Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free

by Wednesday Martin

The paradigm that females are sexless and decorous protectors of the hearth prevailed for decades, even in the face of intervening generations of abolitionists, suffragettes, and crusaders from Ida Wells to Margaret Sanger critiquing it with their pointed activism. And while flappers—originally a derogatory English term for prostitute—made real strides by boisterously presuming the liberties and freedoms that suffragists and others attempted to engineer through lobbying, legislation, and political protest, with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, historians of the era tell us, these pioneering young disruptors were bludgeoned back into propriety. In fact, even working outside the home was suspect for the next decade, and women who tried might well be subjected to public censure, “taking jobs from men.” Making matters still more difficult for women of color, between 1932 and 1933, 68 percent of jobs posted by the Philadelphia Employment Bureau stipulated the jobs were “white only,” doubling down on the discrimination.