Black women had in fact already made some of the very points for which Friedan was being hailed.
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...
A painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen. Yet
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.
One Reformation-era proverb, which would be cited in different forms by John Donne and William Shakespeare, proclaimed that women who died unmarried were doomed to lead apes in hell.
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...
In part, surely, it’s because power is always more rigidly patrolled than powerlessness: When money and status are at stake, lines around who may access and transmit them (white men) and who is barred...
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 fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions –– its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage –– that has allowed marr...
I know there still are barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, she finally said, and the room roared in relief and affirmation. You can be so proud that, from now on, it will be unremarkable...
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...
For if single women are looking for government to create a hubby state for them, what is certainly true is that their male counterparts have a long enjoy the fruits of a related wifey state, in which...
At the turn of the nineteenth century, New Orleans saw an influx of refugees from Haiti, increasing the population of gens de couleur libre, or free blacks. Free women of color were permitted to inher...
As another philosopher, Myisha Cherry, has recently argued, I want to convince you that there are types of anger that are not bad. In particular, she is interested in anger at injustice, regarding it...
As another philosopher, Myisha Cherry, has recently argued, I want to convince you that there are types of anger that are not bad.
And yet, women kept right on not marrying. In 1990, the median age for first marriage for women jumped to nearly twenty-four, the highest it had been in the century in which it had been recorded.
Wealthy, white American wife, relieved of her responsibilities for at-home production, became responsible for scrupulously maintaining a domicile that served as the feminized inverse of the newly bust...