Independent Lady Quotes

I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.

It is better to be looked over than overlooked.

All I'm telling you to do is to be smart about it. Know that if this man isn't looking for a serious relationship, you're not going to change his mind just because you two are going on dates and being intimate. You could be the most perfect woman on the Lord's green earth-you're capable of interesting conversation, you cook a mean breakfast, you hand out backrubs like sandwiches, you're independent (which means, to him, that you're not going to be in his pockets)-but if he's not ready for a serious relationship, he going to treat you like sports fish.

My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent

There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil -- improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?" "Are you a young lady?" "I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated.

I'm independent and strong, but sometimes...just sometimes, it's nice to be taken case of. It's nice to be made to feel like a lady

I think some men love the idea of a strong independent woman but they don’t want to marry a strong independent woman,

Always choose yourself first. Women are very socialized to choose other people. If you put yourself first, it’s this incredible path you can forge for yourself.

I wound up happily married because I lived in an era in which I could be happily single.

It would be so much easier if I did not want to know everything so badly. If I did not want so badly to be reliant upon no soul by myself.

In part, that's because when we delay marriage, it's not just women who become independent. It's also men, who, like women, learn to clothe and feed themselves, to clean their homes iron their shirts and pack their own suitcases.

My mother was very strong about my doing well in school and living up to my potential. Two things were important to her and she repeated them endlessly. One was to ‘be a lady,’ and that meant conduct yourself civilly, don’t let emotions like anger or envy get in your way. And the other was to be independent, which was an unusual message for mothers of that time to be giving their daughters.

In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection. In fact, it's high time that more people acknowledged the electric pull that women can feel for their profession, the exciting heat of ambition and frisson of success.

But, mostly, I didn't pursue people I wasn't crazy about because I was busy doing things that I enjoyed more than being with men I wasn't crazy about.

Fashion sighs after trends. I want timeless elegance. Fashion has no time. I do. I say: Hello Lady, how can I help you? Fashion has no time to even ask such a question, because it is constantly concerned with finding out: What will come next? It is more about helping women to suffer less, to attain more freedom and independence.

You could be the most perfect woman on the Lord’s green earth—you’re capable of interesting conversation, you cook a mean breakfast, you hand out backrubs like sandwiches, you’re independent (which means, to him, that you’re not going to be in his pockets)—but if he’s not ready for a serious relationship, he’s going to treat you like a sports fish.

The Lady Amalthea beckoned, and the cat wriggled all over, like a dog, but he would not come near... She was offering her open palm to the crook-eared cat, but he stayed where he was, shivering with the desire to go to her"...[later, Molly asked the cat] "Why were you afraid to let her touch you? I saw you. You were afraid of her." "If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me but I could not let her. No cat will... The price is more than a cat can pay.

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs. It was often at just the moment that their educations were complete and their childhood ambitions coming into focus that these troublesome, funny girls were suddenly contained, subsumed, and reduced by domesticity.

Here is the nexus of where work, gender, marriage, and money collide: Dependency.

Well, we never expected this!" they all say. "No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous, and scornful. But when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether!" How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am.

For young women, for the first time, it is as normal to be unmarried as it is to be married, even if it doesn't always feel that way.

When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it's important to remember that the very acknowledgement that women have selves that exist independently of others, and especially independent of husbands and children, is revolutionary. A true age of female selfishness, in which women recognized and prioritized their own drives to the same degree to which they have always been trained to tend to the needs of all others, might, in fact, be an enlightened corrective to centuries of self-sacrifice.

When a woman is independent, that’s also a huge issue. I have noticed that an independent woman is spoken down to because she is fearless, free, and she would rather walk alone because she knows her worth. Ladies, there is nothing wrong with that!

When we cast, as we so often do, the choice not to permanently partner as a failure or as a tragedy, we assume partnership as a norm to which everyone should or must aspire.

No matter what the bards may say, there’s no romance in dying for a man.

Be independent and be a lady.

She is that maze, the one you would love to chase. She is the faith, quite missing nowadays. And her heart is a rave, with hopeless barricades. She is the one, whose tears flow, just as lavishly, as her laughter roars!

She wasn't kind of lady that depended on a man and I think that's what made her so irrestible to them, any man she had loved she wanted ~ and the men that loved her back couldn't handle not being needed, so she showed them the door and grew her own wings as they walked out. Love to her isn't a maybe thing, nor is it attachment and any man whom thinks he will ever own her would be best not to try at all.

The solution, she advises, is, “when you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you look better.” Marital

Any time women do anything with their lives that is not in service to others, they are readily perceived as acting perversely. Historian

To be clear, the vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom. The revolution is in the expansion of options, the lifting of the imperative that for centuries hustled nearly all (non-enslaved) women, regardless of their individual desires, ambitions, circumstances, or the quality of available matches, down a single highway toward early heterosexual marriage and motherhood.

Loving without judgment or fear of abandonment is. . . . the toughest activity known to mankind and I think with best friend that can be even more pronounced because you aren’t my mom, we don’t have kids together—but we do have matching tattoos.

Marriage, historically, has been one of the best ways for men to assert, reproduce, and pass on their power, to retain their control.

It is an invitation to wrestle with a whole new set of expectations about what female maturity entails, now that it is not shaped and defined by early marriage. In

I was a grown-up: A reasonably complicated person. I'd become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself.

There's a difference between compromising your independence and compromising yourself. Love's about giving up a little dependence, darling. But that doesn't mean you have to stop being you.

The fact is, being married to your job for some portion or all of your life, even if it does in some way inhibit romantic prospects, is not necessarily a terrible fate, provided that you are lucky enough to enjoy your work, or the money you earn at it, or the respect it garners you, or the people you do it with. Earning,

In the New World, “spinster” gained a more precise meaning: in colonial parlance, it indicated an unmarried woman over the age of twenty-three and under the age of twenty-six. At twenty-six, women without spouses became thornbacks, a reference to a sea-skate with sharp spines covering its back and tail. It was not a compliment

Before independence, these objects had signified my ladies’ admiration for the British. Now, they signified their scorn. My ladies had changed nothing but the reasons for their pretense. If I had learned anything from them, it was this: only a fool lives in water and remains an enemy of the crocodile.

As journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has sensibly observed, “human beings are pretty logical and generally savvy about identifying their interests. Despite what we’ve heard, women tend to be human beings and if they are less likely to marry today, it is probably that they have decided that marriage doesn’t advance their interests as much as it once did.”60

For single women, with or without children, cities offer domestic infrastructure. The city itself becomes a kind of partner, providing for single women the kind of services that women have, for generations, provided men.

You can't put a leash on me. I'm unleashable!

She wasn't the kind of lady that depended on a man and I think that's what made her so irrestible to them, any man she had loved; she wanted ~ and the men that loved her back couldn't handle not being needed, so she showed them the door and grew her own wings as they walked out. Love to her isn't a maybe thing, nor is it attachment and any man whom thinks he will ever own her would be best not to try at all.

Because, as historian Alice Kessler-Harris has observed, the possibility of land ownership created a path to existence outside of marriage, other colonies “began to recognize that giving land to women undermined their dependent role” and thus took measures to curtail the option.

Nora Ephron explained in a 1996 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, about her own graduating class of 1962: “We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.” Both

Today’s free women, as Gloria Steinem might say, are reshaping the world once again, creating space for themselves and, in turn, for the independent women who will come after them. This is the epoch of the single women, made possible by the single women who preceded it.

It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.”22

We have no good blueprint for how to integrate the contemporary intimacies of female friendship and of marriage into one life.

Historically, women have pushed each other into, and supported each other within, intellectual and public realms to which men rarely extended invitations, let alone any promise of equality.

By the time I walked down the aisle—or rather, into a judge’s chambers—I had lived fourteen independent years, early adult years that my mother had spent married. I had made friends and fallen out with friends, had moved in and out of apartments, had been hired, fired, promoted, and quit. I had had roommates I liked and roommates I didn’t like and I had lived on my own; I’d been on several forms of birth control and navigated a few serious medical questions; I’d paid my own bills and failed to pay my own bills; I’d fallen in love and fallen out of love and spent five consecutive years with nary a fling. I’d learned my way around new neighborhoods, felt scared and felt completely at home; I’d been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored. I was a grown-up: a reasonably complicated person. I’d become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself. I was not alone.

It's not such a bad thing to always have something to do, someone to meet, work to complete, trains to catch, beers to drink, marathons to run, classes to attend. By the time some women find someone to whom they'd like to commit and who'd like to commit to them, perhaps it's not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night.

The difficulty that some people have in believing that others might truly relish a life, or even a portion of life, disconnected from traditionally romantic or sexual partnership can merge with a resentment of those who do appear to take pleasure in cultivating their own happiness. As the number of unmarried people steadily rises, threatening the normative supremacy of nuclear family and early bonded hetero patterns, independent life may swiftly get cast as an exercise in selfishness.

On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension. . . Mr. Joyce has a word to say to you on the subject: “Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as harmful; etc.” And another: “Who in his hearts doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the orther? Or that both may be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up in turn and considered apart from the other?” Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.

It is true that when single, I swiftly chased off any men whose threatened disruption of my Saturday mornings, which I set aside for breakfast on my own and a ridiculous apartment-cleaning ritual that involved dancing, I found too irritating to bear.

Mother Atkinson thought that every one should have a trade, or something to make a living out of , for rich people may grow poor, you know, and poor people have to work.... so when I saw how happy and independent those young ladies were, I wanted to have a trade, and then it wouldn't matter about money, though I like to have it well enough.

