Kate Bolick

Due to institutionalized sexism, the unavoidable fact that this first round of female hires had little to no prior work experience, and “functional periodicity”—the widely held belief that menstruation was so debilitating that it prevented women from working full-time, therefore rendering them undeserving of full wages—employers found it very easy to justify paying women less than men. (In the late 1890s, in an ingenious effort to obtain equal pay for

Due to institutionalized sexism, the unavoidable fact that this first round of female hires had little to no prior work experience, and “functional periodicity”—the widely held belief that menstruation was so debilitating that it prevented women from working full-time, therefore rendering them undeserving of full wages—employers found it very easy to justify paying women less than men. (In the late 1890s, in an ingenious effort to obtain equal pay for equal work, one of the new woman physicians, Stanford University’s Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, invented a series of abdominal breathing exercises to counteract menstrual pain, called “moshers

Their friend Floyd Dell’s essay “Feminism for Men,” published in the popular radical journal The Masses in July 1914,

Between the 1940s and the 1960s, everyone from Grace Kelly to Sylvia Plath to Joan Crawford was a “Barbizon Girl.”

not for this solidarity, the political actions taken by reformers from Jane Hull to Margaret Sanger

Brooke Kroeger’s biography of Fannie Hurst, the highest-paid short-story writer of the first half of the twentieth century, and the first to publically pioneer this arrangement

Her ideas were an expansion on and popularization of the “cooperative housekeeping movement” spearheaded in 1868 when Melusina Fay Peirce published a series of articles in The Atlantic Monthly encouraging women to form housekeeping cooperatives and seek reimbursement from the husbands who clearly

childhood, better food, better homes, better society.”

When Edna wrote—“And if I loved you Wednesday, / Well what is that to you? / I do not love you Thursday— / So much is true”—she wasn’t playing around

Addams never married or had children, but she launched the social-reform movement, essentially the precursor to the social-welfare programs started by the federal government in the 1930s. In 1931 she was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize