Quote of the Day

What criteria do we apply to properly designate the nature of "real" partnership?  Do two people have to have regular sexual contact and be driven by physical desire in order to rate as a couple?  Must they bring each other regular mutual sexual satisfaction?  Are they faithful to each other?  By those measures, many heterosexual marriages wouldn't qualify.  

-- Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies, p. 108

Quote of the Day

Suffragists had often staged political "pageants" in which they wore sashes emblazoned "Votes for Women."  But 1921, the year following the ratification of the 19th Amendment, brought a perversion of this display: the debut of the Miss America pageant, in which unmarried women showed off their decidedly apolitical attributes in competition against, as opposed to collaboration with, each other.

-- Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies, p. 62

Quote of the Day

Over a century in which women had exercised increasing independence, living more singly in the world than ever before, the movements that independent women had helped to power had resulted in the passage of the 14th, 15th, 18th and 19th Amendments to the Constitution.  They had reshaped the nation.

-- Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies, p. 58

Quote of the Day

The social crusades of the nineteenth century were made possible by the changing nature of female engagement with the world and new ideas about identity and dependence.

-- Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies, p. 51

Quote of the Day

There may be no greater testament to the suffocating power of marital expectation than the fact that, for a time, the banning of booze seemed a more practical recourse against spousal abuse than the reform of marriage law or redress of inequities within the home.

-- Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies, p. 49

Quote of the Day

The intensity of the resistance to these [single] women is rooted in the (perhaps unconscious) comprehension that their expanded power signals a social and political rupture as profound as the invention of birth control, as the sexual revolution, as the abolition of slavery, as women's suffrage and the feminist, civil rights, gay rights, and labor movements.

-- Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies, p. 36

Quote of the Day

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, All the Single Ladies, p. 30

Meeting Rebecca Traister

I had the pleasure of hearing New York Times best-selling author Rebecca Traister speak last night about her important book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation at the Herrick District Library.  Additionally, on Feb. 1, I was fortunate to be able to hear poet Lauren Haldeman and poet/memoirist Randall Horton read at Hope College, as a part of the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series.