JSTOR Daily Women's History Month Header

Celebrating Women’s History Month

Celebrate Women's History Month all March with JSTOR Daily. We hope you'll find the stories below, and the scholarship they include in full, a valuable resource for classroom or leisure reading.
An illustration of bundling

Bundling: An Old Tradition on New Ground

Common in colonial New England, bundling allowed a suitor to spend a night in bed with his sweetheart—while her parents slept in the next room.
Source: https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/313378

Self Care and Community in 1901 Indianapolis

For Black women engaged with local institutions, the “Delsarte” technique was a means of supporting struggling city residents while advancing political power.
JSTOR Daily celebrates Black History Month

Celebrating Black History Month

JSTOR Daily editors pick their favorite stories for Black History Month.
Two beer glasses

Drinking with Intellectual Humility

What happens when you mix alcohol with intellectual humility? A philosopher asks a writer and former bartender to share her thoughts.
A woman sitting on a fence, books in her left hand while thumbing a lift with her right hand, on a country road, United States, circa 1955.

When Hitchhiking was Wholesome

In the 1930s, hitchhiking was viewed as an opportunity for generosity on the part of the driver and a way to practice good manners on the part of the rider.
Asia Poppers, who portrays colonist Tryphosa Tracy, prepares fritters in her one-room house November 25, 2003 at Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The Countercultural History of Living Museums

In the 1960s and ’70s, guides began wearing period costumes and farming with historical techniques, a change that coincided with the back-to-the-land movement.
Giacomo Casanova by Francesco Narici

Casanova was Famous for Being Famous

Giacomo Casanova achieved celebrity not through any particular achievement but by mingling with famous people and making himself the subject of gossip.
Distribution of coal to the poor at Christmas by the Parish Beadle, c. 1888

Banning Christmas Dinner

Poor laws passed in Great Britain in the 1830s reversed a centuries-old tradition to forbid workhouses from serving roast beef and plum pudding at Christmas.
Bal Masqué by Charles Hermans, 1880

Paris’s Wild Costume Balls

As urban growth brought rich and poor Parisians closer together in the 1830s, masked balls encouraged class mixing and costumes that crossed gender lines.