Fall 2024

New Approaches to ‘Politicized’ Science Under the Bush Administration

Progressives and Abortion

After September 11, 2001, Dissent published a series of articles that critically assessed traditional left ideas about America and its place in the world. For some time, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and I have been thinking about undertaking a similar review …

One of the most laudatory reviews of The Golden Notebook when it first appeared in 1963 was by this magazine’s founding editor, Irving Howe. Writing in the New Republic, Howe praised Lessing’s abilities as a novelist: “Precise and nuanced dialogue …

Global Woman : Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, edited by Arlie Russell Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich

A Superhero and the War on Terror

On January 31, less than two weeks after George W. Bush became the forty-third president of the United States of America, the Six Rivers Planned Parenthood in Eureka, California, was fielding calls from worried patients. The clinic is nestled near …

If a presidential election indicates the health of the body politic, America’s civic condition may be hovering just this side of the intensive-care ward. Even by the low standard we’ve come to expect from the quadrennial circus, the 2000 contest …

Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy by Frances Kiernan Norton, 2000, 845 pp., $35 Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals by David Laskin Simon & Schuster, 2000, 319 pp., $26 Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting …

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 …

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 …

How should democratic socialists think about the family and its role in modern society? The essential problem is to find alternatives to individualist and marketized conceptions of social life. Solutions to this problem are most commonly sought in the political …

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 …

Feminism’s ideological diversity makes fools of those who generalize grandly about the movement, but many critics are undeterred. A foolish view of feminists as a monolithic group of male bashers and prudes was eagerly adopted by impeachment pundits. Confusing feminism …