Departments

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family

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    3/3/2022

    Hating Motherhood

    by Judith Levine

    Feminist thought that has questioned "the inexorable tie between mothers and children" and imagined women's lives without motherhood have been the "demon texts" of the movement; 

  • SOURCE: Public Seminar
    10/6/2021

    Why Hollywood Can't Change a Diaper

    by Janet Golden

    While Hollywood portrayals of motherhood have adapted to incorporate single and working mothers, popular culture images of fatherhood have remained stubbornly stuck in the past. Would supports for child care and parental leave in the budget reconciliation bill help bring movie dads up to date? 

  • SOURCE: College Theology Society
    6/14/2021

    Family Values, Social Reciprocity, and Christianity

    by Stephanie Coontz

    Family historian Stephanie Coontz argues in a chapter excerpted here that relationships of care and mutual obligation have been much more complex than the nuclear family.

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    5/7/2021

    Women Asked for an Independence Day. They Got Mother’s Day Instead

    by Kimberly A. Hamlin

    Mother's Day was established by Woodrow Wilson to blunt demands by suffragist and feminist movements for policy changes that would make women "citizens in fact as well as in name." The burdens of domestic work experienced by women during COVID should inspire a return to these more radical proposals. 

  • SOURCE: New York Times
    5/3/2021

    A New Deal, This Time for Everyone

    The New Deal emphasized that American democracy must be healthy for its economy to enjoy legitimacy, and vice versa. It's time, says NYT editor Binyamin Appelbaum, to extend that commitment to the economic participation of women. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    5/23/2020

    The Many Faces of the ‘Wine Mom’

    Historian Lisa Jacobson explains that the "Wine Mom" meme is rooted in gender and middle class norms regulating women's obligations to their children (and women's desire for freedom from them).

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    3/19/2020

    The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism

    by Helen Lewis

    When people note that Shakespeare and Newton did some of their best work while England was ravaged by the plague, there is an obvious response: Neither of them had child-care responsibilities.