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A new reality was setting in: If women could live independently, many would do so, and as they did, men would become less central to economic security, social standing, sexual life, and, as it turned out, to parenthood.
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Rebecca Traister |
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while the feminist movement of the 1970s was in part a "direct response to these conditions of early and pervasive marriage," the ironic side effect was that single women had almost no place in the underpinnings of the movement."
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Rebecca Traister |
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483ac4d
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some of the Bard's feistiest and most loquacious heroines, including Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, ceased to have any lines after their dramatically conclusive marriage alliances.
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Rebecca Traister |
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a13584b
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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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2f8ca0a
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the weird possibility of marriage loomed. It loomed, in part, because there weren't very many appealing models of what other kinds of female life might take its place.
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Rebecca Traister |
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4077d16
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the dream of a more orderly world.
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Rebecca Traister |
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be06148
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Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.
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Rebecca Traister |
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658af2f
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If a woman is not wed, it's not because she 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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6c55e55
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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.
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Rebecca Traister |
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766a86e
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The Supreme Court had made birth control legal for married couples in the 1965 case, Griswold v. Connecticut, basing its decision on the opinion that a ban violated the privacy of the marital bedroom's "innermost sanctum." But, for single women, the relevant decision came seven years later. In 1972's Eisenstadt v. Baird, the Court struck down a law that prohibited the sale of contraception to unmarried persons," --
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Rebecca Traister |
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But, for the unmarried, legal abortion provided yet another tool to protect their ability to live outside of marriage.
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Rebecca Traister |
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d539613
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And, in 1974, Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, making it easier for women to secure credit cards, bank loans, and mortgages, and to buy their own homes.
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Rebecca Traister |
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1abe762
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And yet, women kept right on not marrying. In 1990, the median age for first marriage for women jumped to nearly twenty-four, the highest it had been in the century in which it had been recorded.
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Rebecca Traister |
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aeaa40a
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By 2013, about half of first-time births were to unmarried women; for women under thirty, it was almost 60 percent.
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Rebecca Traister |
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2eb0d84
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conservatives: a complete rethinking of who women are and who men are and, therefore, also of what family is and who holds dominion within it . . . and outside it. The expanded presence of women as independent entities means a redistribution of all kinds of power, including electoral power, that has, until recently, been wielded mostly by men.
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Rebecca Traister |
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6adb717
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Single women helped put Barack Obama back in the White House; they voted for him by 67 to 31 percent, while married women voted for Romney.
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Rebecca Traister |
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d11f600
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In 2012, unmarried women made up a remarkable 23 percent of the electorate. Almost a quarter of votes were cast by women without husbands,
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Rebecca Traister |
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they did not match society's expectations by entering an institution built around male authority and female obeisance.
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Rebecca Traister |
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So, while women who have remained single, on purpose or by accident, may have retained some power and self-determination, they rarely, in the past, escaped social censure or enjoyed economic independence.
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Rebecca Traister |
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0895108
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in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Connecticut, and New Haven during the seventeenth century, unmarried people were required to live with families that were "well governed" by a church-going, land-owning man."
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Rebecca Traister |
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8580447
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Coverture encompassed what legal historian Ariela Dubler has called "a stunning array of status-defining legal restrictions" that prevented wives from keeping their own wages, entering contracts or bringing legal action.10 "In its strictly economic aspect the traditional marriage contract resembled an indenture between master and servant,"
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Rebecca Traister |
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fcd8ec8
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Free women of color were permitted to inherit, own property, businesses, and slaves; it was not expected that they would marry. The comparative economic and sexual liberty experienced by these libre women provided them some incentive to steer clear of what free Maria Gentilly, who, after a husband squandered her estate, sued to recover it in the 1790s,17 called "the yoke of matrimony."
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Rebecca Traister |
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c911c10
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a new model of aspirational upper-class femininity and attitude about female purpose that historians now refer to as the Cult of Domesticity.
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Rebecca Traister |
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wealthy, white American wife, relieved of her responsibilities for at-home production, became responsible for scrupulously maintaining a domicile that served as the feminized inverse of the newly bustling, masculine public space.
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Rebecca Traister |
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Published in 1829, The Young Lady's Book asserted that "Whatever situation of life a woman is placed, from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind, are required from her."19 Everyday tasks were made more time-consuming and taxing, so as to better fill the days of women who might otherwise grow restive and attempt to leave the house."
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Rebecca Traister |
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a social structure that relied on domesticity as its principle mode of female control;
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Rebecca Traister |
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perfect servants of god, family, and community. Women without husbands were often expected to care for the sick and destitute within their communities, and were expected to care for aging parents as married siblings headed off to tend new families.
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Rebecca Traister |
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5be83a8
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Znaimer asks Steinem what she wants to be "when you grow up." "Free," Steinem replies, "and old . . . and a little mean."18"
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Rebecca Traister |
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05741ea
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Women's anger, publicly and loudly expressed, is all of that: unnatural, chaotic, upsetting to how power is supposed to work. Women's determination to voice that fury toward men in 2017 and 2018 had led those men to feel some fraction of the anxiety that nonwhite non-men feel daily. That these men experience any anxiety or discomfort is intolerable enough that in 2018, a Canadian clinical psychologist named Jordan Peterson became a mega-bes..
