By 2013, about half of first-time births were to unmarried women; for women under thirty, it was almost 60 percent.
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...
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...
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...
These characters might not have wed, but their lack of husbands constrained and defined them, just as surely as marriage would have. They
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 the same period, scientists around the world were working to justify the continued subjugation of women and nonwhites by making medical claims as to their inferior capabilities.
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,...
The wholesale revision of what female life might entail is also, by many measures, the invention of independent female adulthood. The
You want women around to reflect their experiences and see a female candidate through their particular prism.
Today, only around 20 percent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are wed,4 compared to the nearly 60 percent in 1960.
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...
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...