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...
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 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...
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.
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 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.
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...
By 2013, about half of first-time births were to unmarried women; for women under thirty, it was almost 60 percent.
The wholesale revision of what female life might entail is also, by many measures, the invention of independent female adulthood. The
Feminist Sheila Cronan wrote, Since marriage constitutes slavery for women . . . Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
More sharply, Steinem argued that marriage rendered women half people,
Later, I would learn that Shakespeare’s comedies ended with wedlock and his tragedies with death, making marriage death’s narrative equivalent and supporting my childhood hunch about its ability to sh...
In 2012, unmarried women made up a remarkable 23 percent of the electorate. Almost a quarter of votes were cast by women without husbands,