"Taking Mom Out For Brunch? It's A Feminist Tradition"

"The right to dine out in public during the day was an early victory of the women's rights movement at the turn of the 20th century, says Lisa Stoffer, the co-author of Repast, a book that examines the dawn of modern dining during that era.

"It was part of a larger set of changes in society that accepted the idea that women could be public people," Stoffer tells The Salt. "Some of the early lawsuits around women being able to eat in public without chaperones came from people involved in women's voting rights.""

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2015/05/09/398832815/taking-mom-out-for-brunch-it-s-kind-of-a-feminist-tradition

I feel like it's still a surprising thing for women to be in public. It's still like people get to treat women in public like they are a spectacle.