Big Girls Don't Cry Quotes

“What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“By 1996 Nora Ephron was telling a graduating class at Wellesley, “Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back.… Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“Harriet Tubman: “I could have saved thousands—if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“As we gather here today,” Clinton said, “the fiftieth woman to leave this Earth is orbiting overhead. If we can blast fifty women into space, we will someday launch a woman into the White House.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“I know there still are barriers and biases out there, often unconscious,” she finally said, and the room roared in relief and affirmation. “You can be so proud that, from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories, unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States.” She paused. People screamed. “And that is truly remarkable.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“Anyone who lived through the 1960s should have known that the younger generation wins.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“Clinton was the first candidate for the job of first lady to have a life that reflected post-second-wave America and the many working women who made their careers and raised their families here.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“Michelle—darker skinned than her husband, descended like most African Americans from slaves, raised in a black neighborhood—was a reminder of all that was different and possibly scary about Barack. Melissa Harris-Lacewell told me in 2009, “Michelle is a representation of Barack Obama’s choice to aggressively move toward blackness.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“You want women around to reflect their experiences and see a female candidate through their particular prism.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“For young women and men who had never seen blatant misogyny before, who had never heard a woman called a “cunt” or seen the size of a senator’s thighs referred to on a T-shirt, these in-your-face examples of gender-based resistance to Hillary were eye-opening.”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women

“Yesterday, a beautiful day… I was talking to [an older] woman who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she’s afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don’t have time for it. Not now. HILLARY RODHAM, Wellesley commencement speech, 1969”
― Rebecca Traister, Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women