Until the worry sets in that you might not be able to undo your own attachment to independence and its attendant eccentricities.

The truer story is that even the most intense waves of backlash have rarely fully undone the progress made previously.

She likes to do everything for herself and has no belief in any one's power to help her.

The realization that a bad marriage might be bad enough to cause a painful split provided ammunition to those women who preferred to abstain from marriage than to enter a flawed one. What

The Trumans usually celebrated Thanksgiving in the White House, but they spent most Christmases in Independence, quietly, with their families. And every year they instructed the kitchen help to prepare two full Christmas meals to go to two needy families in the District of Columbia—and to tell nobody.

As Kimberlé Crenshaw reported1 in 2014, the median wealth, defined as the total value of one’s assets minus one’s debts, of single black women is $100; for single Latina women it is $120; those figures are compared to $41,500 for single white women. And for married white couples? A startling $167,500.2

The lowest of the low-poverty countries manage to get along in the world with similar levels of single mother parenting just fine. . . . We plunge more than 1 in 5 of our nation’s children into poverty because we choose to.

Don't pretend you don't like it when I treat you as a lady.” “Maybe I don't.” Despite that, he still opened the car door for me, with his lips curving up into a careless grin. “Girls always do that,” he said, “—pretend they think you're taking their independence from them if you open a door. But that's not the case.” “Well, what is the case?” I sat down on the front seat—leaving my feet on the driveway. “Simply that we're demonstrating good-breeding; showing the girl we're worthy and capable of taking care of her—that we're polite, considerate and nurturing.” I folded my arms. “Women don't need nurturing—or to be taken care of. We can fend for ourselves. We're equal to men, you know.

Mrs Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, published in 1841, which proved to be magnificently timely. It was the first book of any type ever to encourage women of elevated classes to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration. This was novel almost to the point of eroticism. Gardening for Ladies bravely insisted that women could manage gardening independent of male supervision if they simply observed a few sensible precautions – working steadily but not too vigorously, using only light tools, never standing on damp ground because of the unhealthful emanations that would rise up through their skirts.

Scotland can exist fully if we dream hard enough, Julie. I just can’t relate to that Scottish deep-fried-chip-on-the-shoulder. Trainspotting was wrong: it feels fucking great being Scottish. We’re becoming something, Julie. I can feel it. We’re getting dressed up.

In later years, Paul would draft the Equal Rights Amendment, which read, simply, "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction;", it would be introduced to every Congressional session from 1923 until 1972, when it finally passed but was not ratified by the states. (It has been reintroduced, though never passed, in every session since 1982).

The more highly a man is developed on the intellectual and moral side, the more independent he is, the more pleasure life gives him. Socrates, Diogenes, and Marcus Aurelius, were joyful, not sorrowful. And the Apostle tells us: 'Rejoice continually'; 'Rejoice and be glad.

Working-class and poor women are also living outside of marriage, at even higher rates than their more privileged peers. When it comes to unmarried women and money, the unprecedented economic opportunity enjoyed by a few is a small fraction of a far more complicated story.

It is still women who must do the lion’s share of the arithmetic. The tallying and risk and rewards of lost wages and promotions, sick days and leave policies, pumping rooms and corner offices that come with kids. Women are all too mindful of the variety of losses they incur should they choose to bear children. “We’re well aware that we lose fertility at a certain age…but also that we lose professional power after we have kids.

She kept her eyes on her book and tried to fix her mind. It had lately occurred to her that her mind was a good deal of a vagabond, and she had spent much ingenuity in training it to a military step and teaching it to advance, to halt, to retreat, to perform even more complicated maneuvers, at the word of command. Just now she had given it marching orders and it had been trudging over the sandy plains of a history of "German Thought

More than a century later, Anthony’s argument, that women living independently in ways that once made them unattractive mates will eventually rearrange men’s very tastes, is in tandem with shifts described by marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, who has pointed out that female college graduates and high earners, once the women least likely to find themselves hitched, are now among the most likely to one day become wives and to enjoy long-lasting unions.20

I know more of the realities of life than I once did," wrote Bronte. "I think many false ideas are propagated...those married women who indiscriminately urge their acquaintances to marry [are] much to blame. For my part I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance--what I always said in theory--Wait.

My character was forged by independence and self-sufficiency in the face of loneliness, so I assumed the tools for survival were already in my kit, it was just a matter of learning to use them. But not only do I not have the tools, I have no plans and no supplies and seem to be working in a different medium entirely.

I first met Winston Churchill in the early summer of 1906 at a dinner party to which I went as a very young girl. Our hostess was Lady Wemyss and I remember that Arthur Balfour, George Wyndman, Hilaire Belloc and Charles Whibley were among the guests… I found myself sitting next to this young man who seemed to me quite different from any other young man I had ever met. For a long time he seemed sunk in abstraction. Then he appeared to become suddenly aware of my existence. He turned on me a lowering gaze and asked me abruptly how old I was. I replied that I was nineteen. “And I,” he said despairingly, “am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though, “he added, as if to comfort himself. Then savagely: “Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is this allotted span for all we must cram into it!” And he burst forth into an eloquent diatribe on the shortness of human life, the immensity of possible human accomplishment—a theme so well exploited by the poets, prophets, and philosophers of all ages that it might seem difficult to invest it with new and startling significance. Yet for me he did so, in a torrent of magnificent language which appeared to be both effortless and inexhaustible and ended up with the words I shall always remember: “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow worm.” By this time I was convinced of it—and my conviction remained unshaken throughout the years that followed. Later he asked me whether I thought that words had a magic and music quite independent of their meaning. I said I certainly thought so, and I quoted as a classic though familiar instance the first lines that came into my head. Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. His eyes blazed with excitement. “Say that again,” he said, “say it again—it is marvelous!” “But I objected, “You know these lines. You know the ‘Ode to a Nightengale.’ ” He had apparently never read or heard of it before (I must, however, add that next time I met him he had not learned not merely this but all of the odes to Keats by heart—and he recited them quite mercilessly from start to finish, not sparing me a syllable). Finding that he liked poetry, I quoted to him from one of my own favorite poets, Blake. He listened avidly, repeating some lines to himself with varying emphases and stresses, then added meditatively: “I never knew that old Admiral had found so much time to write such good poetry.” I was astounded that he, with his acute susceptibility to words and power of using them, should have left such tracts of English literature entirely unexplored. But however it happened he had lost nothing by it, when he approached books it was “with a hungry, empty mind and with fairly srong jaws, and what I got I *bit*.” And his ear for the beauty of language needed no tuning fork. Until the end of dinner I listened to him spellbound. I can remember thinking: This is what people mean when they talk of seeing stars. That is what I am doing now. I do not to this day know who was on my other side. Good manners, social obligation, duty—all had gone with the wind. I was transfixed, transported into a new element. I knew only that I had seen a great light. I recognized it as the light of genius… I cannot attempt to analyze, still less transmit, the light of genius. But I will try to set down, as I remember them, some of the differences which struck me between him and all the others, young and old, whom I have known. First and foremost he was incalculable. He ran true to no form. There lurked in his every thought and world the ambush of the unexpected. I felt also that the impact of life, ideas and even words upon his mind, was not only vivid and immediate, but direct. Between him and them there was no shock absorber of vicarious thought or precedent gleaned either from books or other minds. His relationship wit

I didn’t realize it would be so hard.” “To study medicine?” Yes, I think, but also to be a woman alone in the world. My character was forged by independence and self-sufficiency in the face of loneliness, so I assumed the tools for survival were already in my kit, it was just a matter of learning to use them. But not only do I not have the tools, I have no plans and no supplies and seem to be working in a different medium entirely. And, because I’m a woman, I’m forced to do it all with my hands tied behind my back.

I don't wish to marry, ever. I like men quite well- at least the ones I've been acquainted with- but I shouldn't like to have to obey a husband and serve his needs. It wouldn't make me at all happy to have a dozen children, and stay at home knitting while he goes out romping with his friends. I would rather be independent." The room was silent. Lady Berwick's expression did not change, nor did she blink even once as she stared at Pandora. It seemed as if a soundless battle were being waged between the authoritative older woman and the rebellious girl. Finally Lady Berwick said, "You must have read Tolstoy." Pandora blinked, clearly caught off guard by the unexpected comment. "I have," she admitted, looking mystified. "How did you know?" "No young woman wants to marry after reading Tolstoy. That is why I never allowed either of my daughters to read Russian novels.

Cities allow us to extract some of the transactional services that were assumed to be an integral, gendered aspect of traditional marriage and enjoy them as actual transactional service, for which we pay. This dynamic also permits women to function in the world in a way that was once impossible, with the city serving as spouse and, sometimes, true love.

I'd be the strong... Independent... smart young lady that I'd grown into without the help of my parents, everything that I'd become was because of me.

In the interview’s final question, Znaimer asks Steinem what she wants to be “when you grow up.” “Free,” Steinem replies, “and old . . . and a little mean.”18 A

The impact of all this persistent inequity on the economic (in)stability of unmarried women is profound.

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. Better

I raised a strong independent young lady, I shouldn’t be surprised when she uses that strength to disobey me.

the weird possibility of marriage loomed. It loomed, in part, because there weren’t very many appealing models of what other kinds of female life might take its place.

These characters might not have wed, but their lack of husbands constrained and defined them, just as surely as marriage would have. They

DEAR LADIES: Go to school, work hard, become something in life ,Marriage isn't a Guarantee & REALIZE that a Man isn't a Financial Breakthrough

You have an independent income, the only thing that never lets you down.

