To be unwed and female was to succumb to an illness with only one known cure: marriage.
Social scientists could supply plenty of research to show that one member of the family, at least, is happier and more well adjusted when mum stays home and looks after the children. But that person is dada finding of limited use to backlash publicists.
My goal is to be accused of being strident.
Self-esteem is the basis for feminism because self-esteem is based on defining yourself and believing in that definition. Self-esteem is regarding yourself as a grown-up.
The demand that women “return to femininity” is a demand that the cultural gears shift into reverse, that we back up to a fabled time when everyone was richer, younger, more powerful.
The women’s movement hit my neighborhood like a freight train. Everybody got divorced. You wonder what would have happened to women if the suburbs hadn’t been built.
A backlash against women’s rights is nothing new. Indeed it’s a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality, a seemingly inevitable early frost to the brief flowerings of feminism.
When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.
That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing-from dresses to underwear.
As women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman’s proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially.
Women who had discovered pants, low-heeled shoes, and loose sweaters during World War II were reluctant to give them up in peacetime.
The economic victims of the era are men who who know someone has made off with their future- and they suspect the thief is a woman.
Having whipped single women into high marital panic-or “nuptialitis,” as one columnist called it- the press hastened to soothe fretted brows with conjugal tonic.
An accurate charting of American women’s progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time-but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal.
For some high-profile men in trouble, women, especially feminist women, became the all-purpose scapegoats-charged with crimes that often descended into the absurd.
The American woman has not yet slipped into a cocoon, but she has tumbled down a rabbit hole into sudden isolation.
A lot of people seem to want to make the institution of marriage substitute for a real relationship.
I think a reason that a lot of people feel politically paralysed is that it used to be clear how power was organised. But those who have their hands on the levers of popular culture today have great power – and it isn’t even clear who they are.
As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women’s mental health: employment improves it.
Women are enslaved by their own liberation.