In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Connecticut, and New Haven during the seventeenth century, unmarried people were required to live with families that were well governed by a church-going, land-owning...
Conservatives: a complete rethinking of who women are and who men are and, therefore, also of what family is and who holds dominion within it . . . and outside it. The expanded presence of women as in...
This book is about how anger works for men in ways that it does not for women, how men like both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can wage yelling campaigns and be credited with understanding--and comp...
The Supreme Court had made birth control legal for married couples in the 1965 case, Griswold v. Connecticut, basing its decision on the opinion that a ban violated the privacy of the marital bedroom’...
Suffragists had often staged political pageants in which they wore sashes emblazoned Votes for Women. But 1921, the year following the ratification of the 19th Amendment, brought a perversion of this...
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 w...
Coverture encompassed what legal historian Ariela Dubler has called a stunning array of status-defining legal restrictions that prevented wives from keeping their own wages, entering contracts or brin...
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...
With voluntary sterility among married men and women of good life . . . If the best classes do not reproduce themselves the nation will of course go down. Roosevelt’s distinctions were rooted in the r...
Black women were working all day (often scrubbing the homes of white women), it was impossible for them also to fulfill the at-home maternal ideal for which white women were being celebrated. If black...
This relative parity in coverage, the both-sides-ism that defined media coverage of the race, was a reflection of the lie at the center of everything. Because the reality was that Trump’s racist and s...
The message that an active sex life was not simply a new freedom but, in fact, an imperative, a form of validating the worth of young women, has been one of the more convoluted messages to emerge in t...
One of the favorite conservative themes is that the cure for poverty is more marriage and earlier marriage. We hear that all the time; there have been billions of dollars now, between the Bush adminis...
In a 2011 study, researchers at the University of Missouri explored the pressures faced by middle-class, never-married women. They found that these women experienced a heightened sense of deviant visi...
There is a kind of woman who is economically powerful, professionally powerful, who threatens a white male grip on power that has a long historic precedent in the country. Independent women living out...
Women are living independently, but we don't yet have the social and economic policies behind us to support that independence.
The recognition that Americans’ rights should neither be circumscribed nor made more expansive based simply on whether they were wed.
You want women around to reflect their experiences and see a female candidate through their particular prism.
Typically only the incivility of the less powerful toward the more powerful can be widely understood as such, and thus be subject to such intense censure. Which is what made #metoo so fraught and revo...
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 rela...