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.
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.
Calls for civility are designed to protect the powerful by casting them as victims.
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...
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,...
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...
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 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...
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...
In his 1873 Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for the Girls, Harvard professor Edward Clarke argued that the female brain, if engaged in the same course of study as the male, would become overburdene...
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...
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.
Humor can be such a good way to hide anger at racist, sexist degradation and to challenge white male authority sideways—without risking as much direct blowback—that it perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise...
German scientist Carl Vogt wrote, in 1864, The grown-up Negro partakes, as regards his intellectual faculties, of the nature of the child, the female, and the senile white.
Friedan did not include black women in her vision. Black
For most Americans, work is the center of life, not because they yearn for it to be, but because it has to be. Beneath