Quotes from Rebecca Traister

In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent.

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.

There may be many benefits to working outside the home for wages, but it's certainly not been done as an act of liberation. It's an act of economic necessity and has been since the beginning of time.

In 2008, I started the election season as a critic of Hillary Clinton, a fan of Barack Obama, and a supporter of John Edwards. But by the end of Clinton's historic drive toward nomination, the gendered rhetoric used against her - as well as the way so many men in my own party diminished the value of electing a female president - had radicalized me.

Like everyone else, I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come with watching someone do something so badly. Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem, Sofia Coppola acting in 'The Godfather: Part III,' Sarah Palin talking about Russia - they all create the same level of eyeball-squinching discomfort.

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.

In 1947, the year Clinton was born, there were no women serving in the Senate.

There are a whole bunch of structural and systemic factors we need to address in order to move away from the model in which women really are still dependent on men.

We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood....After a long history during which living solo would get you labeled a pathetic spinster or, if you were lucky, a sexual iconoclast, being recognized as an independent person rather than as someone's daughter, wife, or mother is a new, shiny kind of liberty for women, one that has unlocked all sorts of doors.

Marriage has been a way of attempting to ensure the replication of power and wealth from one generation of another, passing it down from men to men.

Scores of African-Americans have written both appreciatively and critically about what 'The Cosby Show' meant to them over the years.

For inspiration, we still demand the rhetorical high notes. Clinton has hit them before, in her speech in Beijing as first lady when she said, 'Women's rights are human rights,' and in her 2008 concession speech, when she talked about the '18 million cracks' in the glass ceiling.

Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.

Single women will get us closer to gender equality, and that will take many forms, including a reimagining of what families entail and what it means to have a full female life. Also, their presence will force the government to support a population of independent women more capably.

Hillary Clinton must have been as aware as anyone that by entering the presidential race she was kicking off a long-awaited social experiment.

Though Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton 11 years after Camille Hanks married Bill Cosby, and after having earned her own law degree, the terms of her marriage were also shaped in their own way by a presumption of a husband's centrality and a wife's subsidiary nature.

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.

Our government and its social policies, its tax breaks, the way school days work, so much of the country we live in is built for married couples with a male breadwinner and a female domestic laborer. Government needs to be massively altered in order to serve this population.

Camille Hanks, whose upper-middle-class parents both had college degrees, was a student at the University of Maryland planning on a teaching career when she met Bill Cosby, who was seven years her senior.

It was impossible for Hillary Clinton to have chosen a path to the White House that bypassed the loathing, jeering derision and gendered stereotyping built on two centuries of male power. What was interesting was how hard she tried to do just that.

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.

White people loved 'The Cosby Show,' especially liberal white people. They loved it because it was a great, funny, well - written, and beautifully performed television show.

Bill Clinton had to propose to Hillary Rodham several times before she agreed to marry him and move to Arkansas.

Obama has proved to be particularly adept at using the media to disseminate his administration's messages, but he is a masterful orator. Bill Clinton, too.