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Black and white headshot of author Erin Blakemore

Erin Blakemore

Erin Blakemore is a Boulder, Colorado-based journalist Her debut book, The Heroine’s Bookshelf (Harper), won a Colorado Book Award for Nonfiction and has been translated into Italian, Korean and Portuguese. Erin has written about history and culture and other topics for Smithsonian.com, The Washington Post, TIME, mental_floss, NPR’s This I Believe, The Onion, Popular Science, Modern Farmer and other journals. You can find more of her work at erinblakemore.com.

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Victorian-era lacemakers
Politics & History

How the Victorians Politicized Lace

Scholar Elaine Freedgood tells the story of how, in the face of encroaching industrialism, handmade lace enjoyed a frilly revival.
Women moonshiners bootleggers
Politics & History

How Prohibition Encouraged Women to Drink

During Prohibition, American women “made, sold, and drank liquor in unprecedented fashion,” writes historian Mary Murphy.
Candice Bergen Murphy Brown
Arts & Culture

Murphy Brown, Motherhood, and “Family Values”

Murphy Brown represented a threat to “family values”—a position that inherently placed her on the side of the families of color whose single family structures supposedly threatened the white, middle-class status quo of the 1990s.
18th century hoop skirt
Education & Society

Why Hoop Petticoats Were Scandalous

In the 18th century a new trend in women's underwear sparked public scandal: the hoop petticoat. How the world became obsessed with what was under women’s skirts.
Lady Loinette
Business

The Feminist Evolution of the Iowa Porkettes

In Iowa, between 1964 and 1991, groups of women—the wives of pork farmers—boosted the supposed benefits of pork-heavy diets. They were the Iowa Porkettes.
women in a reading room at Smith College in 1898
Education

The Reading Rooms Designed to Protect Women from “Library Loafers”

In the late 1800s, American women began to move more freely in public. In response, public libraries created sex-segregated reading rooms, intended to keep women in their proper place.
supermarket illustration
Business

Sex and the Supermarket

Supermarkets represented a major innovation in food distribution—a gendered innovation that encouraged women to find sexual pleasure in subordination.
Winter Shack Landscape
Arts & Culture

A Feminist Reading of The Long Winter

In The Long Winter, often praised as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s greatest novel, the villain may be not the snow, but oppressive gender roles.
Christmas banquet
Arts & Culture

How Victorians’ Fear of Starvation Created Our Christmas Lore

One scholar sees more in the Christmas food of authors like Charles Dickens—English national identity and class.
Compleat Housewife frontispiece
Education & Society

What Amateur Cookbooks Reveal About History

Remember those spiral-bound cookbooks from your church group or your mom’s favorite charity? Those amateur recipe collections are history books, too.
Monkeys illustration
Politics & History

Early America’s Troubled Relationship With Monkeys

The real and supposed resemblances between humans and non-human primates shaped American conversations about race and society.
Carlisle Indian Industrial School
Education

How Native Americans Taught Both Assimilation and Resistance at Indian Schools

In the nineteenth century, many Native American children attended “Indian schools” designed to blot out Native cultures in favor of Anglo assimilation.
Young Winston Churchill
Politics & History

Winston Churchill’s Love-Hungry Childhood

Winston Churchill started life as a love-starved child whose lonely childhood set the stage for his almost fanatical need for influence and power.
1949 Little Women
Arts & Culture

The Grumpiness of Little Women

By focusing in on the characters’ emotions, a scholar discovers something more than good little women. She finds surprisingly angry ones.
Punch bowl
Politics & History

Punch vs. Tea in the 18th Century

In the 18th century, whether a person drank punch or tea revealed a lot about gender, stereotypes, sociability, and domesticity.
Thoreau Sherlock Holmes
Arts & Culture

The Truth About Sherlock Holmes: He’s Actually Henry David Thoreau

A tongue in cheek comparison between the British fictional sleuth and the American Transcendentalist author, just because.
Colorful donuts with different decorations
Politics & History

The Delicious Democratic Symbolism of…Doughnuts?

Doughnuts became popular during World War I, when Salvation Army volunteers—most of them women—made and served the soldiers million of doughnuts.
Mommie Dearest
Arts & Culture

Are Mothers Monsters? Revisiting Mommie Dearest

On the surface, "Mommie Dearest" is a portrait of vanity and self-obsession. Dig deeper, and it reflects society’s discomfort with mothers and single women.
Winifred Bonfils
Politics & History

The “Sob Sisters” Who Dared to Cover the Trial of the Century

The term “sob sisters” was used in the early twentieth century to make fun of women journalists who dared cover the first trial of the century.
USPS Forever stamps featuring illustrations from Ezra Jack Keats' book "Snowy Day"
Arts & Culture

The Man Whose Snowy Day Helped Diversify Children’s Books

Jack Ezra Keats's 1962 book The Snowy Day featured an African-American protagonist, a first for a full-color children’s book.
kitchen of the future baby boomers
Business & Economics

Did Better Household Technology Create the Baby Boomers?

The Baby Boomers have been blamed for everything from economic stagnation to America's current political situation. But where did they come from?
Leave It To Beaver family dad
Arts & Culture

When Ward Cleaver Caused Social Anxiety

In the early 1960s, an Illinois Children and Family Services worker tried to figure out how TV dads were impacting contemporary American fathers.
Lois Lowry Number the Stars
Arts & Culture

The Real-Life Story Behind Number the Stars

An interview with Lois Lowry reveals that the popular children's novel Number the Stars was based on a true story of resistance to the Nazis.
Clothing Rack full of T-Shirts at a Thrift Store
Business

How Thrift Stores Were Born

According to the Association of Retail Professionals, about 16 to 18 percent of Americans shop at thrift stores in any given year.
Martin Shkreli
Education & Society

Is a Fair Trial Possible in the Age of Social Media?

Is it possible to have a fair trial or an impartial jury in an age when anyone is just a viral tweet or a Facebook search away?

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