I am my own law–and the law of some others.

Gay marriage, inherently and ideally based on love and companionship, and not on gender-defined social and economic power, will be key to our ability to re-imagined straight marriage.

Once he had put the phone down Lennie felt restless. His wife was the most exciting woman in the world, but – damn it – she pissed him off. Why couldn’t she say – Lennie, if things are tough, I’ll be right there? Why couldn’t she forget everything else and be with him? Lucky Santangelo. Drop-dead gorgeous. Strong. Determined. Enormously rich. And too independent. Lucky Santangelo. His wife.

Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, argued in the daily beast that the power of the single voter is destined to fade, since single people "Have no heirs," while their religious, conservative, counterparts will repopulate the nation with children who will replicate their parents politics, ensuring that "conservative, more familial-oriented values inevitably prevail." Kotkin's error, of course, is both in assuming that unmarried people do not reproduce -- in fact, they are doing so in ever greater numbers -- but also in failing to consider whence the gravitation away from married norms derived. A move toward independent life did not simply emerge from the clamshell: it was born of generations of dissatisfaction with the inequalities of religious, conservative, social practice.

…women are not rejecting marriage. They like their...are delaying it until it is something they can be sure of, until they feel stable and self-assured enough to hitch themselves to someone else without fear of losing themselves or their power to marriage. Rich, middle class, and poor women, all share an interest in avoiding the dangerous pitfalls of dependency that made marriage such an inhibiting institution for decades. They all want to steer clear of the painful divorces that are the results of bad marriages. They view marriage as desirable is an in enhancement of life, not a ratifying requirement.

The postponement of parenthood has brought its own set of challenges and peculiarities, among them the likelihood that if you are an unmarried women over the age of twenty-four, you've read, heard, or been told something that has made you quite certain that your ovaries are withering and your eggs are going bad. Right now. This second. As you're reading this and still not doing anything about getting pregnant.

Don’t you wish to marry?” At Pandora’s lack of response, she pressed impatiently, “Well?” Pandora glanced at Kathleen for guidance. “Should I say the conventional thing or the honest thing?” Lady Berwick replied before Kathleen was able. “Answer honestly, child.” “In that case,” Pandora said, “No, I don’t wish to marry, ever. I like men quite well—at least the ones I’ve been acquainted with—but I shouldn’t like to have to obey a husband and serve his needs. It wouldn’t make me at all happy to have a dozen children, and stay at home knitting while he goes out romping with his friends. I would rather be independent.

Some are sad to not yet have found mates, like Elliott Holt, a forty-year-old novelist who told me, 'I guess I just had no idea, could never have predicted, how intense the loneliness would be at this juncture of my life.

Every ruler makes enemies. The Lady is no exception. The Sons of the White Rose are everywhere.… If one chooses sides on emotion, then the Rebel is the guy to go with. He is fighting for everything men claim to honor: freedom, independence, truth, the right.… All the subjective illusions, all the eternal trigger-words. We are minions of the villain of the piece. We confess the illusion and deny the substance. There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies. We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.

those assumptions are often undergirded by an unconscious conviction that, if a woman is not wed, it’s not because she’s made a set of active choices, but rather that she has not been selected—chosen, desired, valued enough.

When abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone married Henry Blackwell in 1855, the couple asked their minister to distribute a statement protesting marriage’s inequities. It read, in part: “While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife . . . this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage, as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.” Stone kept her last name, and generations of women who have done the same have been referred to as “Lucy Stoners.” An

For women under thirty, the likelihood of being married had become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are wed,4 compared to the nearly 60 percent in 1960.

Amina Sow agrees. The advice she gives everyone is “Always choose yourself first. Women are very socialized to choose other people. If you put yourself first, it’s this incredible path you can forge for yourself.” Amina too understood how she sounded as the words were coming out of her mouth. “If you choose yourself people will say you’re selfish,” she said. “But no. You have agency. You have dreams. It takes a lot to qualify a man as selfish.” Freakishness

We’re all alone, no matter,” Frances agreed, but, noting that I am married and she is not, “You’re alone in a different way from my aloneness. I have lots of friends, and very deep friendships. But essentially, I’m alone.” Barbarous

As Anthony would tell the journalist Nellie Bly, “I’ve been in love a thousand times! . . . But I never loved any one so much that I thought it would last. . . . I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealth, she became a pet and a doll. Just think, had I married at twenty, I would have been a drudge or a doll for fifty-five years.”3 Of

It was the kind of upheaval, smack in the middle of adulthood, which was messy enough to make me consider, back then, the wisdom of early marriage. When we’re young, after all, our lives are so much more pliant, can be joined without too much fuss. When we grow on our own, we take on responsibility, report to bosses, become bosses; we get our own bank accounts, acquire our own debts, sign our own leases. The infrastructure of our adulthood takes shape, connects to other lives; it firms up and gets less bendable. The prospect of breaking it all apart and rebuilding it elsewhere becomes a far more daunting project than it might have been had we just married someone at twenty-two, and done all that construction together. The

Some choices about remaining unmarried were made expressly to escape the unhappiness of an earlier generation of married women. "When you think of your mother as helpless, unable to choose her own life, you become determined to never become vulnerable.

an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.

Author Judy Blume has described how, as a college student with literary ambitions, she gave in to the expectation to marry young. Pregnant by the time she earned her degree, Blume recalled the dismay with which she “hung [her] diploma over the washing machine.”65

The more highly a man is developed on the intellectual and moral side, the more independent he is, the more pleasure life gives him. Socrates, Diogenes, and Marcus Aurelius, were joyful, not sorrowful. And the Apostle tells us: ‘Rejoice continually’; ‘Rejoice and be glad.

the American mothers who either choose to remain single or who find themselves unmarried are the generators and perpetuators of poverty; that they, and not the economically rigged system in which they make their way, are to blame for their families’ economic circumstances.

we are defined by who we are, what we do, and how much we make. And if we haven’t gotten to where we want and need to be, then we’re not going to be ready to figure out how settling down with one woman fits into our plans for becoming a truly independent, mature, well-off man.

A toast," Smooth Kitty cried, feeling almost giddy, "to self-government. Saint Etheldreda's School for Young Ladies will be run by young ladies from this point forward. Hear, hear!" Great applause. "To independence!" added Pocked Louise. "No fussy old widows telling us when not to speak, and how to set the spoons when an Earl's niece comes to supper. And telling us to leave scientific experiment to the men." Teacup toasts in support of Louise. "To freedom!" chimed in Disgraceful Mary Jane. "No curfews and evil eyes and lectures on morals and propriety." Loud, if nervous, cheering. "To womankind," proclaimed Stout Alice. "Each of us girls free to be what she wishes to be, without glum and crotchety Placketts trying to make us into what we're not." Tremendous excitement. "To sisterhood," said Dear Roberta, "and standing by each other, no matter what.

Is not true that marriage is the answer, it is true that by simply living independently, they face an additional set of challenges in a world that remains designed with married Americans in mind. Single women foot more of their own bills, be they necessities like food and housing, or luxuries like cable and vacation; they pay for their own transportation. They do not enjoy the tax breaks for insurance benefits available to married couples. Sociologist Bella DePaulo has repeatedly pointed out there are more than one thousand laws that benefit married people over single people.

This was because the hawks and falcons in the castle mews were all Lancre birds and therefore naturally possessed of a certain “sod you” independence of mind. After much patient breeding and training Hodgesaargh had managed to get them to let go of someone’s wrist, and now he was working on stopping them viciously attacking the person who had just been holding them, i.e., invariably Hodgesaargh. He was nevertheless a remarkably optimistic and good-natured man who lived for the day when his hawks would be the finest in the world. The hawks lived for the day when they could eat his other ear.

…women are not rejecting marriage. They...are delaying it until it is something they can be sure of, until they feel stable and self-assured enough to hitch themselves to someone else without fear of losing themselves or their power to marriage. Rich, middle class, and poor women, all share an interest in avoiding the dangerous pitfalls of dependency that made marriage such an inhibiting institution for decades. They all want to steer clear of the painful divorces that are the results of bad marriages. They view marriage as desirable is an in enhancement of life, not a ratifying requirement.

The irony, as Slate’s Amanda Marcotte has observed, is that conservatives are surely maddest at and most threatened by powerful single women—the privileged, well-positioned women who earn money, wield influence, enjoy national visibility, and have big voices: Anita Hill, Murphy Brown, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham.

And Jane Eyre. Oh, smart, resourceful, sad Jane. Her prize, readers, after a youth of fighting for some smidgen of autonomy? Marrying him: The bad-tempered guy who kept his first wife in the attic, wooed Jane through a series of elaborate head games, and was, by the time she landed him, blind and missing a hand.

In many ways, the emotional and economic self-sufficiency of unmarried life is more demanding than the state we have long acknowledged as (married) maturity. Being on one’s own means shouldering one’s own burdens in a way that being coupled rarely demands. It means doing everything—making decisions, taking responsibility, paying bills, cleaning the refrigerator—without the benefits of formal partnership. But we’ve still got a lot of hardwired assumptions that the successful female life is measured not in professional achievements or friendships or even satisfying sexual relationships, but by whether you’re legally coupled.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, nineteenth-century women’s rights reformer and married mother of seven, was wry about the tolls of home life; she joked in a letter after not having heard from Anthony for a while: “Where are you, Susan, and what are you doing? Your silence is truly appalling. Are you dead or married?”4 Common

There is an assumption, put forth by everyone from greeting card companies to Bruce Springsteen, that nobody likes to be alone, least of all women. But many women, long valued in context of their relations to other people, find solitude—both the act of being alone and the attitude of being independent—a surprisingly sweet relief.

