All posts tagged: middle class

How Big Money Hurt American Feminism

How Big Money Hurt American Feminism

Published by skeptic

By the time the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, many Americans had already opened their wallets to protest. In the approximately 24 hours after the Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked early, the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue raised $12 million, and Reproductive Freedom for All’s donations increased by 1,400 percent. According to one researcher, more than 300 crowdfunded GoFundMe campaigns drew in nearly $3.2 million in the seven months between the Dobbs leak and the 2022 midterm elections, and that’s just a small measure of the overall amount that flooded the cause. Abortion-rights groups certainly need financial support. But the history of the National Organization for Women, second-wave feminism’s largest and most expansive membership group, reveals that when people engage with feminism primarily through their donations, the cause can suffer. Starting in the mid-1970s, NOW’s embrace of the then-novel fundraising technique of direct mail “change[d] the nature of” the organization, the longtime NOW leader Mary Jean Collins told me; the strategy ballooned NOW’s budget, but it also …

America’s Eyes Are on Unions

America’s Eyes Are on Unions

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The president was on the picket line, and the American public is paying attention to unions. This moment of renewed interest in organizing could energize labor activity in the U.S., but it also turns up the pressure on union leaders. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: “A Genuinely Historic Moment” “Unions built the middle class,” the president of the United States bellowed this week through a bullhorn emblazoned with an American flag. “You deserve what you’ve earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.” On Tuesday, Joe Biden became the first sitting president to join striking workers on a picket line. In standing with the United Auto Workers, who have been on strike against the Big Three car companies for almost two weeks, he has picked a side. As …

Is Single Parenthood the Problem?

Is Single Parenthood the Problem?

Published by skeptic

The most heavily anticipated economics book of the year makes a radical argument: Having married parents is good for kids. I know, I know. It seems like a joke, right? Of course having two involved parents living in a stable home together is good for kids. Anyone who has considered having children with a partner or was ever a child themselves must know that. But for years, academics studying poverty, mobility, and family structures have avoided that self-evident truth, the economist Melissa Kearney writes in The Two-Parent Privilege, released this week. And while the wonks avoided the topic, the rise of single-parent households in America exacerbated inequality and contributed to astonishingly high rates of child poverty. Melissa Kearney: A driver of inequality not enough people are talking about “The high incidence of single motherhood has spread to what we might think of as the middle class,” Kearney told me. “It has undermined the economic security of a much wider swath of the population.” Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, has amassed reams of …

The Magazine That Was a Window on America

The Magazine That Was a Window on America

Published by skeptic

I grew up in the 1950s, on a farm in Virginia miles away from any town or neighbors. For most of my childhood we didn’t have a television, so my three brothers and I amused ourselves fighting pretend Civil War battles in the fields and woods around our house or vying over card and board games that we spread across the living-room floor. But for me, the best entertainment was always reading. I read for pleasure, for company, and for escape from my contained Virginia world. I could explore other places and imagine myself into other lives—lives that went beyond the limited choices available to my mother and the women of her circle, who were all ruled by the era’s prescriptions of female domesticity. The written word introduced me to what girls could do: solve mysteries, like Nancy Drew; brave the Nazis, like Anne Frank; demand change, like the protagonist of Susan Anthony: Girl Who Dared. Reading could provide, to borrow Scout’s words in To Kill a Mockingbird, a way to escape “the starched walls …

Why So Many Americans Have Stopped Going to Church

Why So Many Americans Have Stopped Going to Church

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Church attendance in America has been on the decline in recent decades. Are Americans losing their ability to incorporate religion—or any kind of intentional community—into their lives? First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: How American Life Works “Take a drive down Main Street of just about any major city in the country, and—with the housing market ground to a halt—you might pass more churches for sale than homes,” two sociologists wrote in The Atlantic in January. And the facts bear out that visual: As Jake Meador, the editor in chief of the quarterly magazine Mere Orthodoxy, notes in a recent essay, about 40 million Americans have stopped going to church in the past 25 years. “That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history,” …