Kate Bolick

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

constant renegotiation. To get more of it, you beg or borrow or outright redraw the border when the other isn’t looking, and savor your briefly expanded plot of land as best you can—an all-girls weekend with your college roommates; an afternoon hike up a local mountain; even those delicious few minutes at the salon, when you surrender your head to the sink for your hair to be washed

When you’re coupled, and especially if you’re parents, time is a precious commodity, or a contested territory under

Shared kitchens in city apartment buildings would help women balance family and work, and provide social support for those who chose to stay at home. Eventually these changes would result in “better motherhood and fatherhood, better babyhood and