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...
So, while women who have remained single, on purpose or by accident, may have retained some power and self-determination, they rarely, in the past, escaped social censure or enjoyed economic independe...
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, 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...
To be clear, the vast increase in the number of single women is to be celebrated not because singleness is in and of itself a better or more desirable state than coupledom. The revolution is in the ex...
The only way some feminists were able to absorb the notion of a woman who didn’t necessarily want to marry a man was to understand her as homosexual.
The only way some feminists were able to absorb the notion of a woman who didn’t necessarily want to marry a man was to understand her as homosexual. At
Tar Baby’s Jadine Childs, whose determination to flout gendered and racial expectations gets her cast out from her world,
In many ways, the emotional and economic self-sufficiency of unmarried life is more demanding than the state we have long acknowledged as (married) maturity. Being on one’s own means shouldering one’s...
Clinton was the first candidate for the job of first lady to have a life that reflected post-second-wave America and the many working women who made their careers and raised their families here.
Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen. Yet for all of this,...
And, in 1974, Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, making it easier for women to secure credit cards, bank loans, and mortgages, and to buy their own homes.
And as writer Nora Ephron explained in a 1996 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, about her own graduating class of 1962: We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marr...
Is a loud and livid objection to the kinds of control that have long been in place in a nation built by white men who, when they angrily broke free of imperialist control themselves, promptly encoded...
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...
We must train ourselves to even be able to see and hear anger from women and understand it not only as rational, but as politically weighty. It is, in fact, an anger on behalf of the nation’s suppress...
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...
They seemed to confirm Simone de Beauvoir’s observation about real life women, which I would also, eventually, uncover: that, by definition, we are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from...
These characters might not have wed, but their lack of husbands constrained and defined them, just as surely as marriage would have. They