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.
Interpretation
Women can have a significant impact on the world through collaboration, with a focus on constructive critique rather than blind support.
In this quote, Rebecca Traister emphasizes the various ways women collectively influence the world. She argues that support among women is important, but she does not advocate for uncritical support; instead, she values constructive critique that fosters growth and improvement. This approach encourages accountability while fostering a strong community, highlighting the nuanced dynamics of female relationships in the pursuit of social change.
In practice
During a women's empowerment seminar, this quote can be used to highlight the importance of constructive criticism among women.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
The surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities is not more police and prisons, but ecologically sounds economic development. And that same path can lift us to a new, green economy - one with the power to lift people out of poverty while respecting and repairing the environment.
In too many instances, the march to globalization has also meant the marginalization of women and girls. And that must change.
In the end, it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
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