The Atlantic Ideas Tour: Women's Empowerment

Celebrating 150 Years of The Atlantic | Women's Rights

This is the fifth in a series of archival excerpts in honor of the magazine's 150th year of publishing.

Women's Empowerment
An introduction
by Terry Castle, a professor of English at Stanford. Her books include Boss Ladies, Watch Out!, and Courage, Mon Amie.

Meditations on Votes for Women (October 1914)
by Samuel McChord Crothers
In 1914, as the women’s suffrage amendment languished in Congress, Samuel McChord Crothers, a popular essayist and a Harvard Square–based Unitarian minister, made the case for equal suffrage. (The amendment did not pass that year, however; American women would not win the right to vote for another six years.)

Talent, Opportunity, and Female Aspirations (June 1926)
by Faith Fairfield
Six years after the Nineteenth Amendment had given American women the right to vote, Atlantic contributor Faith Fairfield pointed to an ongoing double standard in other areas.

Equality of Opportunity and Pay (May and June 1938)
by Virginia Woolf
In 1938, Virginia Woolf, a champion of equal opportunity for women and the author of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One’s Own, responded scathingly in the pages of The Atlantic to a written solicitation she had received in the mail asking “the daughters of educated men” to join in the cause against war. What women really ought to lobby for, she argued, is equal opportunity and better pay for themselves.

The Science: Careers for Women (October 1957)
by Helen Hill Miller
In 1957, Helen Hill Miller, a Washington, D.C.–based writer and a correspondent for The Economist, considered the social and psychological obstacles facing women attempting to forge careers in science.

Desperate Housewives (June 1961)
by Nora Johnson
Two years before Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique articulated "the problem that has no name," novelist and essayist Nora Johnson considered the frustrations of the well-educated homemaker.

Feminism's Unfinished Business (November 1997)
by Katha Pollitt
Decades after the women's-liberation movement began the battle to break down gender barriers and put women on a more equal footing with men, social critic and columnist Katha Pollitt pointed out that sexism and gender bias continued to play an insidious–and largely unacknowledged–role in women's lives. She called for a revitalized feminism to rectify the problem.


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