The dream of a more orderly world.
Feminist Sheila Cronan wrote, Since marriage constitutes slavery for women . . . Freedom for women cannot be won without the abolition of marriage.
Calls for civility are designed to protect the powerful by casting them as victims.
A new model of aspirational upper-class femininity and attitude about female purpose that historians now refer to as the Cult of Domesticity.
Trump’s scorn for women was on prominent display from the start: he called them pigs, dogs, evaluated them on scales of one to ten, had run beauty pageants, been accused by his first wife of rape, and...
The impulse toward liberation isn’t inoculated against by strict conservative backgrounds; it’s often inculcated by them.
The divorce boom had a huge impact on never or not-yet married women. First, it created more single people, helping to slowly destigmatize the figure of the woman without a ring on her finger. It also...
The connection women were feeling in shared fury was its own home, its own reward, its own community, and for some the pushback to their activism, the losses it incurred—money, domestic comforts, rela...
Stone kept her last name, and generations of women who have done the same have been referred to as Lucy Stoners.
Settlement Houses were, in many cases, designed as sustainable places where single and divorced women might find community and a respectable life structure outside marriage; they were also a breeding...
Published in 1829, The Young Lady’s Book asserted that Whatever situation of life a woman is placed, from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humil...
Perhaps the reason that women’s anger is so broadly denigrated—treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational—is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn t...
One year later, the court ruled in Roe v. Wade that abortion was legal. The decision affected married and single women equally.
Note on Interviews and Attribution
Men, including a former senator, told me of how shaken they were to hear from their wives and friends and mothers and coworkers about the ubiquity of sexual assault and harassment, how they had had th...
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...
I’ve often suspected that, as well as being symptomatic of the persistence of unequal divisions of domestic labor and responsibilities, contemporary opting out is also a symptom of the midlife burnout...
In fact, in 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent.1 And that median age of first marriage that had remained between twenty and twenty-two from 1890 to 1980?2...
In 1993, Bill Clinton appointed Joycelyn Elders, an outspoken advocate of humane drug laws and abortion rights, as Surgeon General of the United States. The following year, at a United Nations confere...
In 1919, Congress passed the 19th Amendment; it was ratified by the states in 1920. For the first time in America’s history, its female citizens could legally (if not practically, in the Jim Crow Sout...