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...
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
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 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.
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.
For most Americans, work is the center of life, not because they yearn for it to be, but because it has to be. Beneath
Even those who claimed he’d never be president credited him with reaching voters in a visceral way, as having a gift for channeling the rage of a white America which felt it had been left behind, had...
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...
By 1920, nearly 40 percent of black women worked for wages, compared to about 18 percent of white women; a 1919 study showed that the typical black laborer in New York City was young, unmarried, and h...
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.