A man worth his salt will treat a lady like a lady and make the effort to be a gentleman. While independent women are fully capable of being self-reliant, the majority whom I know appreciate being treated with respect, consideration, and chivalry. For the women who yearn for the old-fashioned, good-hearted, chivalrous guy, I promise, they do exist.

The young man named George glanced at the clever lady, and then returned moodily to his plate. Obviously he and his father did not do. Lucy, in the midst of her success, found time to wish they did. It gave her no extra pleasure that anyone should be left in the cold; and when she rose to go, she turned back and gave the two outsiders a nervous little bow.

The only path of escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay through the chivalry of some other man. That a woman could possibly rebel against one man without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside the range of Mr. Brumley's understanding. It is still outside the range of most men's understandings -- and of a great many women's.

It’s not such a bad thing to always have something to do, someone to meet, work to complete, trains to catch, beers to drink, marathons to run, classes to attend. By the time some women find someone to whom they’d like to commit and who’d like to commit to them, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night. These same women might have greeted entry into the same institution, had they been pressured to enter it earlier, with the indignation of a child being made to go to bed early as the party raged on downstairs.

By the time some women find someone to whom they’d like to commit and who’d like to commit to them, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing that they will have, if they were lucky, soaked in their cities and been wrung dry by them, that those who marry later, after a life lived single, may experience it as the relief of slipping between cool sheets after having been out all night.

When feminist impulses are recorded, they are, almost always, the writings of privileged women who had some status from which to speak freely, more opportunity to write and have their writings recorded. Abigail Adams, even before the Declaration of Independence, in March of 1776, wrote to her husband: . . . in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound to obey the laws in which we have no

She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in Mme. de Saint-Euverte's house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished (so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by coming might, so to speak, 'count double') to shew herself as friendly and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she called 'exaggerating,' and always made a point of letting people see that she 'simply must not' indulge in any display of emotion that was not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by virtue of that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the most self-confident persons, by contact with an unfamiliar environment, even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played, a piece which, it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had ever heard before; and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy towards the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment she would merely straighten her shoulder-straps or feel in her golden hair for the little balls of coral or of pink enamel, frosted with tiny diamonds, which formed its simple but effective ornament, studying, with a cold interest, her impassioned neighbour, while at another she would beat time for a few bars with her fan, but, so as not to forfeit her independence, she would beat a different time from the pianist's.

I think nineteenth-century women lucky, with their largely sucky marriages and segregation into a subjugated and repressed gender caste. They had it easier on this one front: They could maintain an allegiance to their female friends, because there was a much smaller change that their husband was going to play a competitively absorbing role in their emotional and intellectual lives.

And as writer Nora Ephron explained in a 1996 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, about her own graduating class of 1962: “We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren’t meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect.” Both

I am a governess myself." "Oh, indeed!" said Miss Kate, but she might as well have said, "Dear me, how dreadful!" for her tone implied it, and something in her face made Meg color, and wish she had not been so frank. Mr. Brooke looked up and said quickly, "Young ladies in America love independence as much as their ancestors did, and are admired and respected for supporting themselves.

Putting aside the fact that graveyards also contain large numbers of wives and mothers, Mills was wrong on another front: A job may very well love you back. It may sustain and support you, buoy your spirits and engage your mind, as the best romantic partner would, and far more effectively than a subpar spouse might. In work, it is possible to find commitment, attachment, chemistry, and connection.

In his 1873 Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for the Girls, Harvard professor Edward Clarke argued that the female brain, if engaged in the same course of study as the male, would become overburdened and that wombs and ovaries would atrophy.43 Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, “a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen.” Yet

Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs. It was often at just the moment that their educations were complete and their childhood ambitions coming into focus that these troublesome, funny girls were suddenly contained, subsumed, and reduced by domesticity. Later,

The images on the covers of previous Little House books, drawn by Garth Williams in the editions I owned, had been of Laura in motion, front and center: gamboling down a hillside, riding a horse barefoot, having a snowball fight. Here she was, stationary and solidly shod, beside her husband; the baby she held in her arms was the most lively figure in the scene. Laura’s story was coming to a close. The tale that was worth telling about her was finished once she married.

This would be the last moment of the primary during which I felt as though I inhabited a different planet than everyone else in my party, that I had heard a different speech, seen a different person, been in a different room than everyone else. But I can't say that I was unhappy that they had heard what they did. If they thought Hillary was telling them to fuck off, that was okay with me. For just one last day, before I joined their ranks, I wanted them to fuck off too.

Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself, she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.

Two things were important to my mother. One was that I be independent, and the other – she called it – ‘being a lady’. And by that she didn’t mean wearing white gloves. She meant that a lady doesn’t give way to emotions that sap energy and do no good. Anger. Jealousy. Remorse. Those are emotions that don’t move you forward, they trap you. So ‘being a lady’ meant don’t snap back in anger, take a few deep breaths and respond in a way that helps educate people who don’t understand.

New Rule: Conservatives have to stop rolling their eyes every time they hear the word "France." Like just calling something French is the ultimate argument winner. As if to say, "What can you say about a country that was too stupid to get on board with our wonderfully conceived and brilliantly executed war in Iraq?" And yet an American politician could not survive if he uttered the simple, true statement: "France has a better health-care system than we do, and we should steal it." Because here, simply dismissing an idea as French passes for an argument. John Kerry? Couldn't vote for him--he looked French. Yeah, as a opposed to the other guy, who just looked stupid. Last week, France had an election, and people over there approach an election differently. They vote. Eighty-five percent turned out. You couldn't get eighty-five percent of Americans to get off the couch if there was an election between tits and bigger tits and they were giving out free samples. Maybe the high turnout has something to do with the fact that the French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research, or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. The electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about private lives. In the current race, Madame Royal has four kids, but she never got married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him "liberal," he grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something. Royal's opponent is married, but they live apart and lead separate lives. And the people are okay with that, for the same reason they're okay with nude beaches: because they're not a nation of six-year-olds who scream and giggle if they see pee-pee parts. They have weird ideas about privacy. They think it should be private. In France, even mistresses have mistresses. To not have a lady on the side says to the voters, "I'm no good at multitasking." Like any country, France has its faults, like all that ridiculous accordion music--but their health care is the best in the industrialized world, as is their poverty rate. And they're completely independent of Mid-East oil. And they're the greenest country. And they're not fat. They have public intellectuals in France. We have Dr. Phil. They invented sex during the day, lingerie, and the tongue. Can't we admit we could learn something from them?

Because whether through our whole lives, or through decades at the beginning of them--and, often, at the end of them, after divorces or deaths--it's our friends who move us into new homes, friends with whom we buy and care for pets, friends with whom we mourn death and experience illness, friends alongside who some of us may raise children and see them into adulthood. There aren't any ceremonies to make this official. There aren't weddings; there aren't health benefits or domestic partnerships or familial recognition.

O'rourke's alienation from the married woman comes in part because she's filling in the imaginative blank of that woman's union with a fantasy of fulfillment. If loneliness is a want of intimacy, then being single lends itself to loneliness because the loving partnerships we imagine in comparison are always, in our minds, intimate; they are not distant or empty of abusive or dysfunctional. We don't fantasize about being in bad marriages, or about being in what were once good marriages that have since gone stale or sexless or hard, creating their own profound emotional pain.

Women began promenading without shame, publicly socializing and visiting the parks erected to be the lungs of industrialized cities. The outdoors offered opportunities to push social and sexual boundaries, and young people, writes Peiss, “used the streets as a place to meet the other sex, to explore nascent sexual feelings, and carry on flirtations, all outside the watchful eyes and admonitions of parents.”12 So liberating was a life lived in the urban wild that the YWCA worried, Peiss reports, about how “young girls . . . in this unconventional out-of-door life, are so apt to grow noisy and bold.” By

I love you, Maggie Windham. I love your courage, I love your independence, I love your determination, and I want it for my own.” He paused and gathered his own courage. “I want—I pray—that our children take after their mother.” The words took an instant to penetrate the emotion wracking the woman beside him, a silent, fraught moment during which Ben’s hopes and dreams, his very heart and soul hung suspended between the light of hope and the shadow of despair. “Benjamin.” She pitched into him, right there in the sunshine, sobbing and clinging and bawling for all the world to see. “Hold me, please. Hold me and never let me go, not ever. Not for anything.” He

The psychology books and the internet dating experts will tell you that women and girls love the bad boys and the bad men. That the boys and men who are cold in their heart are chased by women. That the ones who show less emotions score more with the ladies. But that's not entirely true. Be a man who can be sensitive and strong at the same time. Be a man who is not scared of being alone. A man who is assertive and independent, yet loving and kind. And the ladies will stay by you. Find some time out of your busy schedule to show some love and care to the girls when they need it the most. Be a wanderer and a loner if you like it that way, But don't forget to show some love and care for the women around you.

Surely it was strange that so young a woman should be living here quite unattached, quite independent apparently of all control, with a great deal of money at her disposal, and only one little girl to give her a countenance? Suppose she were not a proper person at all, suppose she were an outcast from society, a being on whom her own countrypeople turned their backs? This desire to share her fortune with respectable ladies could only be explained in two ways: either she had been moved thereto by an enthusiastic piety of which not a trace had as yet appeared, or she was an improper person anxious to rebuild her reputation with the aid and countenance of the ladies of good family she had entrapped into her house.

