Zitat des Tages von Rebecca Traister:
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.
The contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders offered such a bright and bracing contrast to all those professional wrestlers emerging from the RNC's clown car.
Look at somebody like Margaret Sanger, who was married young and had kids but then left her husband and wound up living a kind of single life as she got into the founding of what would become Planned Parenthood.
'The Cosby Show' was a show about black people that was fundamentally and unequivocally friendly to whiteness and to white people. The Huxtables had white friends.
During childbearing years, changing jobs - even for a fundamentally better gig - can be a very bad idea. Those prime childbearing years - mid-twenties to early forties - overlap precisely with prime professional years. This is when employees are most attractive to new employers, when they should be able to zip up ladders with the most alacrity.
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.
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.
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.
The lack of marriage is being blamed for almost every social ill - whether it's gun violence, whether it's poverty, whether it's the dropping birth rate.
In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent.
Changing professional expectations and technological tools have created an impossibility of balancing work and life.
When lawmakers start to make laws that hurt single women, often the women that they're hurting the most are not the economically powerful ones. They're not Sandra Fluke. They're not Lena Dunham, who conservatives hate more than anybody. They're hurting low-earning single mothers.
I'd spent my whole adult life considering myself an independent entity, my life filled by work and friends and family. Suddenly I had a male partner, someone I woke up with and went to sleep with every night.
In 220 years of American presidential politics, there had been no serious female major party contenders, though women had been campaigning for the presidency since before they could vote, starting with Victoria Woodhull in 1872 and Belva Lockwood in 1884.
By the time Clinton graduated from Yale Law School, many people, including her boyfriend Bill, believed she could, and should, embark on a political career. She'd given the Wellesley commencement speech that had earned her a 'Life' write-up of her own.
In some ways, privileged women who are closer to power wind up being able to exert their influence in ways that change public policy in ways that women with less power don't have access to.
In 1947, the year Clinton was born, there were no women serving in the Senate.
There are all kinds of ways in which especially white men in this country have been helped by the government.
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.
The vast majority of women who marry still take their husband's name. And I'm not vilifying that behavior! But that's a pattern where women are truly still taking on their husbands' identities.
One of the things that gets confused often is the difference between marriage and good marriage. Marriage is a theoretical concept of the institution, and 'you should be married,' is actually meaningless. Marriage is pretty meaningless without the notion of having a specific person to whom you are married.
It's a controversial issue: many feminists reasonably worry that by taking the concentration off gender as an independent locus of oppression, we dilute the strength of a women's movement, or of women's rights advocacy.
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.
'Living Single' was on in early 1990s - the show about Queen Latifah living with a bunch of friends. And then there's 'Friends,' and that's called the groundbreaking show about unmarried adults living in New York!
Blogs with feminist content, from 'Feministing' and 'Jezebel' to 'Racialicious' and 'Shakesville' and 'Feministe,' have opened up and changed the scope of the feminist universe for women who might never have encountered contemporary feminism.
Throughout America's history, the start of adult life for women - whatever else it might have been destined to include - had been typically marked by marriage.
Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.
Women are living independently, but we don't yet have the social and economic policies behind us to support that independence.
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.
I think that technology - computers and smart phones and 24-hour availability - often leaves me, and others I know, feeling blank and depressed at the end of a day. I also believe that hyped expectations for raising children leaves many women and men feeling as if their days are a blur of carpools and play-groups and tutors.
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.
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.
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.
Bill Clinton had to propose to Hillary Rodham several times before she agreed to marry him and move to Arkansas.
