All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation QUOTES

1 " This would be the last moment of the primary during which I felt as though I inhabited a different planet than everyone else in my party, that I had heard a different speech, seen a different person, been in a different room than everyone else. But I can't say that I was unhappy that they had heard what they did. If they thought Hillary was telling them to fuck off, that was okay with me. For just one last day, before I joined their ranks, I wanted them to fuck off too. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

2 " O'rourke's alienation from the married woman comes in part because she's filling in the imaginative blank of that woman's union with a fantasy of fulfillment. If loneliness is a want of intimacy, then being single lends itself to loneliness because the loving partnerships we imagine in comparison are always, in our minds, intimate; they are not distant or empty of abusive or dysfunctional. We don't fantasize about being in bad marriages, or about being in what were once good marriages that have since gone stale or sexless or hard, creating their own profound emotional pain. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

3 " In part, that's because when we delay marriage, it's not just women who become independent. It's also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

4 " 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. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

5 " In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection. In fact, it's high time that more people acknowledged the electric pull that women can feel for their profession, the exciting heat of ambition and frisson of success. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

6 " 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 bodies work. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

7 " 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 hardwired assumptions that the successful female life is measured not in professional achievements or friendships or even satisfying sexual relationships, but by whether you’re legally coupled. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

8 " 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. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

9 " 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. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

10 " Between 1934 and 1962, the government subsidized $120 billion in new housing; 98 percent of it for white families. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

11 " Cities have long provided safer harbor for, and have in turn been shaped by, single women. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

12 " One year later, the court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion was legal. The decision affected married and single women equally. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

13 " 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’m too aggressive, and nobody will ever vote for me.” She moved to Arkansas and married him, working as a lawyer, law professor, and for the Children’s Defense Fund. She didn’t put the gas on her own political career until after her husband left the White House and their daughter was in college. Today, "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

14 " 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. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

15 " 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 solo-dwellers climbs to around 50 percent.2 "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

16 " 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 early heterosexual marriage and motherhood. There are now an infinite number of alternate routes open; they wind around combinations of love, sex, partnership, parenthood, work, and friendship, at different speeds. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

17 " 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. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

18 " 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. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

19 " 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. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

20 " 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. "

― Rebecca Traister , All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation