All the Strong, Independent Ladies

It should come as no surprise that women are taking control of their own destiny more than ever before: from having greater career ambitions to marrying later in life to traveling farther. I recently read All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister and share my favorite quotes from the book, below.

If we want to account for the growing numbers of unmarried people in the professional world, we must begin also to account for the fact that it is not just brides, grooms, and new parents who require the chance to catch their breath, to flourish, and to live full lives. (141)

I truly believe that women should be financially independent from their men. – Beyonce (153)

It is too rarely acknowledged that there are millions of ways that women leave marks on the world, and that having children is but one of them. (276)

I didn’t pursue people I wasn’t crazy about because I was busy doing other things that I enjoyed more than I enjoyed being with men I wasn’t crazy about…I wound up happily married because I lived in an era in which I could be happily single. (263)

We have to rebuild not just our internalized assumptions about individual freedoms and life paths; we also must revise our social and economic structures to account for, acknowledge, and support women in the same way in which we have supported men for centuries. (298)

Final note: All the Single Ladies is by no means a book only for women that intend to never marry. It also provides a glimpse into why women are marrying later in life, after they’ve achieved what success is to them, on their own. While not a ground breaking book with new information, the book does provide a nice compilation of many sources you’ve probably read on singleness and feminism — it is “a nuanced investigation into the sexual, economic, and emotional lives of women in America.”