“Yes, it’s tougher to become — or to be — an adult today than it was half a century ago.
And yes, young and old alike regard adulthood with ambivalence. Young people are embarrassed and anxious by their prolonged dependence on their parents, but they also hate the idea of a mortgage, a disgruntled spouse, never-ending debt, and a life that binds them to a boring job.”
via The New Adulthood – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
“In the 1910s, American suffragists would take advantage of holidays including Valentine’s Day to send postcards to politicians and loved ones advocating for votes for women.”
via 14 Wonderfully Sassy Vintage Valentines From Suffragists.
“In 1918, towards the end of the First World War, the Representation of the People Act was passed. This gave the vote to some women, but it was only in 1928 that the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act gave the vote to all women over 21 on the same terms as men.”
via 28 Powerful Pictures Of Women Fighting For Their Right To Vote.
“In the Pacific Northwest, people with nowhere else to go are forming micro-communities with communal kitchens and toilets but teeny, individual sleeping units. Could tiny homes, once the provenance of design blogs, help curb homelessness nationwide?” via Are Tiny-House Villages The Solution To Homelessness – BuzzFeed News.
“And that was the goal we had in mind as my wife and I raised our kids. We both had careers in white firms that represented the best in law, banking and consulting; we attended schools and shared dorm rooms with white friends and had strong ties to our community including my service, for the last 12 years, as chairman of the county police board. I was certain that my Princeton and Harvard Law degrees and economic privilege not only would empower me to navigate the mostly white neighborhoods and institutions that my kids inhabited, but would provide a cocoon to protect them from the bias I had encountered growing up. My wife and I used our knowledge of white upper-class life to envelop our sons and daughter in a social armor that we felt would repel discriminatory attacks. We outfitted them in uniforms that we hoped would help them escape profiling in stores and public areas: pastel-colored, non-hooded sweatshirts; cleanly pressed, belted, non-baggy khaki pants; tightly-laced white tennis sneakers; Top-Sider shoes; conservative blazers; rep ties; closely cropped hair; and no sunglasses. Never any sunglasses.”
“What you can see in this simple pie chart comparison, above, is the enormous shift in the U.S. population that took place between the days when Gen Xers were kids and today. In 1980, the year that The Empire Strikes Back came out, 78% percent of 15 to 34 year-olds identified as white. In 2012, just 32 years later, only 58% identify themselves as white.This doesnt just reflect a change in the size of the white population. It also means that white Millennials are much more likely to know and have friends who are people of color. Millennials live in a U.S. where its harder for white people to live in a place where they never meet someone with a different racial background than themselves. Of course they still can and do, but its just pragmatically more difficult. Put simply, its no longer easy to claim whites are the “norm.” Increasingly, theyre just part of the mix.”
via Is This the Single Most Important Statistic About Millennials?.
“Our feminism looks like an end to police repression of minority communities, access to quality public schools that do not expel our children for minor infractions, and an end to the prison industrial complex, which locks up far too many of our men and women, fracturing families and creating further economic burdens when our loved ones are released. We need comprehensive healthcare and access to abortion clinics, but we also need a robust mental health care system, that can address long centuries of racist, sexist, sexual and emotional trauma. We need equal pay, yes. But we also need good jobs, rather than being relegated to an endless cycle of low-wage work.
White women’s feminisms still center around equality, a point on which Traister and Shulevitz converge. Black women’s feminisms demand justice. There is a difference. One kind of feminism focuses on the policies that will help women integrate fully into the existing American system. The other recognizes the fundamental flaws in the system and seeks its complete and total transformation.”
via Feminism’s ugly internal clash: Why its future is not up to white women – Salon.com.
“When I heard about the demise of the Journal, I decided to look at the history of ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’. What I found, dipping into the columns published across decades, was the archive of unhappiness that I remembered, full of thrown dishes, turned backs and late-night screaming matches. But I also read a starkly misogynist vision of proper wifeliness that shocked me in its matter-of-factness. We’re used to thinking of the 1950s ‘housewife’ as a vague, happy caricature on gift-shop mugs and postcards – vacuuming in pearls, offering a post-work martini to the returning husband. In its intimate individual details, this advice column resurrects a sharper history, showing the array of cruelties that this kind of marriage could entail, the number of wives who resisted their roles, and the way that mainstream culture tried to put them in their place.”
via The warped world of 1950s marriage counselling – Rebecca Onion – Aeon.
Ecofeminista 