Rebecca Traister

“The diminishment of southern contests is the kind of veiled racist rhetoric that Bill Clinton deployed memorably in South Carolina in 2008, and which does not look any more attractive on Bernie - the guy whose campaign is centered on the premise that he plays cleaner and more progressive politics than his opponents.”

“In 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 64 percent of mothers with children under six worked.”

“O'rourke's alienation from the married woman comes in part because she's filling in the imaginative blank of that woman's union with a fantasy of fulfillment. If loneliness is a want of intimacy, then being single lends itself to loneliness because the loving partnerships we imagine in comparison are always, in our minds, intimate; they are not distant or empty of abusive or dysfunctional. We don't fantasize about being in bad marriages, or about being in what were once good marriages that have since gone stale or sexless or hard, creating their own profound emotional pain.”

“After Emancipation, black women married earlier and more often because they were legally free to do so for the first time, and that was true until after World War II. But middle-class white women married less and later.”

“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.”

“Roseanne was a huge groundbreaking comedian. Margaret Cho. Ellen DeGeneres, and then on 'Saturday Night Live,' the era of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler sort of helped to bring in an awareness of a new generation of women comedians, often women who were feminist in their comedy, who were unafraid - and this came from the genre of show that was emerging.”

“Yes, there have been women in comedy. Moms Mabley was one of the earliest. She was an African American comedian; she often dressed up as an older, disheveled woman.”

“Women's roles in the movies remain, for the most part, girlfriends, mothers, wives.”

“As the second decade of the twenty-first century has worn on, politicians of all stripes, aware of the political power of the unmarried woman yet seemingly incapable of understanding female life outside of a marital context, have come to rely on a metaphor in which American women, no longer bound to men, are binding themselves to government.”

“The lack of marriage is being blamed for almost every social ill - whether it's gun violence, whether it's poverty, whether it's the dropping birth rate.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions –– its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage –– that has allowed marriage to evolve, to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.”

“Plenty of the women who were single in the nineteenth century wrote about their desire to evade marriage. Marriage was scary in a lot of ways. It often involved having a lot of kids, losing your autonomy, being in service to a husband and children who were often born at an unremitting pace without the benefit of modern medicine.”

“'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.”

“There is not a special place in Hell for people who didn't support Sarah Palin. Do you know what I mean? It's ridiculous. And there is certainly not a special place in Hell for women who don't support Hillary Clinton.”

“By demanding more from men and from marriage, it's single women who have perhaps played as large a part as anyone in saving marriage in America.”

“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.”

“In 1965, Cosby had become the first black man ever to star in a prime-time television show; he was conscious enough of his non-dissolved, traditional nuclear family that he made it the foundation of his public persona, his comedy act, and eventually of his blockbuster sitcom.”