Gay marriage, inherently and ideally based on love and companionship, and not on gender-defined social and economic power, will be key to our ability to re-imagined straight marriage.
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,...
Those assumptions are often undergirded by an unconscious conviction that, if a woman is not wed, it’s not because she’s made a set of active choices, but rather that she has not been selected—chosen,...
The vision of Hill’s being grilled by a panel of white men had on America’s representative politics. In 1991, there had been only two women serving in the United States Senate, an embarrassing circums...
White patriarchal minority rule was established by America’s founders when they encoded slavery into our founding documents and built our electoral apparatus around its protection. It was strengthened...
Whether those who worried were concerned about too many babies or too few babies, women living in poverty or women enjoying power, they all seemed to return to the same conclusion: Marriage must be re...
When we meet other women who seem happier, more successful, and more confident than we are, it's all too easy to hate them for it...when you meet a women who is intimidating witty, stylish, beautiful,...
When Susan B. Anthony began earning a salary as an elementary school teacher, at twenty-six, she had already turned down two marriage proposals in her quest to remain unmarried. She purchased for hers...
The other side of the anger is the hope. We wouldn't be angry if we didn't believe that it could be better.
The ideas that undergirded Single Blessedness were that women unmarried by chance or by choice had their own acceptably submissive purpose. The singly blessed were presumed to be pious vessels whose 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...
Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.
More sharply, Steinem argued that marriage rendered women half people,
Men literally have no idea how to even legitimately recognize or name our anger—largely because we don’t either. This is new territory for everybody. Women’s rage has been so sublimated for so long th...
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.
Between 1934 and 1962, the government subsidized $120 billion in new housing; 98 percent of it for white families.
Because while it surely felt cathartic to see it all laid bare, even briefly, the view did not undo the damage. We could not go back in time and have the story of Hillary Clinton be written by people...
The weird possibility of marriage loomed. It loomed, in part, because there weren’t very many appealing models of what other kinds of female life might take its place.