
The Real Legacy of the Suffrage Movement
The cause produced undaunted trailblazers, Black and white, who continued to pursue social reform.
The cause produced undaunted trailblazers, Black and white, who continued to pursue social reform.
Anna Julia Cooper was among the educators who emphasized the power of communal care as a method of addressing larger structural ills.
Their reasoning shows how far women’s rights have come since the late 1800s.
During the suffrage movement, conventional wisdom held that civic duty was bad for the ovaries.
Physicians once advised menstruating women against mental exertion, fearing it would ravage their health.
Female lawmakers needed a critical mass in Congress before they could begin chipping away at the inequalities baked into the nation’s laws.
Starting in the 1850s, proponents of the movement for women’s rights traded their long dresses for bloomers—and paid a heavy social price for it.
In the years leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Atlantic writers often pitted political participation against domestic duty.
Images of some of the brave women who worked tirelessly for years to demand equal rights, and finally succeeded by having them written into law
Activists on both sides of the abortion wars see themselves as inheritors of the early women’s movement—a history that’s become more contested than ever under Trump.
A century after women won the right to vote, The Atlantic reflects on the grueling fight for suffrage—and what came after.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, magazine contributors debated whether women should have the right to vote—and whether they truly wanted it.
As it weighs a census case, the Supreme Court will have to decide whether America is a nation for all its citizens.
Donald Trump’s ideological cousins around the world want to reverse the feminist gains of recent decades.
In more than a decade of arguing cases in court, I’ve witnessed the stubborn cultural biases female attorneys must navigate to simply do their jobs.
The first female speaker of the House has become the most effective congressional leader of modern times—and, not coincidentally, the most vilified.
Tech companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to improve conditions for female employees. Here’s why not much has changed—and what might actually work.
Nearly half a century ago, a feminist art historian asked why there had been no great female artists. A new wave of all-women exhibitions revives the question—and suggests a new answer.
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy has provoked a wave of misogyny—one that may roil American life for years to come.
The technology craze of the 1890s meant fashion freedom and transportation independence.
Deep anxiety about the ability to have children later in life plagues many women. But the decline in fertility over the course of a woman’s 30s has been oversold. Here’s what the statistics really tell us—and what they don’t.
It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.
Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences
Dispatches from the nanny wars
The famous gender gap is often described simply as good news for one party—women are moving to the Democrats. But it's a two-way gap—even more men have moved to the Republicans. Each party and its candidates now appear to represent, at least in part, the interests of one sex against the other
The most effective backlash against feminism comes from within