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Rebecca Traister |
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about the conditions as they have been. Meanwhile, angry art of the new era--from Naomi Alderman's best-selling novel The Power; to Dietland, a television show about a women's magazine . . . and a feminist terrorist group that throws men out of planes; to Hannah Gadsby's cult stage show Nanette and the exhibition of Adrian Piper's art at MoMA and the feminist street art of Tatyana Fazlalizadeh--captures the furious female energy of contempo..
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Rebecca Traister |
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Trump's scorn for women was on prominent display from the start: he called them pigs, dogs, evaluated them on scales of one to ten, had run beauty pageants, been accused by his first wife of rape, and bragged to Howard Stern of never having changed a diaper. He had told a magazine that you have to "treat [women] like shit."
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Rebecca Traister |
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1799572
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Typically only the incivility of the less powerful toward the more powerful can be widely understood as such, and thus be subject to such intense censure. Which is what made #metoo so fraught and revolutionary. It was a period during which some of the most powerful faced repercussion. The experience of having patriarchal control compromised felt, perhaps ironically, like a violation, a diminishment, a threat to professional standing--all th..
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Rebecca Traister |
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e6b43d9
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Progress in America takes a punishingly long time; but it also happens in fits and bursts, sometimes in reaction to terrible, deadening, deeply damaging setbacks. We are in one of those moments now, and we need to pay attention, to be aware of what is possible if we think hard about what we're angry about, and what needs to change. Because change can happen quickly.
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Rebecca Traister |
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7f890fd
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Even those who claimed he'd never be president credited him with reaching voters in a visceral way, as having a gift for channeling the rage of a white America which felt it had been left behind, had its privileges stolen by female, nonwhite interlopers--the kinds of people who'd never occupied the White House or held representative numbers of seats in legislative bodies, people who were paid less, taxed more for health care, and denied ful..
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Rebecca Traister |
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a51ccea
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The task-- especially for the newly awakened, the newly angry, especially for the white women, for whom incentives to renounce their rage will be highest in coming years--is to keep going, to not turn back, to not give in to the easier path, the one where we weren't angry all the time, where we accepted the comforts of racial and economic advantage that will always be on offer to those who don't challenge power. Our job is to stay angry . ...
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rage
feminism
political-action
white-supremacy
patriarchy
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Rebecca Traister |
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922d902
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White men have had a nearly exclusive grip on political, economic, social, and sexual power in the United States, despite being only around a third of its population. The way that a minority power protects itself from the potential uprising of a majority is to discourage unification of that majority. And the best way to discourage unification is to split the majority against itself, by offering benefits and protections of power to some, whi..
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Rebecca Traister |
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To point out that an undue amount of attention is regularly paid to the internal conflicts within feminism is not to diminish the seriousness and centrality of those conflicts: they are real, and understanding whence they stem is crucial to understanding the very mechanisms of bias, oppression, and inequality that the women's movement theoretically aims to dismantle.
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Rebecca Traister |
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education pioneers including Horace Mann and the never-married Catharine Beecher "explicitly conceived of teaching as a job for spinsters," an occupation that could "ease the stigma of being unwed"27 and permit unmarried women to nurture young children and thus fulfill their domestic calling, even without offspring of their own."
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Rebecca Traister |
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To fight her, and her predecessor--another history-making challenge to white masculinity--the Republican Party had chosen a figure who embodied every one of the strains of denigration and disrespect that had historically worked to bar women and nonwhite men from the presidency and to deny them equal access to political power. It worked. He won.
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Rebecca Traister |
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The more distant" white women are "from the benefits of and investments in traditional heterosexual marriage, the less likely they are to support Republican presidential candidates," i.e., candidates of the party more likely to support traditional white heteropatriarchy. It has long been true that some of the most energetic opponents of women's political advancement have been . . . women. Back in the nineteenth century, anti-suffrage campai..
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Rebecca Traister |
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But not only did Trump seem to surge ahead in spite of his hatred and dismissal of nonwhite non-men, his supporters seemed to love him because of it. Even those who claimed he'd never be president credited him with reaching voters in a visceral way, as having a gift for channeling the rage of a white America which felt it had been left behind, had its privileges stolen by female, nonwhite interlopers--the kinds of people who'd never occupie..
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Rebecca Traister |
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When somebody manages to project a lot of strength and a lot of warmth, we say they're charismatic and magnetic, we want to be with that person, we want to be that person,' said Neffinger.
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magnetic
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Rebecca Traister |
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19363ea
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White patriarchal minority rule was established by America's founders when they encoded slavery into our founding documents and built our electoral apparatus around its protection. It was strengthened when they granted white men the franchise and violently guarded that exclusivity for almost a century, ensuring that it was only they who created and controlled the courts, the businesses, the economic systems, who wrote the legislation and cr..
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Rebecca Traister |
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53ca1d8
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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."
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Rebecca Traister |