Two champagne glasses toasting

Why Champagne?

We use champagne to celebrate New Year's Eve and other major events. But how did the sparkling wine get such cultural cachet? (Hint: marketing helped.)
Interior with breastfeeding woman

Breast Milk as Medicine

Human breast milk has been recommended as a cure-all since the 17th century.
Jack Halberstam, Afsaneh Najmabadi-Evaz and bell hooks

Gender Studies: Foundations and Key Concepts

Gender studies developed alongside and emerged out of Women’s Studies. This non-exhaustive list introduces readers to scholarship in the field.
Lick Observatory

The Women Who Made Male Astronomers’ Ambitions Possible

In the late 19th century, Elizabeth Campbell helped her astronomer husband run the Lick Observatory and lead scientific eclipse-viewing expeditions.
Plaster face casts by Anna Coleman Ladd

How Masks of Mutilated WWI Soldiers Haunted Postwar Culture

In the age before plastic surgery, masks were the best option for veterans with faces scarred by war. The end results, however, were somewhat uncanny.
The Eldorado Nightclub

Gender Identity in Weimar Germany

Remembering an early academic effort to define sexual orientation and gender identity as variable natural phenomena, rather than moral matters.
Illustrated portrait of Russian astronaut Valentina Tereshkova

Valentina Tereshkova and the American Imagination

Remembering the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, and how she challenged American stereotypes.
U.S. World War II anti-venereal disease poster

When America Incarcerated “Promiscuous” Women

From WWI to the 1950s, the "American Plan" rounded up sexually-active women and quarantined them, supposedly to protect soldiers from venereal disease.
Children out at night

What Happened to the Night Children?

A hundred years ago, it was quite common for working-class children to roam the streets freely at night.
breastfeeding eighteenth century

When Breastfeeding Was a Civic Duty

Think people are judgmental of mothers now? In the 18th- and 19th-centuries, mothers who bottle-fed their babies were blamed for many of society's ills.