Bill Clinton told the story in 2015, he had to ask his girlfriend to marry him, and come to Arkansas where he was pursuing a political career, three times before she said yes. He recalled telling Hillary Rodham, “I want you to marry me, but you shouldn’t do it.” Instead, he urged her to go to Chicago or New York to begin a political career of her own. “Oh, my God,” he remembered Hillary responding at one point. “I’ll never run for office. I’m too aggressive, and nobody will ever vote for me.” She moved to Arkansas and married him, working as a lawyer, law professor, and for the Children’s Defense Fund. She didn’t put the gas on her own political career until after her husband left the White House and their daughter was in college. Today,

For if single women are looking for government to create a "hubby state" for them, what is certainly true is that their male counterparts have a long enjoy the fruits of a related "wifey state," in which the nation and its government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Men, and especially married wealthy white men, have a long relied on government assistance. It's a government that has historically supported white men's home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offer them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men's right to vote and thus exert control over the government at the nation's founding and has protected their enfranchisement. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women: by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civic protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby women were forced to be dependent on those men, creating a gendered class of laborers who took low paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and childcare work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres. But the growth of a massive population of women who are living outside those dependent circumstances puts new pressures on the government: to remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence, to a citizenry now made up of plenty of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives.

In a 1840 letter to the The Lowell Offering, the publication of the Massachusetts mill town that employed thousands of young, single women and would become one of the birth places of the later labor movement, a correspondent named Betsey claiming to be “one of that unlucky, derided, and almost despised set of females, called spinsters, single sisters, lay-nuns . . . but who are more usually known by the appellation of Old Maids” argued that it was “a part of [God’s] wise design that there should be Old Maids,” in part because “they are the founders and pillars of anti-slavery, moral reform, and all sorts of religious and charitable societies.”28 Here was the idea of service and moral uplift brought into disruptive relief: What if women, in service to greater and moral good, did not submit themselves to a larger power structure, but instead organized to overturn it? Frederick

Independent Women Lucy Liu... with my girl, Drew... Cameron D. and Destiny Charlie's Angels, Come on Uh uh uh Question: Tell me what you think about me I buy my own diamonds and I buy my own rings Only ring your cell-y when I'm feelin lonely When it's all over please get up and leave Question: Tell me how you feel about this Try to control me boy you get dismissed Pay my own fun, oh and I pay my own bills Always 50/50 in relationships The shoes on my feet I've bought it The clothes I'm wearing I've bought it The rock I'm rockin' 'Cause I depend on me If I wanted the watch you're wearin' I'll buy it The house I live in I've bought it The car I'm driving I've bought it I depend on me (I depend on me) All the women who are independent Throw your hands up at me All the honeys who makin' money Throw your hands up at me All the mommas who profit dollas Throw your hands up at me All the ladies who truly feel me Throw your hands up at me Girl I didn't know you could get down like that Charlie, how your Angels get down like that Girl I didn't know you could get down like that Charlie, how your Angels get down like that Tell me how you feel about this Who would I want if I would wanna live I worked hard and sacrificed to get what I get Ladies, it ain't easy bein' independent Question: How'd you like this knowledge that I brought Braggin' on that cash that he gave you is to front If you're gonna brag make sure it's your money you flaunt Depend on noone else to give you what you want The shoes on my feet I've bought it The clothes I'm wearing I've bought it The rock I'm rockin' 'Cause I depend on me If I wanted the watch you're wearin' I'll buy it The house I live in I've bought it The car I'm driving I've bought it I depend on me (I depend on me) All the women who are independent Throw your hands up at me All the honeys who makin' money Throw your hands up at me All the mommas who profit dollas Throw your hands up at me All the ladies who truly feel me Throw your hands up at me Girl I didn't know you could get down like that Charlie, how your Angels get down like that Girl I didn't know you could get down like that Charlie, how your Angels get down like that Destiny's Child Wassup? You in the house? Sure 'nuff We'll break these people off Angel style Child of Destiny Independent beauty Noone else can scare me Charlie's Angels Woah All the women who are independent Throw your hands up at me All the honeys who makin' money Throw your hands up at me All the mommas who profit dollas Throw your hands up at me All the ladies who truly feel me Throw your hands up at me Girl I didn't know you could get down like that Charlie, how your Angels get down like that [repeat until fade]

The impulse here is to add “again,” but making New York “work” had not always, and maybe not ever, been a goal for those who welcomed disorder as the way to overtime or a palmed twenty. City government had never been run for maximum efficiency; the point of patronage was jobs, with results a distant second. Management was the province of reformers and the public agencies, foundations, and advocacy groups who’d erected a virtuous scaffolding around City politics, assuring things actually got done while City Hall focused on giving special interests their taste. Everyone else got pinched, especially the middle class and small businessmen who paid for their independence by having to slash through thickets of red tape, following absurd union rules and paying inflated prices. Koch liked to tell about the time an old woman tugged his sleeve and said, “Mr. Koch, Mr. Koch, make the city what it once was.” To which he said, “Lady, it was never that good.

The real loser in the eastern forests has been the songbird. One of the most striking losses was the Carolina parakeet, a lovely, innocuous bird whose numbers in the wild were possibly exceeded only by the unbelievably numerous passenger pigeon. (When the first pilgrims came to America there were an estimated nine billion passenger pigeons—more than twice the number of all birds found in America today.) Both were hunted out of existence—the passenger pigeon for pig feed and the simple joy of blasting volumes of birds from the sky with blind ease, the Carolina parakeet because it ate farmers’ fruit and had a striking plumage that made a lovely ladies’ hat. In 1914, the last surviving members of each species died within weeks of each other in captivity. A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman’s warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman’s warbler. But there are almost certainly others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three species of bird—the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue Mountain warbler—that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of Townsend’s bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the populations of migratory songbirds fell by 50 percent in the eastern United States (in large part because of loss of breeding sites and other vital wintering habitats in Latin America) and by some estimates are continuing to fall by 3 percent or so a year. Seventy percent of all eastern bird species have seen population declines since the 1960s. These days, the woods are a pretty quiet place.

They’re sound theories,” Benjamin replied. “And they let me both steal a bite from your ices and feed you a few spoonfuls of my own.” She had to glance away lest he see her smile. “I was distracted, else you should not have gotten away with such outrageous behavior. I know what you’re doing, though.” “I’m glad somebody knows what I’m about, because I seem to have lost my own grasp of it entirely.” He smiled at her, an open, charming smile that had Maggie’s insides fluttering around like the birds flitting from branch to branch above them. “You’re making it seem as if we’re enamored of one another.” She kept her eyes on the horses before them, because an honest smile from Benjamin Portmaine was enough to steal her few remaining wits. “I am enamored of you.” He slowed the horses to let a landau lumber on ahead of them. “You’re gorgeous, passionate, intelligent, and independent—also a financial genius. I’m the man who proposed to you earlier this week, if you’ll recall.” “Must you remind me?” “Frequently, until you comprehend that I did not ask out of anything other than an honest desire to make you my countess.” She

Letisha also misses New York, and what it offered her as a single mother, even at the same time that it made it impossible for her to stay. “In New York, everybody on the corner knew who I was,” she said. “Oh, that’s the brown woman with the baby and the dog.” This sense of community was comforting, and felt safe, even in the neighborhoods that she understood to be unsafe. One of her apartments, Letisha recalled, was “right next to a shady bodega,” but she said, “Never once did I feel unsafe in there.” She said she was never harassed on the street, often felt like the shop owners who sat outside on sidewalks served as an informal neighborhood watch, and felt comfortable enough with her neighbors, in each of her New York apartments, that she could ask for help getting groceries and a stroller up the stairs. She sometimes even left Lola in a store with neighbors while she ran across the street to pick up her laundry. “The attitude was: She’s one of us and we take care of our own,” she said. “I never felt like I was going to be in any danger. But you can’t control the shootings, and I wouldn’t go to block parties.” In her Virginia apartment complex, Letisha said, none of her neighbors acknowledge each other. For

As we get older, the consequences of being tough and independent, when you're supposed to be tender and helpless increase in severity. For young girls the penalties range from a stern look to descriptions like "tomboy" or "headstrong". But as we get older, the consequence of being too assertive or too independent take on a darker nature: shame, ridicule, blame, and judgement. Most of us were too young and having too much fun to notice when we crossed the fine line into behavior not becoming of a lady: actions that call for a painful penalty. Now, as a woman and a mother of both a daughter and a son, I can tell you exactly when it happens. It happens on the day girls start spitting farther, shooting better, and completing more passes than boys. When that day comes, we start to get the message in subtle and not so subtle ways that its best if we focus on staying thin, minding our manners, and not being so smart or speaking out so much in class that we call attention to our intellect. This is a pivital day for boys too. This is the moment when they're introduced to the white horse. Emotional stoicism and self control are rewarded. Displays of emotion are punished. Vulnerability is weakness. Anger becomes an acceptable substitute for fear, which is forbidden.

