Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik’s Notorious RBG is an insightful and charming account of a woman who, by challenging unjust and sexist laws and defending constitutional definitions of equality over a period of two decades, defined and articulated many of the freedoms that Americans—both men and women—enjoy today.
“Cuba hurtles towards capitalism,” declared the Economist in 2012. When I traveled there that year, I didn’t get the same impression.
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein: Betty Friedan and the Women?s Movement
Death by Gender Editors: I am more than a little perturbed at the headlining of my article “Death By Gender” on the cover of the Spring Dissent. “Honor killings” as a category is not a “feminist” issue (which many readers …
Finally, the atrocity of gendercide—the murder and mutilation of victims selected by sex—is getting prominent attention in the press. Through feminist online activism, but more prominently through the efforts of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (in his new book …
American mothers are under attack again. The new attack is not like that of the 1950s and 1960s, which faulted stay-at-home mothers for “smother love,” “momism,” and schizophrenogenic behavior that turned their sons psychotic. It is aimed instead at women …
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi William Morrow & Co., 1999, 662 pp., $27.50 Are American men in crisis, entrapped in a consumer culture without the opportunity to pursue meaningful work, and in psychic despair, searching …
The recent publication of two biographies of Betty Friedan, and the media attention the books have drawn, make this an apt moment to reflect on the myths about the women’s movement that some on the political left as well as …
Solutions to problems often carry unanticipated consequences. This is the case with part-time work in America today. Part-time work can be a reasonable way of dealing with the work-family dilemma. It has been discussed widely in the press, among corporate …
An odd coalition of women’s rights advocates and anti-feminists are marketing a new kind of sexism. It was first sighted at the Virginia Military Institute and Citadel cases, in which some feminists and Old South traditionalists claimed that girls and …
For many alumni of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and the Citadel, the last two state-supported schools that hoped to continue their pattern of discrimination against women, the Civil War has been lost again. The suit by the Department of …
Nancy Reagan had one next to the bed, and before you know it, Barbie’s wardrobe may include one. The pearl-handled hairbrush on the dressing table ofAmerican women may soon be joined by a pearl-handled revolver. Even more important than the …
Not long ago, perhaps a little more than a decade, perfectly “qualified” women and people of color couldn’t get through the front door when it came to well-paying, prestigious occupations—or, indeed, many less attractive jobs. There were almost no black …
Rose Laub Coser died August 21, 1994 at her summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, ending seventy-eight years of intense and passionate commitment to her family, the institutions of which she was a part, sociological analysis, and the cause of social …
America’s ambivalence about the roles of women today was played out most ironically in the past presidential campaign. The Republican National Convention gave the private, family-centered woman Barbara Bush a very public and political role as a highlighted speaker, while …
