Kate Bolick

Due to institutionalized sexism, the unavoidable fact that this first round of female hires had little to no prior work experience, and “functional periodicity”—the widely held belief that menstruation was so debilitating that it prevented women from working full-time, therefore rendering them undeserving of full wages—employers found it very easy to justify paying women less than men. (In the late 1890s, in an ingenious effort to obtain equal pay for

Due to institutionalized sexism, the unavoidable fact that this first round of female hires had little to no prior work experience, and “functional periodicity”—the widely held belief that menstruation was so debilitating that it prevented women from working full-time, therefore rendering them undeserving of full wages—employers found it very easy to justify paying women less than men. (In the late 1890s, in an ingenious effort to obtain equal pay for equal work, one of the new woman physicians, Stanford University’s Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, invented a series of abdominal breathing exercises to counteract menstrual pain, called “moshers

Their friend Floyd Dell’s essay “Feminism for Men,” published in the popular radical journal The Masses in July 1914,