The New Republic

Jane’s a flapper. That is a quaint, old-fashioned term, but I hope you remember its meaning. As you can tell by her appellation, Jane is 19. She urgently denies that she is a member of the younger generation. The younger generation, she will tell you, is aged 15 to 17; and she professes to be decidedly shocked at the things they do and say. This is a fact which would interest her minister, if he knew it – poor man, he knows so little! For he regards Jane as a perfectly horrible example of youth–paint, cigarettes, cocktails, petting parties–oooh! READ MORE >>

On Tuesday, The Onion published a piece jarringly titled, “Heartbroken Chris Brown Always Thought Rihanna Was Woman He’d Beat To Death.” It’s a riff on "the one that got away" truism—only instead of wistfully saying that he always thought he’d have kids with her, an imagined Chris Brown laments all the abuse he never got to visit upon his ex: “Despite all the ups and downs, I was so sure Rihanna was the one I’d take by the throat one day and fatally READ MORE >>

In a 1981 interview, the essayist and journalist Rebecca West was asked about a phrase she once deployed to characterize the difference between a male sensibility and a female one. “Idiots and lunatics,” she said. “It’s a perfectly good division.” West is rightly thought of as one of the twentieth century’s pithiest feminists, but she was never exactly part of a movement. READ MORE >>

“Opting out” has never been as sexy as a decade of style section articles would have you believe. A decade ago, Lisa Belkin coined the term “opt-out revolution” in a piece that explained, “It's not just that the workplace has failed women. READ MORE >>

Traditionally, the cookbook has been thought of as a manual of pedestrian concerns and conservative virtues—or more recently, a compendium of food-porn glamour shots of dishes no one is likely to actually make. But to limit cookbooks to those two categories is to miss a fundamental truth about the genre: All cookbooks are political. READ MORE >>

My first mommy date—you know, those painstakingly-dressed-for occasions you hope will turn the mother of your child’s new best friend into your best friend, too—also gave me my first taste of the shame that makes the mommy wars so bitter. Tali’s husband worked on Wall Street, she stayed home with the children, and the playroom in their restored Victorian on a lake in Westchester was photo-spread perfect. READ MORE >>

The day after Hurricane Sandy, my husband had cabin fever and was desperate to go for a walk. We had been trapped in our apartment for 36 hours. Here was the rub. His father was about to come over, and our living room was strewn with shut-in detritus: magazines, beef jerky wrappers, and empty soup cans. Even though I was eight months pregnant, I insisted we tidy up. My husband argued that his dad didn’t care if our place was a bit messy, but it’s really hard to fight with a massively pregnant person who is hanging up jackets and washing dishes. READ MORE >>

In her 1883 memoir of the great American feminist intellectual Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe acknowledged that she was already a late-comer to the haunting story. READ MORE >>

About two-thirds of the way through Makers, the PBS documentary charting the rise and fall of modern feminism, we learn the exact moment the American women’s movement died. OK, maybe “died” is too strong a word. Let’s say it had a really big stroke. On June 30, 1982, the Equal Rights Amendment passed its deadline for ratification and expired. READ MORE >>

“Sexy feminism,” according to Jennifer Keishin Armstrong and Heather Wood Rudulph, “owns the oft-maligned word feminist and aims to show young women how fun, empowering and, yes, sexy it is to fight for women’s rights. We want to help other women find their feminism."This is an unarguably laudable aim. It is, however, rather difficult for a woman to find her feminism if she is too embarrassed to be seen reading the guidebook in public. READ MORE >>