories in which women staked out land were places in which woman suffrage would precede passage of the nineteenth amendment.
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Rebecca Traister |
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The lion's share of finding love is luck, in tandem with privilege, since key to propitious circumstance is opportunity: the opportunities on offer to us when we are born, the resources and options made available to us as we grow.
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Rebecca Traister |
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Of the few women who managed to leave a historical trace, usually from wealthier castes, a great number turn out to have been single, or, at the very least, single for the period during which they carved out space for themselves in the remembered world. Writers and artists, including painter Mary Cassatt, poets Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, novelists Anne and Emily Bronte, Willa Cather, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and prolific Afric..
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Rebecca Traister |
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But embedded in the structure of both literature and life was the reality that for women, adulthood--and with it, the end of the story--was marriage.
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Rebecca Traister |
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Later, I would learn that Shakespeare's comedies ended with wedlock and his tragedies with death, making marriage death's narrative equivalent and supporting my childhood hunch about its ability to shut down a story.
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Rebecca Traister |
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In fact, in 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent.1 And that median age of first marriage that had remained between twenty and twenty-two from 1890 to 1980?2 Today, the median age of first marriage for women is around twenty-seven, and much higher than that in many cities.
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Rebecca Traister |
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Today, only around 20 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are wed,4 compared to the nearly 60 percent in 1960.
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Rebecca Traister |
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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.
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Rebecca Traister |
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The relevance of her single status was how it distinguished her from established expectations of femininity. Hill had no husband to vouch for her virtue, no children to affirm her worth, as women's worth had been historically understood.
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Rebecca Traister |
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af00102
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The lingering assumption--born of the same expectations that I had chafed at as a kid, reading novels--was that the natural state of adult womanhood involved being legally bound to a man.
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Rebecca Traister |
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the vision of Hill's being grilled by a panel of white men had on America's representative politics. In 1991, there had been only two women serving in the United States Senate, an embarrassing circumstance that the hearings put in stark national relief.
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Rebecca Traister |