" What is marriage anymore, anyway? How is the institution structured? What assumptions do we bring to it? Is it an irreducible economic unit, in which production and labor remain distributed along traditional lines (the model of husband as protector and breadwinner and wife as 'angel in the house,' domestic goddess, and nurturer)? Or is it a spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and social partnership - a lifelong collaboration, a project, a constant becoming? Is it what patriarchal society said it is, or what Hollywood pretended it was? What does it mean to be a modern woman? Where does a woman's 'modern-ness' reside? In what she looks like, how she acts, what she does, wears, or says? Or is it somewhere else entirely outside of her, in a larger system that allows her to be a whole, free person? that represents her as such? that allows her to represent herself? that recognizes her individuality and subjectivity? Is it about things like voting and birth control, the issues that Katharine Hepburn's mother devoted her life to fighting for? Is it about wearing pants, not aiming to please, sleeping around, and not getting married, like Katharine Hepburn did? Is it about smoking Virginia Slims? Is it not perhaps all and none of these things but the fact that we keep having to make a case for our personhood? Is it not the story that needs to be reframed? the heroine who needs to be allowed to create herself, from scratch? "

― Carina Chocano , You Play the Girl: And Other Vexing Stories That Tell Women Who They Are