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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
Black women had in fact already made some of the very points for which Friedan was being hailed.
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...
A painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen. Yet
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
They did not match society’s expectations by entering an institution built around male authority and female obeisance.