"'Marriage Changes When You Don't Just Need A Warm Body and a Paycheck': A Talk With Rebecca Traister"

"We haven’t escaped the idea that marriage remains the organizing principle of female adult life. But, we are certainly complicating the idea, which means we have to account for the lingering pressure and stigma...

As sociologists put it, marriage is now a capstone event instead. It’s the thing you do when your life is in shape, when you have the right amount of money—and particularly in middle and lower-income communities, when you know you have the right partner, and in many cases, when you already have a kid. Marriage is popularly a sign that your life is in order, which contributes to this renewed positioning of marriage as aspirational...

in a way, the fullness of my life was a prophylactic against relationships that I probably shouldn’t have been in. When people came in who probably weren’t right for me, it was like, “Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t have time for you.” Then when somebody came in who was right for me, I was like, “Oh, I have all the time in the world.”...

Poor women, women of color, have been working outside the home for ages, out of necessity. When the behavior is adopted by privileged, predominantly white women, it’s like, “Oh, women in the workforce! It’s a feminist revolution!” It becomes legible as liberation, when it’s a behavior pioneered by women who are still regarded as victims because of it.

The same is true for not marrying. The contemporary wave of not marrying perhaps started in the post-war years when white middle-class women were being nudged, often by the government, out of the workforce and out of colleges where they’d gone at the beginning of the 20th century... At the same time, the way that domesticity was being built—the way these suburbs were physically constructed—was cutting off women of color from housing, job opportunities, transportation, education."

http://jezebel.com/marriage-changes-when-you-dont-just-need-a-warm-body-an-1762007106

FB: a super, super fascinating interview. "that difficulty points to the fact that we are really dealing with a significant reorganization of the nation. Our schools, our government, our schedules, our tax breaks, our housing policy—all of it was designed with one typical unit of citizenry, which is the married unit. (Interestingly, all these things accommodated single men. People may have looked at you askance, but the world made room for you. You could still earn.)

So what we need is very daunting: we need a top-to-bottom rethinking of how all of our structures are built, and around what."