Up until 1920, women couldn't vote. Until 1974, married women couldn't get their own credit cards or, in some cases, their own loans. Basically, the husband's professional, social, and economic identity covered the individual identity of the wife.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the historical oppression of women and the gradual changes in their social and economic rights.
Rebecca Traister's quote emphasizes the significant transformations in women's rights over the decades, illustrating how women were historically denied basic rights such as voting and financial autonomy. It showcases the societal structures that often relegated women's identities to that of their husbands, underlining the importance of recognizing and addressing these inequities to foster true gender equality.
In practice
This quote can be used in a women's rights rally to emphasize the importance of continuing the fight for equality.
There is a kind of woman who is economically powerful, professionally powerful, who threatens a white male grip on power that has a long historic precedent in the country. Independent women living outside of marriage threaten all kinds of things about the way power is supposed to work.
There are all kinds of ways in which women, together, change the world. And I don't mean that in a cheesy way. I'm not somebody who believes all women should support each other. I believe very strongly in women critiquing each other, just not critiquing each other more intensely because they're women.
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.
More women than ever are having babies at the peak of their careers. When will we stop punishing them for it?
Being able to control your reproduction is essential to women's ability to flourish in the United States.
You can't expect to go about change - especially change of this nature, when you talk about racial equality and justice - you can't expect to go about or engage in that without resistance, and so you're going to have some people who aren't on board.
Sometimes there's just no way to hold back the river.
Our goal is to have a country that's not divided by race.
Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
The goal in the end is not to win elections. The goal is to change society.
One always has to know when a stage comes to an end. If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through. Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters – whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.
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