|
15cdeb8
|
German scientist Carl Vogt wrote, in 1864, "The grown-up Negro partakes, as regards his intellectual faculties, of the nature of the child, the female, and the senile white."
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
3f1ddf0
|
with "voluntary sterility among married men and women of good life . . . If the best classes do not reproduce themselves the nation will of course go down." Roosevelt's distinctions were rooted in the readily expressed racism of his time and in animosity toward Japanese and Chinese immigrants on the West Coast, whose comparative fecundity seemed to threaten the whiteness of the nation. But they were also an expression of judgment against th..
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
b323b86
|
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."
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
f594b1e
|
The imagined connection between social agitation and an unmarried state was so firm that even married activists got tarred as single, frigid, or unmarriageable
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
85802c8
|
Electric street lamps had come to cities around the country, creating "white ways" that made it feel safer for women to be on the streets at night. This development changed the kinds of jobs women could work, as well as the ways in which they could spend money and leisure time."
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
7e7d4d4
|
In 1865, the governor of Massachusetts proposed the transport of some of the 38,000 "excess" women in his state to Oregon and California, where women were in short supply."
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
3ef5dc1
|
The divorce boom had a huge impact on never or not-yet married women. First, it created more single people, helping to slowly destigmatize the figure of the woman without a ring on her finger. It also forced a very public reckoning with marriage as an institution of variable quality. The realization that a bad marriage might be bad enough to cause a painful split provided ammunition to those women who preferred to abstain from marriage than..
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
b3ed221
|
The journey toward legal marriage for gays and lesbians may seem at odds with what looks like a flight from marriage by heterosexuals. But in fact, they are part of the same project: a dismantling of the institution as it once existed--as a rigidly patrolled means by which one sex could exert legal, economic, and sexual power over another--and a reimagining of it as a flexible union to be entered, ideally, on equal terms.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
49cc9ec
|
The impulse toward liberation isn't inoculated against by strict conservative backgrounds; it's often inculcated by them.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
4deb789
|
Whether those who worried were concerned about too many babies or too few babies, women living in poverty or women enjoying power, they all seemed to return to the same conclusion: Marriage must be reestablished as the norm, the marker and measure of female existence, against which all other categories of success are weighed.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
2f2f1a3
|
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 |
|
8a22008
|
At the turn of the nineteenth century, New Orleans saw an influx of refugees from Haiti, increasing the population of gens de couleur libre, or free blacks. Free women of color were permitted to inherit, own property, businesses, and slaves; it was not expected that they would marry.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
a74f59b
|
The ideas that undergirded Single Blessedness were that women unmarried by chance or by choice had their own acceptably submissive purpose. The "singly blessed" were presumed to be pious vessels whose commitment to service, undiluted by the needs of husbands or children, made them 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 e..
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
7000dc2
|
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. Women could vote in Wyoming, Utah, Washington, Montana, Colorado, Idaho, California, Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, and Alaska before 1920, while women in the more urban, established Eastern states (save for New York) had to wait ..
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
711b61a
|
By the end of the nineteenth century, the country was awash in fears of insurrection by increasingly independent populations of women and newly freed slaves.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
1fa1561
|
Responding to Susan B. Anthony's temperance work in 1853, the New York Sun published a screed noting that, "The quiet duties of daughter, wife or mother are not congenial to those hermaphrodite spirits who thirst to win the title of champion of one sex and victor over the other." The imagined connection between social agitation and an unmarried state was so firm that even married activists got tarred as single, frigid, or unmarriageable."
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
f35d187
|
The deplorable conditions experienced by millions of female workers were at the roots of the labor struggle, which would be spurred forward in large part by unconventionally wed, or unwed, women.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
95610e3
|
Russian-Polish immigrant and labor organizer and suffragist Rose Schneiderman, who would never marry. Her 1911 speech, in which she implored, "The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too" became the mantra of the 1912 Bread and Roses strike of female textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and an anthemic phrase in the labor and women's movements that were to come."
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
35d3482
|
By 1920, nearly 40 percent of black women worked for wages, compared to about 18 percent of white women; a 1919 study showed that the typical black laborer in New York City was young, unmarried, and had at least a grammar school education
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
805d8a1
|
Black women got stuck with the hottest, dirtiest and most unsafe jobs in factories, and as Giddings writes, "they were paid from 10 to 60 percent less than ill-paid White women."
