In 1865, the governor of Massachusetts proposed the transport of some of the 38,000 excess women in his state to Oregon and California, where women were in short supply.
Here was the idea of service and moral uplift brought into disruptive relief: What if women, in service to greater and moral good, did not submit themselves to a larger power structure, but instead or...
Friends did not form isolated dyads but were normally part of highly integrated networks
For most Americans, work is the center of life, not because they yearn for it to be, but because it has to be. Beneath
Electric street lamps had come to cities around the country, creating white ways that made it feel safer for women to be on the streets at night. This development changed the kinds of jobs women could...
By 1996 Nora Ephron was telling a graduating class at Wellesley, Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back.… Understand: every...
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...
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.
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...
Some of the Bard’s feistiest and most loquacious heroines, including Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, ceased to have any lines after their dramatically conclusive marriage alliances.
Other colonies began to recognize that giving land to women undermined their dependent role
Education pioneers including Horace Mann and the never-married Catharine Beecher explicitly conceived of teaching as a job for spinsters, an occupation that could ease the stigma of being unwed27 and...
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.
To fight her, and her predecessor—another history-making challenge to white masculinity—the Republican Party had chosen a figure who embodied every one of the strains of denigration and disrespect tha...
The lingering assumption—born of the same expectations that I had chafed at as a kid, reading novels—was that the natural state of adult womanhood involved being legally bound to a man.
Of course, single people are lonely. Of course. We have all been lonely. For moments, for days, for endless, chilled seasons of sequestration. For some women, the loneliness may stem from, or be exace...