By the end of the nineteenth century, the country was awash in fears of insurrection by increasingly independent populations of women and newly freed slaves.
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 Hill...
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 figure...
Metropolises like Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Denver boast single-dwelling households that comprise more than 40 percent of their total populations. According to Census data,1 Susa...
Znaimer asks Steinem what she wants to be when you grow up. Free, Steinem replies, and old . . . and a little mean.18
White men have had a nearly exclusive grip on political, economic, social, and sexual power in the United States, despite being only around a third of its population. The way that a minority power pro...
The lion’s share of finding love is luck, in tandem with privilege, since key to propitious circumstance is opportunity: the opportunities on offer to us when we are born, the resources and options ma...
Some women went west themselves. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller reports that prior to 1900, around 10 percent of land claims in two Colorado counties were filed by unmarried women, some of whom—like S...
Responding to Susan B. Anthony’s temperance work in 1853, the New York Sun published a screed noting that, The quiet duties of daughter, wife or mother are not congenial to those hermaphrodite spirits...
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 s...
One Reformation-era proverb, which would be cited in different forms by John Donne and William Shakespeare, proclaimed that women who died unmarried were doomed to lead apes in hell.
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 witho...
In 1969, University of Chicago sociology professor Marlene Dixon wrote that the institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women . . .
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...
A new reality was setting in: If women could live independently, many would do so, and as they did, men would become less central to economic security, social standing, sexual life, and, as it turned...
While the feminist movement of the 1970s was in part a direct response to these conditions of early and pervasive marriage, the ironic side effect was that single women had almost no place in the unde...
In 1634, a bill was introduced to the House of Delegates in Maryland proposing that land owned by a spinster must be forfeited, should she fail to marry within seven years.7 Almost
For young women and men who had never seen blatant misogyny before, who had never heard a woman called a cunt or seen the size of a senator’s thighs referred to on a T-shirt, these in-your-face exampl...
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 thei...
We are never forced to consider that rage—and not just stoicism, sadness, or strength—were behind the actions of the few women’s heroes we’re ever taught about in school, from Harriet Tubman to Susan...