More women than ever are having babies at the peak of their careers. When will we stop punishing them for it?
Interpretation
This quote highlights the struggle women face in balancing career success with motherhood, questioning societal judgments about their choices.
Rebecca Traister's quote points out a significant change in societal norms where more women are choosing to have children during their peak career years. It emphasizes the need to reevaluate the existing biases that often penalize women for pursuing both professional and personal aspirations, advocating for a more supportive environment that acknowledges the complexity of their choices without stigma.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a women's rights seminar discussing the evolving roles of women in society.
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.
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.
Being able to control your reproduction is essential to women's ability to flourish in the United States.
The gift economy represents a shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance and isolation to community.
If you're going to answer the call and you're going to transform and you're going to change, get ready. It is not a day at the beach.
We can almost recycle everything now. If we lived within our means, by being prudent, the 7 billion people in the world could have everything they needed. Global politics should be moving in that direction. But we think as people and countries, not as a species.
My hope is that the corona crisis will help bring us into a new age of cooperation and solidarity and a realization that we're in this together.
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
I believe the twenty-first century can become the most important century of human history. I think a new reality is emerging. Whether this view is realistic or not, there is no harm in making an effort.
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