The ability to narratively flip the dynamics of aggression and abuse—to view the less powerful as a menace to the aggressors—has been key to how white patriarchal structures have persisted.
The ability to feel the anger and convey it to others is itself the transformative experience for many women. Women’s anger spurs creativity and drives innovation in politics and social change, and it...
Steinem’s most powerful gift was her ability to synthesize radical sentiments into appealingly pithy, era-defining sound bites.
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...
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...
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 . . .
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
Black women got stuck with the hottest, dirtiest and most unsafe jobs in factories, and as Giddings writes, they were paid from 10 to 60 percent less than ill-paid White women.
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...