Eight Bells: Robert J. Kane ‘55D died June 3, 2017, in Palm Harbor, Florida. He came to MMA by way of Boston College. Bob or “Killer,” as he was affectionately known, was an independent and eccentric soul, enjoying the freedom of life. After a career at sea as an Officer in the U.S. Navy and in the Merchant Marine he retired to an adventurous single life living with his two dogs in a mobile home, which had originally been a “Yellow School Bus.” He loved watching the races at Daytona, Florida, telling stories about his interesting deeds about flying groceries to exotic Caribbean Islands, and misdeeds with mysterious ladies he had known. For years he spent his summers touring Canada and his winters appreciating the more temperate weather at Fort De Soto in St. Petersburg, Florida…. Enjoying life in the shadow of the Sunshine Bridge, Bob had an artistic flare, a positive attitude and a quick sense of humor. Not having a family, few people were aware that he became crippled by a hip replacement operation gone bad at the Bay Pines VA Hospital. His condition became so bad that he could hardly get around, but he remained in good spirits until he suffered a totally debilitating stroke. For the past 6 years Bob spent his time at various Florida Assisted Living Facilities, Nursing Homes and Palliative Care Hospitals. His end came when he finally wound up as a terminal patient at the Hospice Facility in Palm Harbor, Florida. Bob was 86 years old when he passed. He will be missed….

At a swearing-in ceremony for new immigrants in the summer of 2014, the Harvard-educated First Lady Michelle Obama said: “It’s amazing that just a few feet from here where I’m standing are the signatures of the fifty-six Founders who put their names on a Declaration that changed the course of history. And like the fifty of you, none of them were born American—they became American.” That’s if you don’t count the forty-eight of fifty-six who were born in America. The other eight—like the rest of them—were either British or Dutch. Fifty-five were Protestant. Only one was Catholic. There’s a reason King George called the American Revolution “a Presbyterian war.”2 The single document in Nexis’s news archives to report the First Lady’s jaw-droppingly ignorant remark about the signers of America’s Declaration of Independence did so in order to proclaim her “correct.” Yes, Snopes.com said Mrs. Obama was “correct” in the sense that “the Founding Fathers were not born into a fully formed and established America with its own history, customs, culture, and values, as modern American children are.”3 That’s if you don’t count the 85 percent of the Declaration’s signers who were born into a fully formed and established America, with its own history, customs, culture, and values. The American colonies had been around for about 150 years at that point. Not only the signers of the Declaration, but the first seventeen presidents, were all born in one of the original thirteen colonies. The eighteenth was Ulysses Grant, who was born in Ohio.

Men are seeking a divinity to serve and adore. But the reality is, most women are so disconnected from their sensual feminine self that, as men, the only option we now have is to turn inwards to our own anima, or turn to other men for sensual feminine affection. A lot of men are becoming accustomed to embracing romance from the same sex, others opted to having sex with ANY woman they can get to console themselves. Problem is, we are living in a generation of women that are constantly protesting “Accept me for who I am!” IN THEIR MASCULINE ENERGY. They don’t know what it truly means to be a woman. But there’s a new breed of men that are awakened and of high quality in every respect of the word, and they’re not willing to settle for any woman that simply wants to be accepted for who she is. They want a woman who wants to be challenged for growth purposes. “I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” ~Anaïs Nin Listen ladies, you have not yet fully become a woman if no man is seeking to serve and adore you. Now, understand the meaning of ‘serve and adore’. This means that a man has to NOT want to see you struggle in any way, shape or form that he can change for the better. So, if you’re still struggling in ANY way that a man can change for the better for you as a female, then you have not yet become a full grown WOMAN. The ultimate sign that you’ve become a full grown woman is when you are constantly being served and adored, especially by an emotionally healthy masculine man, without you having to ask. So tell me, are you a woman yet? "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." ~Simone de Beauvoir Too bad that so many of you are so hellbent on fighting to be ‘yourselves’ (masculine selves), yet that very ‘self’ isn’t serving you like you need to be served. For many of you, fighting to be ‘yourselves’ is, for the most part, fighting to be independent of the masculine and of your divine purpose which is to be a WOMAN. It’s easier to be disagreeable than it is to surrender to your true calling.

Numbers express quantities. In the submissions to my online survey, however, respondents frequently attributed qualities to them. Noticeably, colors. The number that was most commonly described as having its own color was four (52 votes), which most respondents (17) said was blue. Seven was next (28 votes), which most respondents (9) said was green, and in third place came five (27 votes), which most respondents (9) said was red. Seeing colors in numbers is a manifestation of synesthesia, a condition in which certain concepts can trigger incongruous responses, and which is thought to be the result of atypical connections being made between parts of the brain. In the survey, numbers were also labeled “warm,” “crisp,” “chagrined,” “peaceful,” “overconfident,” “juicy,” “quiet” and “raw.” Taken individually, the descriptions are absurd, yet together they paint a surprisingly coherent picture of number personalities. Below is a list of the numbers from one to thirteen, together with words used to describe them taken from the survey responses. One Independent, strong, honest, brave, straightforward, pioneering, lonely. Two Cautious, wise, pretty, fragile, open, sympathetic, quiet, clean, flexible. Three Dynamic, warm, friendly, extrovert, opulent, soft, relaxed, pretentious. Four Laid-back, rogue, solid, reliable, versatile, down-to-earth, personable. Five Balanced, central, cute, fat, dominant but not too much so, happy. Six Upbeat, sexy, supple, soft, strong, brave, genuine, courageous, humble. Seven Magical, unalterable, intelligent, awkward, overconfident, masculine. Eight Soft, feminine, kind, sensible, fat, solid, sensual, huggable, capable. Nine Quiet, unobtrusive, deadly, genderless, professional, soft, forgiving. Ten Practical, logical, tidy, reassuring, honest, sturdy, innocent, sober. Eleven Duplicitous, onomatopoeic, noble, wise, homey, bold, sturdy, sleek. Twelve Malleable, heroic, imperial, oaken, easygoing, nonconfrontational. Thirteen Gawky, transitional, creative, honest, enigmatic, unliked, dark horse. You don’t need to be a Hollywood screenwriter to spot that Mr. One would make a great romantic hero, and Miss Two a classic leading lady. The list is nonsensical, yet it makes sense. The association of one with male characteristics, and two with female ones, also remains deeply ingrained.

Before their chaise drew to a complete halt in front of the house a door was already being flung open, and a tall, stocky man was bouncing down the steps. “It would appear that our greeting here is going to be far more enthusiastic than the one we received at our last stop,” Elizabeth said in a resolute voice that still shook with nerves as she drew on her gloves, bravely preparing to meet and defy the next obstacle to her happiness and independence. The door of their chaise was wrenched open with enough force to pull it from its hinges, and a masculine face poked inside. “Lady Elizabeth!” boomed Lord Marchman, his face flushed with eagerness-or drink; Elizabeth wasn’t certain. “This is indeed a long-awaited surprise,” and then, as if dumbstruck by his inane remark, he shook his large head and hastily said, “A long-awaited pleasure, that is! The surprise is that you’ve arrived early.” Elizabeth firmly repressed a surge of compassion for his obvious embarrassment, along with the thought that he might be rather likeable. “I hope we haven’t inconvenienced you overmuch,” she said. “Not overmuch. That is,” he corrected, gazing into her wide eyes and feeling himself drowning, “not at all.” Elizabeth smiled and introduced “Aunt Berta,” then allowed their exuberant host to escort them up the steps. Beside her Berta whispered with some satisfaction, “I think he’s as nervous as I am.” The interior of the house seemed drab and rather gloomy after the sunny splendor outside. As their host led her forward Elizabeth glimpsed the furnishings in the salon and drawing room-all of which were upholstered in dark leathers that appeared to have once been maroon and brown. Lord Marchman, who was watching her closely and hopefully, glanced about and suddenly saw his home as she must be seeing it. Trying to explain away the inadequacies of his furnishings, he said hastily, “This home is in need of a woman’s touch. I’m an old bachelor, you see, as was my father.” Berta’s eyes snapped to his face. “Well, I never!” she exclaimed in outraged reaction to his apparent admission of being a bastard.” “I didn’t mean,” Lord Marchman hastily assured, “that my father was never married. I meant”-he paused to nervously tug on his neckcloth, as if trying to loosen it-“that my mother died when I was very young, and my father never remarried. We lived here together.” At the juncture of two hallways and the stairs Lord Marchman turned and looked at Berta and Elizabeth. “Would you care for refreshment, or would you rather go straight to bed?” Elizabeth wanted a rest, and she particularly wanted to spend as little time in his company as was possible. “The latter, if you please.” “In that case,” he said with a sweeping gesture of his arm toward the staircase, “let’s go.” Berta let out a gasp of indignant outrage at what she perceived to be a clear indication that he was no better than Sir Francis. “Now see here, milord! I’ve been putting her in bed for nigh onto two score, and I don’t need help from the likes of you!” And then, as if she realized her true station, she ruined the whole magnificent effect by curtsying and adding in a servile whisper, “if you don’t mind, sir.” “Mind? No, I-“ It finally occurred to John Marchmen what she thought, and he colored up clear to the roots of his hair. “I-I only meant to show you how,” he began, and then he leaned his head back and briefly closed his eyes as if praying for deliverance from his own tongue. “How to find the way,” he finished with a gusty sigh of relief. Elizabeth was secretly touched by his sincerity and his awkwardness, and were the situation less threatening, she would have gone out of her way to put him at his ease.

TO ADD TO a minor but growing unease concerning the case, Maisie wondered about the commission from James Compton. Was it his mother, Lady Rowan Compton, original supporter and sponsor of her education, who had suggested he contact her regarding this latest purchase of land? Fiercely independent, Maisie had long been both heartened and uncomfortable with the former suffragette’s patronage. Certainly the gulf between their respective stations contributed to her feelings, although people were generally pressed to place Maisie when it came to conversation, for she was more often taken for a clergyman’s daughter than for the offspring of a Lambeth costermonger. But Frankie Dobbs no longer sold vegetables from his horse-drawn barrow. Instead, he had lived at Chelstone since the war, when Lady Rowan’s grooms enlisted and he was brought in to tend the horses, a job that was still his, along with a tied cottage

One was to ‘be a lady,’ and that meant conduct yourself civilly, don’t let emotions like anger or envy get in your way. And the other was to be independent, which was an unusual message for mothers of that time to be giving their daughters.

