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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Of course, some people's decadence is other people's liberation; the exhaustion with child-bearing a child-rearing that Douthat finds so troubling is the weariness of women who've borne the children a...
Single women will get us closer to gender equality, and that will take many forms, including a reimagining of what families entail and what it means to have a full female life. Also, their presence wi...
The recognition that Americans’ rights should neither be circumscribed nor made more expansive based simply on whether they were wed.
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...
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...
Progress in America takes a punishingly long time; but it also happens in fits and bursts, sometimes in reaction to terrible, deadening, deeply damaging setbacks. We are in one of those moments now, a...
America’s first voters were not just white men, but white men who owned property; in England in 1869, unmarried women with property had been granted the right to vote in local elections.
Women are living independently, but we don't yet have the social and economic policies behind us to support that independence.
Women, perhaps especially those who have lived untethered from the energy-sucking and identity-sapping institution of marriage in its older forms, have helped to drive social progress of this country...
William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England interpreted coverture as meaning that the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorpora...
This presents another wrinkle. As one nurse wondered, in a marriage class attended by journalist Katherine Boo in The Marriage Cure, her 2003 story on pro-marriage initiatives in Oklahoma, How do you...