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...
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...
The deplorable conditions experienced by millions of female workers were at the roots of the labor struggle, which would be spurred forward in large part by unconventionally wed, or unwed, women.
The Comstock Act of 1873, along with a series of state laws implemented soon after, made it illegal to distribute any materials deemed obscene, including birth control and educational material about c...
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...
Of the few women who managed to leave a historical trace, usually from wealthier castes, a great number turn out to have been single, or, at the very least, single for the period during which they car...
In 2012, unmarried women made up a remarkable 23 percent of the electorate. Almost a quarter of votes were cast by women without husbands,
Crucially, many of those radically single and late-married women were the ones who were able to devote their unmarried, nonmaternal lives to changing the nation’s power structures in ways that might b...
Cities have long provided safer harbor for, and have in turn been shaped by, single women.
But, for the unmarried, legal abortion provided yet another tool to protect their ability to live outside of marriage.
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...
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...
Feminist Sheila Cronan wrote, Since marriage constitutes slavery for women . . . Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.
A social structure that relied on domesticity as its principle mode of female control;
When people call single women selfish for the act of tending to themselves, it’s important to remember that the very acknowledgment that women have selves that exist independently of others, and espec...
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...
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 journey toward legal marriage for gays and lesbians may seem at odds with what looks like a flight from marriage by heterosexuals. But in fact, they are part of the same project: a dismantling of...
The consumerist cycle both depended on and strengthened capitalism, and thus worked to allay other postwar anxieties about nuclear attack and Communism, both of which had become linked to fears about...
Stone kept her last name, and generations of women who have done the same have been referred to as Lucy Stoners.