On the day that Roe v. Wade was handed down, I felt a mixture of elation and panic. A new future loomed in which unwanted pregnancies would no longer send women to quacks, rushing them to hospitals with raging infections and perhaps to …
When the Tea Party emerged in 2009, most progressive critics characterized it as a sprawling movement of “angry white men.” But it is also a party of angry white women. Everyone in the Tea Party shares an ideology that calls …
Ruth Rosen: American Jews and Israel
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Years later, I would tell my friends never to shirk their jury summonses. This is the most democratic experience you’ll ever have, I’d insist. But when I first arrived at the Alameda County Superior Courthouse, located in what was the …
Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, A History
Diamond: A Struggle For Envioronmental Justice in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor by Steve Lerner
In early October 2001, grief still gripped much of the nation. Anthrax-laced letters kept the public, as well as media, in a state of acute anxiety. In this tense atmosphere, the U.S. government quietly changed its policy governing the Freedom …
Imagine a corporate executive who’s been convicted of embezzlement. He serves his sentence and some years later, having paid his debt to society, leaves prison a free man. Now he’s an ex-convict, in fact, an ex-felon. Should we allow him …
American women entered the twentieth century without the right to vote and ended it with the right “to have it all” as long as they “do it all.” Progress? It depends on whom you ask. The nation’s citizens are deeply …
Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume Two, 1933-1938 by Blanche Wiesen Cook Viking, 1999, 696 pp., $34.95 In divorce court, lawyers and judges often hear amazingly different stories about a marriage that has long disintegrated. In history, as well, there are also his …
Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism by Daniel Horowitz The University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, 352 pp., $29.95 In 1967, when I first became immersed in the women’s …
Hillary Clinton is neither a saint nor a monster. Although I share Zelda Bronstein’s distaste for feminist sycophancy, I think she fails to grasp—amid all the disappointments—what is genuinely laudable about our First Lady. Blaming Hillary Clinton for “losing” the …
The best antidote to feminist despair is knowledge of our own history. With each new skirmish in the gender wars, feminists fall into greater despair. We lose so often that we forget how greatly we have transformed American political culture. …
For more than four decades, the cold war chilled political debate about what women and American families need for their well-being. The family was sacrificed to cold war hysteria and military over-investment. National health programs and child care looked too …
