The Feminine Mystique is 50 years old; do you know where your equality is?

Here's a hint: If you're a woman living in America, it's still pretty far out of reach. Because for as far as women have come in the ol' US of A, the fact is that...

Something has been nagging at me ever since I read Christina Hoff Sommers' Opinionator piece in Sunday's New York Times. Did you catch it? It's yet another essay lamenting the disconnect between today's school system and, well, the nature of boys.

Her piece, which links declining male achievement with...

If we want to close the ambition gap, a good first step might be learning how to shake our heads.

There's this great quote from Feminist icon Germaine Greer: "When we talk about women having it all, what they really have all of is the work." She was being somewhat...

It's easy to be appalled by things that happen elsewhere: the brutal, horrifying rape of the 23-year-old Indian student, so violent that she died of her injuries. Malala Yousufzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl/activist who was shot by the Taliban. It's easy to feel a sort of...

Do not let the outrage die.

In the wake of the horrific mass murders in Newtown, Connecticut, we've read plenty of newspaper articles, listened to numerous TV commentators and read hundreds of Facebook posts, all with the same message: We need to talk about gun control.

And yet, my biggest...

The Year of the Woman? Oy vey.

It's a phrase that's always struck me as ridiculous. It would be one thing to declare it the Year of the Short, Red-headed, Left-Handed Woman, or the Year of the Unmarried, Urban-dwelling Thirty-something Woman, or the Year of the Woman Who Doesn't Want...

Santa, make it stop! My inbox, which has exploded exponentially every day since Thanksgiving rolled over into the Season of Shopping, has sent me on the fast track to crazy town.

Among the fifty-odd messages that popped up since I went to bed last night are emails from everything from...

Lest you thought feminism's battle was over, let me reassure you, we've only just begun. Not only that, but despite all the work we've left to do, many facets of feminism -- facets that are, by all proper measure, actually settled by now -- continue instead to rerun...

I frequently hear from former students -- usually bright, idealistic twenty-somethings -- long after they've exchanged their college dreams for, you know, reality.

Often, these women are more than a little shell-shocked when they come face to face with the disconnect between their high expectations and life out there in...

With the election looming, we decided to write this one together. Call it our endorsement. Because we're women! Two generations of them. And between the two of us, we've held all kinds of roles: daughter, sister, wife, mother, employee, self-employee, employer of others and homeowner. We are upstanding members...

I'm starting to wonder if this presidential election might hinge on aprons.

In the wake of the last debate, we've all been caught up in binders and trapper-keepers and funny Facebook memes -- along with some hijinks on Amazon, where a bunch of smartypants hijacked several binder pages....

The other day, in the midst of a meeting of my paper's editorial staff, I found myself waving my feminist card in a manner reminiscent of when I used to referee kids' soccer games and had to deploy the whistle-yellow card combo. (More often than not, the recipients of...

It happened again the other day: I was being interviewed by my introductory journalism class when I was asked 'The Question.'

"Are you a feminist?"

"Of course," I shot back. Beat. "Are you?"

The young woman was the tiniest bit flummoxed at being put on the spot. "Well," she...

The other day, a good friend who is Swedish emailed me a link to a post by Ann Charlott Altstadt, a Swedish writer who suggests that when life gets us down, we'd sometimes be better off ditching the trip to the yoga studio or the psychologist and seeing...

Is it the end, or just the beginning?

Ye olde End of Men is in the news again; this time, author Stephanie Coontz is weighing in on how the headlines proclaiming "The End of Men" might be a tad premature. It's territory we've covered before, to be sure,...

The last time our family got together -- finding all of us in the same zip code at the same time is a rare and wondrous feat -- we hunkered down in a suite at the Holiday Inn Express (backstory not important). With no bar or restaurant in sight, our...

So, the subject of our book is certainly in the air as of late. First, Ann Marie Slaughter, and now, a piece on The Daily Beast by Debora Spar, whose take on the issues of women chasing perfection, juggling roles and choices in a not-adequately-changed world...

I received a terrifying letter in the mail the other day. It was an invitation to a grade school reunion -- as in eighth grade.

Ew, right? The very thought sent chills up my spine. Did I really want to revisit my adolescent self? Does anyone?

Now, I am old...

Isn't it funny, at a time that's been described as The End of Men And The Rise of Women, during an election season that's been touted as hinging on the "female vote," during an era in which young adult humans of the female persuasion have never known a...

I had a serendipitous moment with Michelle Obama last week -- just a few days before her transcendent speech at the DNC. The occasion was an interview with the First Couple by Lynn Sherr and Maggie Murphy in Parade, the supplement that shows up in many local Sunday...