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
1f77479
|
Settlement Houses were, in many cases, designed as sustainable places where single and divorced women might find community and a respectable life structure outside marriage; they were also a breeding ground for progressive economic policy.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
05f94c1
|
In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment; it was ratified by the states in 1920. For the first time in America's history, its female citizens could legally (if not practically, in the Jim Crow South) vote.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
e843bb9
|
Here was the idea of service and moral uplift brought into disruptive relief: What if women, in service to greater and moral good, did not submit themselves to a larger power structure, but instead organized to overturn it?
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
9633326
|
This presents another wrinkle. As one nurse wondered, in a marriage class attended by journalist Katherine Boo in "The Marriage Cure," her 2003 story on pro-marriage initiatives in Oklahoma, "How do you tell if he wants to marry you for the right reasons . . . ? When I wear my white uniform, guys around here know I'm working and chase me down the street to get their hands on my paycheck."59" --
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
0e06305
|
The message that an active sex life was not simply a new freedom but, in fact, an imperative, a form of validating the worth of young women, has been one of the more convoluted messages to emerge in the century since Balch objected to the notion that sex had been made to mean too much.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
1f9dc95
|
As Kimberle Crenshaw reported1 in 2014, the median wealth, defined as the total value of one's assets minus one's debts, of single black women is $100; for single Latina women it is $120; those figures are compared to $41,500 for single white women. And for married white couples? A startling $167,500.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
6adb26c
|
I've often suspected that, as well as being symptomatic of the persistence of unequal divisions of domestic labor and responsibilities, contemporary opting out is also a symptom of the midlife burnout after having lived decades on one's own in an increasingly work-centered culture.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
dc025f3
|
The consumerist cycle both depended on and strengthened capitalism, and thus worked to allay other postwar anxieties about nuclear attack and Communism, both of which had become linked to fears about the power of women's sexuality run amok.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
2da3eea
|
What was so disruptive about Steinem, and other women who were living like her, whether or not they had men on their arms, was that it seemed she just really enjoyed being free.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
221a8cd
|
For most Americans, work is the center of life, not because they yearn for it to be, but because it has to be. Beneath
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
54e713d
|
In 1993, Bill Clinton appointed Joycelyn Elders, an outspoken advocate of humane drug laws and abortion rights, as Surgeon General of the United States. The following year, at a United Nations conference on AIDS, Elders caused a scandal by voicing her support of teaching masturbation as part of sex education. It was a perfectly sane message, especially in the context of the AIDS epidemic. But so freighted was Elders's simple advocacy of ind..
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
0470f6e
|
When we meet other women who seem happier, more successful, and more confident than we are, it's all too easy to hate them for it...when you meet a women who is intimidating witty, stylish, beautiful, and professional accomplishment, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn't make you look worse by comparison. It makes you look better.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
8e93138
|
These characters might not have wed, but their lack of husbands constrained and defined them, just as surely as marriage would have. They
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
60abec8
|
Tar Baby's Jadine Childs, whose determination to flout gendered and racial expectations gets her cast out from her world,
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
0267ea1
|
Crucially, many of those radically single and late-married women were the ones who were able to devote their unmarried, nonmaternal lives to changing the nation's power structures in ways that might better support today's army of free women. In
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
82a4397
|
Single women foot more of their own bills, be they necessities like food and housing, or luxuries like cable and vacations; they pay for their own transportation. They do not enjoy the tax breaks or insurance benefits available to married couples. Sociologist Bella DePaulo has repeatedly pointed out that there are more than one thousand laws that benefit married people over single people.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
b87a343
|
Yes, many single women, across classes and races, would like to marry, or at least form loving, reciprocal, long-term partnerships, but have not found mates who want the same thing, or who can sustain it. Some are lonely. Many
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
0e6c0d0
|
Friedan also didn't consider the population of American women who were already altering marriage patterns,
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
57490de
|
Friedan did not include black women in her vision. Black
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
f53c9d1
|
Black women had in fact already made some of the very points for which Friedan was being hailed.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
21d5858
|
But there was no consideration that those single incomes were a result as much as a cause,
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
b915997
|
In a society that has built an enormously lavish wedding industry, and in which women are far more likely to forego marriage than ever before, it's awfully easy to see marriage as the elusive solution, the institution where loneliness is ameliorated and solutions to personal challenges can be found.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
d747ec1
|
the expectations of Republican Motherhood - in which women's obligations were the instilling of civic virtue in offspring and the moral maintenance of their husbands.
|
|
women-s-rights
women-writers
|
Rebecca Traister |
|
5fcf0ed
|
Women, perhaps especially those who have lived untethered from the energy-sucking and identity-sapping institution of marriage in its older forms, have helped to drive social progress of this country since its founding.
|
|
|
Rebecca Traister |