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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the fears and challenges women faced regarding marriage in the nineteenth century.
Rebecca Traister highlights the apprehensions many women experienced about marriage during the nineteenth century. She emphasizes how the institution was often associated with a loss of autonomy, overwhelming responsibilities of motherhood, and the health risks involved, especially in an era without modern medical advancements. This perspective sheds light on a significant aspect of women's history and the struggle for independence.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about women's rights and historical perspectives on marriage.
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.
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.
I just think, as women, we have to give ourselves room to be individuals. So when a woman makes a decision for herself, we as women shouldn't set those hardcore boundaries for another woman. Just like we don't want men setting hardcore boundaries for us.
Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat.
It wasn't torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.
I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
...people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.
Watching him during the first several minutes of his delivery, Cecilia felt a pleasant sinking sensation in her stomach as she contemplated how deliciously self-destructive it would be, almost erotic, to be married to a man so nearly handsome, so hugely rich, so unfathomably stupid. He would fill her with his big-faced children, all of them loud, boneheaded boys with a passion for guns and football and aeroplanes.
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