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...
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...
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 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 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 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 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...
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...
Single women helped put Barack Obama back in the White House; they voted for him by 67 to 31 percent, while married women voted for Romney.
Single women foot more of their own bills, be they necessities like food and housing, or luxuries like cable and vacations; they pay for their own transportation. They do not enjoy the tax breaks or i...
Russian-Polish immigrant and labor organizer and suffragist Rose Schneiderman, who would never marry. Her 1911 speech, in which she implored, The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too b...
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. Women could vote in Wy...
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...
Letisha also misses New York, and what it offered her as a single mother, even at the same time that it made it impossible for her to stay. In New York, everybody on the corner knew who I was, she sai...
It's true that increasing one's number of sexual partners almost certainly increases the risk of sexually transmitted disease and of unintended pregnancy. It increases the chance of having your soul s...
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.
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...