Today, only around 20 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are wed,4 compared to the nearly 60 percent in 1960. In a statement from the Population Reference Bureau, the fact that the proportion of young adults in the United States that has never been married is now bigger than the percentage that has married was called “a dramatic reversal.

Nellie Bly: “What do you think the new woman will be?” Susan B. Anthony: “She’ll be free.” —1896

I always hated it when my heroines got married.

marriage and motherhood were supposed to be read as a happy ending. Yet, to me, it felt unhappy, as if Laura were over. And, in many ways, she was.

It was supposed to be romantic, but it felt bleak. Paths that were once wide and dotted with naughty friends and conspiratorial sisters and malevolent cousins, with scrapes and adventures and hopes and passions, had narrowed and now seemed to lead only to the tending of dull husbands and the rearing of insipid children to whom the stories soon would be turned over,

I’d read Persuasion, about Anne Elliot, who, unmarried at twenty-seven, veers perilously close to an economically and socially unmoored fate before being saved from the indignity of spinsterhood by Captain Wentworth. I’d read about Hester Prynne and Miss Havisham and Edith Wharton’s maddening, doomed Lily Bart. These were not inspiring portraits. Collectively, they suggested that women who remained unmarried, whether by choice or by accident, were destined to wear red letters or spend their lives dancing in unused wedding dresses or overdose on chloral hydrate. These characters might not have wed, but their lack of husbands constrained and defined them, just as surely as marriage would have.

We are becoming the men we wanted to marry,” she said, clarifying that an opposition to marriage need not be about the rejection of men or love, but rather about the filling out and equaling up of female life. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” she was often credited with coining (actually, the phrase came from Australian educator Irina Dunn19).

feminist Sheila Cronan wrote, “Since marriage constitutes slavery for women . . . Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.” Radical feminist writer Andrea Dworkin famously commented that “Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.

One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children, only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old.

Ladies, your sensuality is more desirable than your real life achievements. This doesn’t mean your real life achievements have no value though, but that that value is not essential in the world of DREAMS OF ECSTASY®️ or dreams of romance.

Political dissidents draw on Warrior fortitude to speak out, lead the opposition, and withstand attacks. Mahatma Gandhi famously won independence for India through nonviolent tools of protest, actions like boycotts, hunger strikes, and the Salt March to the sea. “Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind,” Gandhi said. “It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.” Think of Aung San Suu Kyi, known by many in her native country as “the Lady.” She withstood house arrest for fifteen years to fight for democratic principles in her society. She was offered freedom if she left the country but she refused in order to maintain her stand for true political freedom.

When we meet other women who seem happier, more successful, and more confident than we are, it’s all too easy to hate them for it,” Ann has written, because we understand it to mean that “There’s less for us.” The solution, she advises, is, “when you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you look better.

You left me,” he said tersely, his gaze unwavering on her. She exhaled. “I am sorry. I am sorry for borrowing your ship, and I—” “You left me after the night we shared.” She tried not to think about being in his arms, when he had seemed to love her as much as she loved him. “I told you that morning what I intended. The time we shared didn’t change anything.” She saw him flinch. “It was wonderful, but I meant it when I said I had to go home. I know you are angry. I know I took the coward’s way, and I shouldn’t have conned Mac—” “I don’t care about the ship!” he cried, stunning her. “I am glad you took my frigate—at least you would be safe from rovers. Damn it! I made love to you and you left me!” She hugged herself harder, trying to ignore that painful figure of speech. “I knew you would want to marry me, Cliff, for all the wrong reasons. How could I accept that? The night we spent together only fueled my desire to leave.” “For all the wrong reasons? Our passion fueled your desire to leave me?” “You misunderstand me,” she cried. “I do not want to hurt you. But you ruined me, you would decide to marry me. Honor is not the right reason, not for me.” He stepped closer, his gaze piercing. “Do you even know my reasons, Amanda?” “Yes, I do.” Somehow she tilted up her chin, yet she felt tears falling. “You are the most honorable man I have ever met. I know my letter hardly stated the depth of my feelings, but after all you have done, and all your family has done, you must surely know that leaving you was very difficult.” “The depth of your feelings,” he said. His nostrils flared, his gaze brilliant. “Do you refer to the friendship you wish to maintain—your affection for me?” He was cold and sarcastic, taking a final step toward her. He towered over her now. She wanted to step backward, away from him, but she held her ground. “I didn’t think you would wish to continue our friendship. But it is so important to me. I will beg you to forgive me so we can remain dear friends.” “I don’t want to be a dear friend,” he said harshly. “And goddamn it, do not tell me you felt as a friend does when you were in my bed!” She stiffened. “That’s not fair.” “You left me. That’s not fair,” he shot back, giving no quarter. “After all you have done, it wasn’t fair, I agree completely. But I was desperate.” He shook his head. “I will never believe you are desperate to be a shopkeeper. And what woman is truly independent? Only a spinster or a widow. You are neither.” Slowly, hating her words, she said, “I had planned on the former.” “Like hell,” he spat. She accepted the dread filling her then. “You despise me now.” “Are you truly so ignorant, so oblivious? How on earth could I ever despise you?” he exclaimed, leaning closer. “Would I be standing here demanding marriage if I despised you?” She started. Her heart skipped wildly; she tried to ignore it. She whispered, “Why did you really pursue me?” “I am a de Warenne,” he said, straightening. “As my father said so recently, there is no stopping us, not if it is a question of love.

(The rape of “ladies” was strictly taboo, but this protection did not apply to women and girls without social standing.) The fear of rape, as well as the actual experience, gave a unique twist to women’s experience of the Revolutionary War.

These great troubles, although affecting the rich along with the poor, did not affect rich and poor alike. The rich, when pillaged, had more to fall back on. “Ladies” were rarely raped. When loyalists were exiled at the end of the war, the well-to-do went to England or island plantations, the others to cold and often barren regions in Canada. Commissioned officers, when taken prisoner, were generally placed on parole and allowed to continue with everyday life, while privates languished in the hulls of prison ships. Few rich people and many poor people suffered from diseases related to the unsanitary conditions of camp or prison life.

Always be a lady: “That meant always conduct yourself civilly, don’t let emotions like anger or envy get in your way. . . . Don’t snap back in anger. Anger, resentment, indulgence in recriminations waste time and sap energy.” “Hold fast to your convictions and your self-respect.” Last but definitely not least: always be independent.

What the women's movement of the 1970s did, ultimately, was not to shrink marriage, or the desire for male companionship, as a reality for many women, but rather enlarge the *rest* of the world to such an extent that marriage's shadow became far less likely to blot out the sun of other possibilities. As legal scholar Rachel Moran writes, "One of the great ironies of second-wave feminism is that it ignored single women as a distinct constituency while creating the conditions that increasingly enabled women to forego marriage.

Men are seeking a divinity to serve and adore. But the reality is, most women are so disconnected from their sensual feminine self that, as men, the only option we now have is to turn inwards to our own anima, or turn to other men for sensual feminine affection. A lot of men are becoming accustomed to embracing romance from the same sex, others opted to having sex with ANY woman they can get to console themselves. Problem is, we are living in a generation of women that are constantly protesting “Accept me for who I am!” IN THEIR MASCULINE ENERGY. They don’t know what it truly means to be a woman. But there’s a new breed of men that are awakened and of high quality in every respect of the word, and they’re not willing to settle for any woman that simply wants to be accepted for who she is. They want a woman who wants to be challenged for growth purposes. “I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” ~Anaïs Nin Listen ladies, you have not yet fully become a woman if no man is seeking to serve and adore you. Now, understand the meaning of ‘serve and adore’. This means that a man has to NOT want to see you struggle in any way, shape or form that he can change for the better. So, if you’re still struggling in ANY way that a man can change for the better for you as a female, then you have not yet become a full grown WOMAN. The ultimate sign that you’ve become a full grown woman is when you are constantly being served and adored, especially by an emotionally healthy masculine man, without you having to ask. So tell me, are you a woman yet? "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." ~Simone de Beauvoir Too bad that so many of you are so hellbent on fighting to be ‘yourselves’ (masculine selves), yet that very ‘self’ isn’t serving you like you need to be served. For many of you, fighting to be ‘yourselves’ is, for the most part, fighting to be independent of the masculine and of your divine purpose which is to be a WOMAN. It’s easier to be disagreeable than it is to surrender to your true calling. A lot of women are just fighting to be a nonentity and they don’t even know it. They resent the divine masculine with passion, not realizing that it is the ultimate key to fully unlocking their WOMANHOOD.

Many of you, ladies, confuse being sexually liberated with being in touch with your sensuality.

It is true that when single, I swiftly chased off any men whose threatened disruption of my Saturday mornings, which I set aside for breakfast on my own and aa ridiculous apartment-cleaning ritual that involved dancing, I found too irritating to bear. I felt smothered by suitors who called too often, claustrophobic around those who wanted to see me too frequently, and bugged by the ones who didn't want to try the bars or restaurants I liked to go to, or who pressured me to cut out of work earlier than I wanted to cut out. I got used to doing things my way; I *liked* doing things my way. These men just mucked it all up. I knew how I sounded, even in my own head: picky, petty, and narcissistic. I worried about the monster of self-interest that I had become. In retrospect, however, I see that the fierce protection of my space, schedule, and solitude served as prophylactic against relationships I didn't really want to be in. Maybe I was too hard on those guys, but I am also certain that I wasn't very interested in them. I am certain of that because when, after six years without a relationship that lasted beyond three dates, I met a man I was interested in and didn't think twice about Saturday mornings, about breaking my weirdo routines or leaving work early; I was happy every single time he called.

As Naomi Gerstel...told the New York Times, 'It's the unmarried, with or without kids, who are more likely to take care of other people...It's not having children that isolates people. It's marriage.' Never-married women in particular are far more likely to be politically active, signing petitions, volunteering time, and attending rallies. Eric Klinenberg has argued that people who live alone are more likely to attend lectures and be out in the world, while married adults tend to focus their energies within their own homes, perhaps volunteering for their own children's schools, but not necessarily for organizations that do not benefit themselves or their kin.

Perhaps, if a future included more communal care between women, and if we saw models that flourished, those communal agreements could become more reliable and grow to contain more people, creating an expansive and resilient shield, in many ways more flexible than marriage, against the brutal realities of life and death, alone and together.

In Cassandra’s case, she was not merely independent, he now knew, but irreverent. Irresponsible. Irritating. She was probably guilty of all the bad behavior all the ir-words in the language alluded to.

Don’t you wish to marry?” At Pandora’s lack of response, she pressed impatiently, “Well?” Pandora glanced at Kathleen for guidance. “Should I say the conventional thing or the honest thing?” Lady Berwick replied before Kathleen was able. “Answer honestly, child.” “In that case,” Pandora said, “No, I don’t wish to marry, ever. I like men quite well—at least the ones I’ve been acquainted with—but I shouldn’t like to have to obey a husband and serve his needs. It wouldn’t make me at all happy to have a dozen children, and stay at home knitting while he goes out romping with his friends. I would rather be independent.” The room was silent. Lady Berwick’s expression did not change, nor did she blink even once as she stared at Pandora. It seemed as if a wordless battle were being waged between the authoritative older woman and the rebellious girl. Finally Lady Berwick said, “You must have read Tolstoy.” Pandora blinked, clearly caught off guard by the unexpected statement. “I have,” she admitted, looking mystified. “How did you know?” “No young woman wants to marry after reading Tolstoy. That is why I never allowed either of my daughters to read Russian novels.” “How are Dolly and Bettina?” Kathleen burst in, trying to change the subject by asking after the countess’s daughters. Neither Lady Berwick nor Pandora would be sidetracked. “Tolstoy isn’t the only reason I don’t wish to marry,” Pandora said. “Whatever your reasons, they are unsound. I will explain to you later why you do wish to marry. Furthermore, you are an unconventional girl, and you must learn to conceal it. There is no happiness for any individual, man or woman, who does not dwell within the broad zone of average.” Pandora regarded her with baffled interest. “Yes, ma’am.” Privately Helen suspected that the two women were looking forward to a ripping argument.

During the years in which I had come of age, American women had pioneered an entirely new kind of adulthood, one that was *not* kicked off by marriage, but by years and, in many cases, whole lives, lived on their own, outside matrimony

The Honourable Lady confuses the American people with American policy.... It is the very generosity of the American people which makes it possible for their policy-makers to confuse the trick them into believing that American is the God-father of the world. That is nonsense, and the American people should know it. If they don't get to know it, then the continuation of their present policy will make them the most despised people on earth. I know the Americans are generous. I know American policy is 'generous'. But there you have two different things. What the policy-makers expect in return for their dollar bounty is political co-operation against Russia and any other nation they like to call Red! I would remind the Honourable Lady that it is their anti-Red benevolence that is universal. In China, American capital is still spending more to create the military dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek than it did to assist China against Japan. With so many other nations in Europe and Asia broken by the war, American assistance with money and machinery almost means life itself. For national existence however, American policy has a price. It offers unconditional money, machinery, and arms to any nation that will denounce Russian and Communism and pronounce American as the God of all free nations. Even in defeated Italy, Germany, and Japan, American policy supports any sect that is anti-Red and anti-Russian. There is no end to this white American morality, it has its wide wide arms across the globe, its long fingers in every nation, and its loud voice in every ear,... Why talk about Russia!... If we must talk here about interference by one nation in another's affairs, let us talk of this American interference in every nation's affairs. Is there a nation on the face of the earth to-day except Russian and her so-called satellites which can hold up its head and say it is independent of the American dollar? We are all on our knees, and we won't admit it. Our American masters do not need arms and occupation; capital is enough. Capital is enough to strangle the earth if only it has the support of its victims. We are asked to support it—to bring others to their knees: France, Jugo-slavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, all of Eastern Europe, Greece, Turkey and Iran. The world over, we are asked to replace so-called Communism with the dollar. That dollar means governorship by those who will sell themselves and their nation for a smell of wealth and a grip of power. Such men are international. American has no monopoly on evil and stupid men. American simply has the wealth for bigger evil. The rest of us follow her according to our own evil and our own stupidity. British policy to-day is as bad as America's despite our Socialist Government.

I can’t force people to believe. They’re either searching or they aren’t. No matter what sense of misery grips someone, whatever depth of shame, there’s still some rebel independence coursing through their veins. We’re all guilty of that, of course.

Hannaford: Please, dear lady, don't

And even though it may offend you, I feel bound to say that the majority also of English people are uncouth and unrefined, whereas we Russian folk can recognise beauty wherever we see it, and are always eager to cultivate the same.  But to distinguish beauty of soul and personal originality there is needed far more independence and freedom than is possessed by our women, especially by our younger ladies.  At all events, they need more experience.  For instance, this Mlle. Polina—­pardon me, but the name has passed my lips, and I cannot well recall it—­is taking a very long time to make up her mind to prefer you to Monsieur de Griers.  She may respect you, she may become your friend, she may open out her heart to you; yet over that heart there will be reigning that loathsome villain, that mean and petty usurer, De Griers.  This will be due to obstinacy and self-love—­to the fact that De Griers once appeared to her in the transfigured guise of a marquis, of a disenchanted and ruined liberal who was doing his best to help her family and the frivolous old General; and, although these transactions of his have since been exposed, you will find that the exposure has made no impression upon her mind. 

A Lady wrote on a Forum "after my body gets old or not and collapses my thoughts which r electrical impulses will cease my body blood etc will melt back into the soil....my last breath which sustains life will go back into the atmosphere so we will be around until our galaxy implodes..." I concur. Who says we die...? I found the epiphany a long time ago that nature is our supreme being and we are going to be here Forever. You die and the grass feeds off your flesh, the cow eats the grass, your children eat the cow and then your children dies and the cycle goes on again. Just as how the carbon dioxide you breathe out is what plants take in and we survive on the oxygen they give out. We are not separate and distinct from nature. We are one. God is a metaphor for the Universe. We are the universe and the universe is in us. It is evident in how the dead meat of an animal or the offspring of a plant gives us life in the form of food then we die and our body deteriorates to fertilize the soil so the plants can survive. The universe is everything. The air that we inhale, the various plants that cures ailments and alleviates various symptoms of diseases. It Should not be cryptic or alien to us to understand how a plant cell completely independent of us can affect our health in such a positive way. That is because the universe is in every one of us.

My young Lady, If you find yourself in a hurry to get out of your parent house to be independent and free from their grips then you better be born again. The answer is not MARRIAGE. Cry day and night till you want nothing than the Lord. Till all you think of is Him. to be His prisoner, to be surrendered fully to His will. HOLY GHOST FILLED ‪#‎Or‬ you will find yourself in a real prison where you are being ruled by a man who is ruled by the letter and not the spirit. (He will quote the Bible to you before maltreating you).

If a woman is not wed, it's not because she made a set of active choices, but rather that she has not been selected -- chosen, desired, valued enough.

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I’ve often suspected that, as well as being symptomatic of the persistence of unequal divisions of domestic labor and responsibilities, contemporary opting out is also a symptom of the midlife burnout after having lived decades on one’s own in an increasingly work-centered culture.

Celia’s instructions would remain carved in her daughter’s memory. Ruth was to always be a lady. “That meant always conduct yourself civilly, don’t let emotions like anger or envy get in your way,” RBG later explained. “Hold fast to your convictions and your self-respect, be a good teacher, but don’t snap back in anger. Anger, resentment, indulgence in recriminations waste time and sap energy.” Few mothers of that time gave their daughters Celia’s second piece of advice: Always be independent.

a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen.” Yet

And many women, whether or not they are politically active, ideologically committed feminists, or whether they have simply considered the lives of their mothers and foremothers, understand, under their skin, that at the heart of independence lies money.

Free women of color were permitted to inherit, own property, businesses, and slaves; it was not expected that they would marry. The comparative economic and sexual liberty experienced by these libre women provided them some incentive to steer clear of what free Maria Gentilly, who, after a husband squandered her estate, sued to recover it in the 1790s,17 called “the yoke of matrimony.

a new model of aspirational upper-class femininity and attitude about female purpose that historians now refer to as the Cult of Domesticity.

wealthy, white American wife, relieved of her responsibilities for at-home production, became responsible for scrupulously maintaining a domicile that served as the feminized inverse of the newly bustling, masculine public space.

Published in 1829, The Young Lady’s Book asserted that “Whatever situation of life a woman is placed, from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind, are required from her.”19 Everyday tasks were made more time-consuming and taxing, so as to better fill the days of women who might otherwise grow restive and attempt to leave the house.

a social structure that relied on domesticity as its principle mode of female control;