Singles’ tax discontent was framed around white manhood and wartime demographics

Evidence

Dr. Huf thought he was being discriminated against because he was not taxed the same way as a single-wage-earner husband with a stay-at-home wife. And there were a lot of Dr. Hufs out there. A different argument was made by Dorothy Shinder, president of Single Persons Tax Reform, a volunteer national service organization. Shinder argued that unmarried women were not spinsters by choice, but because World War II had deprived them of husbands—as had “the ever-increasing number of homosexuals.” — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 116

Categorization

• SHARE: The 1960s singles-tax-reform advocate blamed WWII and gay men for women being unmarried — a wild artifact of that debate worth sending to anyone into tax history.