But embedded in the structure of both literature and life was the reality that for women, adulthood—and with it, the end of the story—was marriage.
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...
As we gather here today, Clinton said, the fiftieth woman to leave this Earth is orbiting overhead. If we can blast fifty women into space, we will someday launch a woman into the White House.
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...
A new model of aspirational upper-class femininity and attitude about female purpose that historians now refer to as the Cult of Domesticity.
Yes, many women who had pursued careers and not families experienced loneliness. But the question of whether that loneliness would be ameliorated by marriage
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 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...
What was so disruptive about Steinem, and other women who were living like her, whether or not they had men on their arms, was that it seemed she just really enjoyed being free.
The impulse toward liberation isn’t inoculated against by strict conservative backgrounds; it’s often inculcated by them.
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...
Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.
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
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...
But not only did Trump seem to surge ahead in spite of his hatred and dismissal of nonwhite non-men, his supporters seemed to love him because of it. Even those who claimed he’d never be president cre...
Between 1934 and 1962, the government subsidized $120 billion in new housing; 98 percent of it for white families.
Andrea Dworkin famously commented that Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. In