Top 70 Rebecca Traister Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “The ability to feel the anger and convey it to others is itself the transformative experience for many women. Women’s anger spurs creativity and drives innovation in politics and social change, and it always has.”

— Rebecca Traister

4. “The other side of the anger is the hope. We wouldn’t be angry if we didn’t believe that it could be better.”

— Rebecca Traister

5. “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

6. “Amina Sow agrees. The advice she gives everyone is “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.” Amina too understood how she sounded as the words were coming out of her mouth. “If you choose yourself people will say you’re selfish,” she said. “But no. You have agency. You have dreams. It takes a lot to qualify a man as selfish.” Freakishness.”

— Rebecca Traister

7. “What becomes clear, when we look to the past with an eye to the future, is that the discouragement of women’s anger – via silencing, erasure, and repression – stems from the correct understanding of those in power that in the fury of women lies the power to change the world.”

— Rebecca Traister

8. “And in order for a new white wokeness to be integrated effectively into a contemporary movement, it must not take it over; there must be acknowledgment that white women are late to the party.”

— Rebecca Traister

9. “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

10. “Men literally have no idea how to even legitimately recognize or name our anger – largely because we don’t either. This is new territory for everybody. Women’s rage has been so sublimated for so long that there’s simply no frame for what happens when it finally comes to the surface. – Sara Robinson.”

— Rebecca Traister

11. “The women’s movement is a movement not of an oppressed minority, but of a subjugated majority. Majorities, by the very nature of their scale, are bound to include groups with varying – and warring – priorities and goals. By dint of size, a majority has the power over a minority – unless its foundations are eroded. The cheapest way to weaken and undermine a mass movement is to use its differences to divide it, and thus maintain power over it.”

— Rebecca Traister

12. “This book is about how anger works for men in ways that it does not for women, how men like both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can wage yelling campaigns and be credited with understanding – and compellingly channeling – the rage felt by their supporters while their female opponents can be jeered and mocked as shrill for speaking too loudly of forcefully into a microphone.”

— Rebecca Traister

13. “Until the worry sets in that you might not be able to undo your own attachment to independence and its attendant eccentricities.”

— Rebecca Traister

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “In the United States, we have never been taught how noncompliant, insistent, furious women have shaped our history and our present, our activism and our art. We should be.”

— Rebecca Traister

18. “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

19. “The fact that we can often only register the fury of white men as heroic is so established that it would verge on the comical if it weren’t so deeply tragic.”

— Rebecca Traister

20. “For women under thirty, the likelihood of being married had become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are wed,4 compared to the nearly 60 percent in 1960.”

— Rebecca Traister

21. “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

22. “The images on the covers of previous Little House books, drawn by Garth Williams in the editions I owned, had been of Laura in motion, front and center: gamboling down a hillside, riding a horse barefoot, having a snowball fight. Here she was, stationary and solidly shod, beside her husband; the baby she held in her arms was the most lively figure in the scene. Laura’s story was coming to a close. The tale that was worth telling about her was finished once she married.”

— Rebecca Traister

23. “The British feminist Laurie Penny tweeted in July 2017, “Most of the interesting women you know are far, far angrier than you’d imagine.”

— Rebecca Traister

24. “Some are sad to not yet have found mates, like Elliott Holt, a forty-year-old novelist who told me, ‘I guess I just had no idea, could never have predicted, how intense the loneliness would be at this juncture of my life.”

— Rebecca Traister

25. “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

26. “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

27. “Anyone who wants power within a white male power structure has been asked to quell anything that sounds like wrath, to reassure that they come in cooperative peace and are not looking to mete out repercussion against those who have oppressed or subjugated them.”

— Rebecca Traister

28. “Here is the nexus of where work, gender, marriage, and money collide: Dependency.”

— Rebecca Traister

29. “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

30. “Well, now those young women had gotten angry. And some older women were rearing back in horror at the force of their rage, and at the fact that a lot of that rage involved interrogating the whole system within which their feminist elders had risen. This moment was asking not just men but the pioneering women who’d succeeded alongside them to reckon with what had not been changed by feminism, how much gendered inequity older feminists had decided to live with, to participate in.”

— Rebecca Traister

31. “Some choices about remaining unmarried were made expressly to escape the unhappiness of an earlier generation of married women. “When you think of your mother as helpless, unable to choose her own life, you become determined to never become vulnerable.”

— Rebecca Traister

32. “We cannot afford to dismiss or fetishize or marginalize or rear back from women’s anger any longer if we want this moment to be transformative. We have to look at it straight, stop hemming and hawing around it or trying to disavow it or worrying that it might offend and discomfit. It must be and always has been at the heart of social progress.”

— Rebecca Traister

33. “One year after Donald Trump had faced no repercussion for having admitted to grabbing women nonconsensually, women appeared hell-bent on ensuring that other men would be forced – at long last – to accept some consequence.”

— Rebecca Traister

34. “The realization that a bad marriage might be bad enough to cause a painful split provided ammunition to those women who preferred to abstain from marriage than to enter a flawed one. What.”

— Rebecca Traister

35. “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. Better.”

— Rebecca Traister

36. “Gay marriage, inherently and ideally based on love and companionship, and not on gender-defined social and economic power, will be key to our ability to re-imagined straight marriage.”

— Rebecca Traister

37. “There is an assumption, put forth by everyone from greeting card companies to Bruce Springsteen, that nobody likes to be alone, least of all women. But many women, long valued in context to their relations to other people, find solitude- both the act of being alone and the attitude of being independent- a surprisingly sweet relief.”

— Rebecca Traister

38. “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

39. “Rose McGowan, one of Weinstein’s earliest and most vociferous accusers, recalled being asked “in a soft NPR voice, ‘What if what you’re saying makes men uncomfortable?’ Good. I’ve been uncomfortable my whole life. Welcome to our world of discomfort.”

— Rebecca Traister

40. “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

41. “Harriet Tubman: “I could have saved thousands – if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.”

— Rebecca Traister

42. “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

43. “Working-class and poor women are also living outside of marriage, at even higher rates than their more privileged peers. When it comes to unmarried women and money, the unprecedented economic opportunity enjoyed by a few is a small fraction of a far more complicated story.”

— Rebecca Traister

44. “Elizabeth Cady Stanton, nineteenth-century women’s rights reformer and married mother of seven, was wry about the tolls of home life; she joked in a letter after not having heard from Anthony for a while: “Where are you, Susan, and what are you doing? Your silence is truly appalling. Are you dead or married?”4 Common.”

— Rebecca Traister

45. “I think nineteenth-century women lucky, with their largely sucky marriages and segregation into a subjugated and repressed gender caste. They had it easier on this one front: They could maintain an allegiance to their female friends, because there was a much smaller change that their husband was going to play a competitively absorbing role in their emotional and intellectual lives.”

— Rebecca Traister

46. “The truer story is that even the most intense waves of backlash have rarely fully undone the progress made previously.”

— Rebecca Traister

47. “In figuring out how a woman might win within a system that had not been designed with her in mind, Clinton had set herself up to lose.”

— Rebecca Traister

48. “We have no good blueprint for how to integrate the contemporary intimacies of female friendship and of marriage into one life.”

— Rebecca Traister

49. “Men, including a former senator, told me of how shaken they were to hear from their wives and friends and mothers and coworkers about the ubiquity of sexual assault and harassment, how they had had their hair blown back by the anger they hadn’t even known had been pent up.”

— Rebecca Traister

50. “It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.”22.”

— Rebecca Traister