Articles

It wasn't long ago that being single after a certain age was considered a recipe for lifelong misery. Up until 1970, the average woman married before she was legally old enough to have a drink at her wedding, and the average man married at 23. A woman still single at the ripe old age of 26 was what the Japanese call Christmas Cake -- past her pull date and destined to spoil. A man not married by the end of his 20s was considered irresponsible, if not "deviant."

In 1973, when President Richard Nixon proclaimed August 26 Women's Equality Day -- commemorating the day in 1920 that women won the right to vote -- a woman could still be denied housing by a real estate broker or credit by a bank, simply because of her gender.

In a letter to The Wall Street Journal this week, Ivanka Trump gave a robust defense of the Trump administration's proposed paid family leave program. The Journal's editorial board had denounced it as a government "entitlement" that "could create another disincentive for work and advancement."

Millennials, generally defined as people born between 1982 and 2000, were supposed to be the generation that forged what has been called "a new national consensus" in favor of gender equality.

I first discovered "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" when I was 25, and I immediately fell in love with it. But a few years ago, when I showed some episodes to a family studies class I was teaching, my students were far less impressed than I had expected them to be. I explained what a revelation it had been in 1970 to see a show about an unmarried working woman in her early 30s who was devoted to her job, was attractive to men and well-liked by her fellow workers, and who turned out to be the most…

Women have made impressive gains in the past forty-five years. But progress toward family-friendly social policies has been exceptionally slow. In 1971, Congress actually passed a comprehensive childcare bill only to have Richard Nixon veto it after concerted lobbying by antifeminists and right-wingers. It took until 1993 just to get the Family and Medical Leave Act, which gave workers in large companies up to twelve weeks of unpaid job-protected leave.