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...
Single female life is not prescription, but its opposite: liberation.
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...
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...
If there are broad distinctions to be made between the nature of same-sex female pairs versus heterosexual ones, it’s that the same-sex unions have not entailed one of their members being automaticall...
I returned again and again to a proclamation made by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, nearly two centuries earlier, that if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the healt...
Friends did not form isolated dyads but were normally part of highly integrated networks
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...
Andrea Dworkin famously commented that Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. In
And in order for a new white wokeness to be integrated effectively into a contemporary movement, it must not take it over; there must be acknowledgment that white women are late to the party.
Among the largely unacknowledged truths of female life is that women’s primary, foundational, formative relationships are as likely to be with each other as they are with the men we’ve been told since...
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.
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.
Yesterday, a beautiful day… I was talking to [an older] woman who said that she wouldn’t want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn’t want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees...
Yes, many women who had pursued careers and not families experienced loneliness. But the question of whether that loneliness would be ameliorated by marriage
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.