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 there was no consideration that those single incomes were a result as much as a cause,
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...
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.
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
Yes, many single women, across classes and races, would like to marry, or at least form loving, reciprocal, long-term partnerships, but have not found mates who want the same thing, or who can sustain...
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...
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 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 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...