Spinster

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be.
—Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” 1931

had ever exerted control over their own bodies and the reproductive process. The first time women were acting on the idea that they were people first, women second

hich is to say: It was the first time women as a group (as opposed to scattered individuals

In her fascinating paper “Victorian Women and Domestic Life,” Sklar argues that the transformation from large to smaller families happened because for the first time in American history women of all classes and races were consciously exerting control

“ambiguous women”—the scholar Carolyn Heilbrun’s wonderful term for those who choose not to center their lives around a man

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