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
The more distant white women are from the benefits of and investments in traditional heterosexual marriage, the less likely they are to support Republican presidential candidates, i.e., candidates of...
Tar Baby’s Jadine Childs, whose determination to flout gendered and racial expectations gets her cast out from her world,
Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the Western territories in which women staked out land were places in which woman suffrage would precede passage of the nineteenth amendment.
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...
By 2013, about half of first-time births were to unmarried women; for women under thirty, it was almost 60 percent.
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...
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...
You want women around to reflect their experiences and see a female candidate through their particular prism.
To point out that an undue amount of attention is regularly paid to the internal conflicts within feminism is not to diminish the seriousness and centrality of those conflicts: they are real, and unde...
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
The vitriolic hatred of Clinton was sometimes only slightly less muted on the left, in part because of the sticky truth of her position: she did have power, she was one of the exceptional women to hav...
In 2012, unmarried women made up a remarkable 23 percent of the electorate. Almost a quarter of votes were cast by women without husbands,
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...
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.
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...
The wholesale revision of what female life might entail is also, by many measures, the invention of independent female adulthood. The
Perfect servants of god, family, and community. Women without husbands were often expected to care for the sick and destitute within their communities, and were expected to care for aging parents as m...