Marriage has been a way of attempting to ensure the replication of power and wealth from one generation of another, passing it down from men to men.
— Rebecca Traister
Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.
In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent.
'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!
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.'
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.
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.
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.'
The vast majority of women who marry still take their husband's name. And I'm not vilifying that behavior! But that's a pattern where women are truly still taking on their husbands' identities.
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.
Being able to control your reproduction is essential to women's ability to flourish in the United States.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
Women are living independently, but we don't yet have the social and economic policies behind us to support that independence.
Up until 1920, women couldn't vote. Until 1974, married women couldn't get their own credit cards or, in some cases, their own loans. Basically, the husband's professional, social, and economic identity covered the individual identity of the wife.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are a whole bunch of structural and systemic factors we need to address in order to move away from the model in which women really are still dependent on men.
