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" Since the late 19th century, the median age of first marriage for women had fluctuated between 20 and 22. This had been the shape, pattern and definition of female life. "

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" I wasn't remotely ambivalent about marrying the person I was marrying, but I was 35. I was deep into my adulthood, and I identified as single. "

Rebecca Traister

Deep

Person

Single

" When lawmakers start to make laws that hurt single women, often the women that they're hurting the most are not the economically powerful ones. They're not Sandra Fluke. They're not Lena Dunham, who conservatives hate more than anybody. They're hurting low-earning single mothers. "

Rebecca Traister

Hurt

Women

" One of the favorite conservative themes is that the cure for poverty is more marriage and earlier marriage. We hear that all the time; there have been billions of dollars now, between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, which has continued the marriage education program, on trying to get more people to get married. "

" Being able to control your reproduction is essential to women's ability to flourish in the United States. "

" By the time Clinton graduated from Yale Law School, many people, including her boyfriend Bill, believed she could, and should, embark on a political career. She'd given the Wellesley commencement speech that had earned her a 'Life' write-up of her own. "

" I'd spent my whole adult life considering myself an independent entity, my life filled by work and friends and family. Suddenly I had a male partner, someone I woke up with and went to sleep with every night. "

" It's a controversial issue: many feminists reasonably worry that by taking the concentration off gender as an independent locus of oppression, we dilute the strength of a women's movement, or of women's rights advocacy. "

" In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent. "

" I think that technology - computers and smart phones and 24-hour availability - often leaves me, and others I know, feeling blank and depressed at the end of a day. I also believe that hyped expectations for raising children leaves many women and men feeling as if their days are a blur of carpools and play-groups and tutors. "

" One of the things that gets confused often is the difference between marriage and good marriage. Marriage is a theoretical concept of the institution, and 'you should be married,' is actually meaningless. Marriage is pretty meaningless without the notion of having a specific person to whom you are married. "

" In the nineteenth century, in part because a ton of American men moved west, in part because of the Civil War, and in part because of trepidation about marriage, which was then a very confining institution, there was a big population of women - mostly middle-class white women on the East Coast - who didn't marry. "

" It's important to remember that, while poverty certainly makes single life harder, it also makes married life harder - so much harder that single life might be preferable. "

" Our government and its social policies, its tax breaks, the way school days work, so much of the country we live in is built for married couples with a male breadwinner and a female domestic laborer. Government needs to be massively altered in order to serve this population. "

" Like everyone else, I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come with watching someone do something so badly. Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem, Sofia Coppola acting in 'The Godfather: Part III,' Sarah Palin talking about Russia - they all create the same level of eyeball-squinching discomfort. "

" I had thought a lot about unmarried life during my years as an unmarried woman - which was all during my 20s and into my 30s. I was someone who didn't have a ton of relationships as a single person - and so I had a sharp identification with singlehood. "

" 'Living Single' was on in early 1990s - the show about Queen Latifah living with a bunch of friends. And then there's 'Friends,' and that's called the groundbreaking show about unmarried adults living in New York! "

" There is a kind of woman who is economically powerful, professionally powerful, who threatens a white male grip on power that has a long historic precedent in the country. Independent women living outside of marriage threaten all kinds of things about the way power is supposed to work. "

" When I say, 'The choice to not marry,' that doesn't always translate into, 'I am a woman, and I am deciding that I am not going to get married,' or 'I am rejecting marriage.' "

" All the epic allusions contribute to the difficulty Clinton has long had in coming across as, simply, a human being. She is uneasy with the press and ungainly on the stump. Catching a glimpse of the 'real' her often entails spying something out of the corner of your eye, in a moment when she's not trying to be, or to sell, 'Hillary Clinton.' "

" Women are living independently, but we don't yet have the social and economic policies behind us to support that independence. "

Rebecca Traister

Support

Independence

" 'Marriage' was not that big a deal, to be honest! I mean, it makes life easier for technical reasons: insurance, next-of-kin stuff, joint tax filing, etc. The real shocker was falling in love with the man I'm married to. I was 32 when we met, and I had really never been in a functional relationship before, had never been deeply in love. "

" Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation. "

" Throughout America's history, the start of adult life for women - whatever else it might have been destined to include - had been typically marked by marriage. "

" In some ways, privileged women who are closer to power wind up being able to exert their influence in ways that change public policy in ways that women with less power don't have access to. "