All the Single Ladies Quotes

“I think some men love the idea of a strong independent woman but they don’t want to marry a strong independent woman,”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Always choose yourself first. Women are very socialized to choose other people. If you put yourself first, it’s this incredible path you can forge for yourself.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“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

“When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it's important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary. A true age of female selfishness, in which women recognized and prioritized their own drives to the same degree to which they have always been trained to tend to the needs of all others, might, in fact, be an enlightened corrective to centuries of self-sacrifice.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs. It was often at just the moment that their educations were complete and their childhood ambitions coming into focus that these troublesome, funny girls were suddenly contained, subsumed, and reduced by domesticity.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“I wound up happily married because I lived in an era in which I could be happily single.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“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

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

“By the time I walked down the aisle—or rather, into a judge’s chambers—I had lived fourteen independent years, early adult years that my mother had spent married. I had made friends and fallen out with friends, had moved in and out of apartments, had been hired, fired, promoted, and quit. I had had roommates I liked and roommates I didn’t like and I had lived on my own; I’d been on several forms of birth control and navigated a few serious medical questions; I’d paid my own bills and failed to pay my own bills; I’d fallen in love and fallen out of love and spent five consecutive years with nary a fling. I’d learned my way around new neighborhoods, felt scared and felt completely at home; I’d been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored. I was a grown-up: a reasonably complicated person. I’d become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself. I was not alone.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“But, mostly, I didn't pursue people I wasn't crazy about because I was busy doing things that I enjoyed more than being with men I wasn't crazy about.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“Here is the nexus of where work, gender, marriage, and money collide: Dependency.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“For young women, for the first time, it is as normal to be unmarried as it is to be married, even if it doesn't always feel that way.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“The solution, she advises, is, “when you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you look better.” Marital”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“As journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has sensibly observed, “human beings are pretty logical and generally savvy about identifying their interests. Despite what we’ve heard, women tend to be human beings and if they are less likely to marry today, it is probably that they have decided that marriage doesn’t advance their interests as much as it once did.”60”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“In the New World, “spinster” gained a more precise meaning: in colonial parlance, it indicated an unmarried woman over the age of twenty-three and under the age of twenty-six. At twenty-six, women without spouses became thornbacks, a reference to a sea-skate with sharp spines covering its back and tail. It was not a compliment”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“The fact is, being married to your job for some portion or all of your life, even if it does in some way inhibit romantic prospects, is not necessarily a terrible fate, provided that you are lucky enough to enjoy your work, or the money you earn at it, or the respect it garners you, or the people you do it with. Earning,”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Any time women do anything with their lives that is not in service to others, they are readily perceived as acting perversely. Historian”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“When we cast, as we so often do, the choice not to permanently partner as a failure or as a tragedy, we assume partnership as a norm to which everyone should or must aspire.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“It's not such a bad thing to always have something to do, someone to meet, work to complete, trains to catch, beers to drink, marathons to run, classes to attend. By the time some women find someone to whom they'd like to commit and who'd like to commit to them, perhaps it's not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“Nora Ephron explained in a 1996 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, about her own graduating class of 1962: “We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.” Both”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Marriage, historically, has been one of the best ways for men to assert, reproduce, and pass on their power, to retain their control.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Because, as historian Alice Kessler-Harris has observed, the possibility of land ownership created a path to existence outside of marriage, other colonies “began to recognize that giving land to women undermined their dependent role” and thus took measures to curtail the option.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“Loving without judgment or fear of abandonment is. . . . the toughest activity known to mankind and I think with best friend that can be even more pronounced because you aren’t my mom, we don’t have kids together—but we do have matching tattoos.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“For single women, with or without children, cities offer domestic infrastructure. The city itself becomes a kind of partner, providing for single women the kind of services that women have, for generations, provided men.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“I was a grown-up: A reasonably complicated person. I'd become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“Today’s free women, as Gloria Steinem might say, are reshaping the world once again, creating space for themselves and, in turn, for the independent women who will come after them. This is the epoch of the single women, made possible by the single women who preceded it.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“It is an invitation to wrestle with a whole new set of expectations about what female maturity entails, now that it is not shaped and defined by early marriage. In”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“The difficulty that some people have in believing that others might truly relish a life, or even a portion of life, disconnected from traditionally romantic or sexual partnership can merge with a resentment of those who do appear to take pleasure in cultivating their own happiness. As the number of unmarried people steadily rises, threatening the normative supremacy of nuclear family and early bonded hetero patterns, independent life may swiftly get cast as an exercise in selfishness.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“…women are not rejecting marriage. They like their...are delaying it until it is something they can be sure of, until they feel stable and self-assured enough to hitch themselves to someone else without fear of losing themselves or their power to marriage. Rich, middle class, and poor women, all share an interest in avoiding the dangerous pitfalls of dependency that made marriage such an inhibiting institution for decades. They all want to steer clear of the painful divorces that are the results of bad marriages. They view marriage as desirable is an in enhancement of life, not a ratifying requirement.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies

“Cities allow us to extract some of the transactional services that were assumed to be an integral, gendered aspect of traditional marriage and enjoy them as actual transactional service, for which we pay. This dynamic also permits women to function in the world in a way that was once impossible, with the city serving as spouse and, sometimes, true love.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies