REBECCA TRAISTER

Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.

Obama has proved to be particularly adept at using the media to disseminate his administration's messages, but he is a masterful orator. Bill Clinton, too.

Our government and its social policies, its tax breaks, the way school days work, so much of the country we live in is built for married couples with a male breadwinner and a female domestic laborer. Government needs to be massively altered in order to serve this population.

In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent.

During childbearing years, changing jobs - even for a fundamentally better gig - can be a very bad idea. Those prime childbearing years - mid-twenties to early forties - overlap precisely with prime professional years. This is when employees are most attractive to new employers, when they should be able to zip up ladders with the most alacrity.

'The Cosby Show' was a show about black people that was fundamentally and unequivocally friendly to whiteness and to white people. The Huxtables had white friends.

More women than ever are having babies at the peak of their careers. When will we stop punishing them for it?

Since the late 19th century, the median age of first marriage for women had fluctuated between 20 and 22. This had been the shape, pattern and definition of female life.

Like everyone else, I can barely take the waves of embarrassment that come with watching someone do something so badly. Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem, Sofia Coppola acting in 'The Godfather: Part III,' Sarah Palin talking about Russia - they all create the same level of eyeball-squinching discomfort.

After Emancipation, black women married earlier and more often because they were legally free to do so for the first time, and that was true until after World War II. But middle-class white women married less and later.

'The Daily Show,' which was created by women, Lizz Winstead and Madeleine Smithberg, has earned quite a bit of ink for the fact that it's written mostly by men.

One of the things that gets confused often is the difference between marriage and good marriage. Marriage is a theoretical concept of the institution, and 'you should be married,' is actually meaningless. Marriage is pretty meaningless without the notion of having a specific person to whom you are married.

The diminishment of southern contests is the kind of veiled racist rhetoric that Bill Clinton deployed memorably in South Carolina in 2008, and which does not look any more attractive on Bernie - the guy whose campaign is centered on the premise that he plays cleaner and more progressive politics than his opponents.

The first big impact that feminism in the 1960s and '70s had was a big divorce boom in the '70s and '80s. That, in part, had an impact on how the children of that divorce boom viewed marriage.

Women's roles in the movies remain, for the most part, girlfriends, mothers, wives.

Throughout America's history, the start of adult life for women - whatever else it might have been destined to include - had been typically marked by marriage.

It's a controversial issue: many feminists reasonably worry that by taking the concentration off gender as an independent locus of oppression, we dilute the strength of a women's movement, or of women's rights advocacy.

There are a whole bunch of structural and systemic factors we need to address in order to move away from the model in which women really are still dependent on men.

Camille Hanks, whose upper-middle-class parents both had college degrees, was a student at the University of Maryland planning on a teaching career when she met Bill Cosby, who was seven years her senior.

Yes, there have been women in comedy. Moms Mabley was one of the earliest. She was an African American comedian; she often dressed up as an older, disheveled woman.

'Marriage' was not that big a deal, to be honest! I mean, it makes life easier for technical reasons: insurance, next-of-kin stuff, joint tax filing, etc. The real shocker was falling in love with the man I'm married to. I was 32 when we met, and I had really never been in a functional relationship before, had never been deeply in love.

There is not a special place in Hell for people who didn't support Sarah Palin. Do you know what I mean? It's ridiculous. And there is certainly not a special place in Hell for women who don't support Hillary Clinton.

I think that technology - computers and smart phones and 24-hour availability - often leaves me, and others I know, feeling blank and depressed at the end of a day. I also believe that hyped expectations for raising children leaves many women and men feeling as if their days are a blur of carpools and play-groups and tutors.

The vast majority of women who marry still take their husband's name. And I'm not vilifying that behavior! But that's a pattern where women are truly still taking on their husbands' identities.

Though Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton 11 years after Camille Hanks married Bill Cosby, and after having earned her own law degree, the terms of her marriage were also shaped in their own way by a presumption of a husband's centrality and a wife's subsidiary nature.