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.
speech bubbles me too

Finding the Words We Need to Talk About Sexual Assault and Harassment

"Me too." As the conversation around sexual assault has spread, it's become clear that not everybody is prepared to talk about such a difficult issue.
Marilyn Monroe

The Many Meanings of Marilyn Monroe

The life, times and image of Monroe has been expounded upon tirelessly in the decades after her tragic death at age 36.
Mt. Holyoke Balloon Day

How Women Crushed on One Another Back in the Day

Same-sex crushes and romantic friendships between college-age women were common throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Giovanni's Room, Philadelphia

Book Club Made Me Gay

Book clubs and reading groups have long been important to marginalized communities.
Steel mill

Rebecca Harding Davis, American Realist

How do we record the voices of those who are silenced? We might do well to remember one of ...
Cars in 1920s LA

How the Women of Los Angeles Protected Their Rights to Drive

In the 1920s, women's love of driving in auto-obsessed Los Angeles created traffic jams and a battle over women’s rightful place.
Wren Library, Cambridge University

Political Correctness Redux

The conservative anti-PC movement of the 1990s has its roots in a backlash against the Civil Rights movement.
A group of Oberlin College students in the early twentieth-century

From Dorm Rooms to Bathrooms: The Long Fight for Gender Equality

Before current uproar over transgender people and bathrooms, the country debated the place of coeducation in American society.
Artist Faith Ringgold poses for a portrait in front of a painted self-portrait during a press preview of her exhibition, "American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington on Wednesday, June 19, 2013. Ringgold explains her "confrontational art" _ vivid paintings whose themes of race, gender, class and civil rights were so intense that for years, no one would buy them. "I didn’t want people to be able to look, and look away, because a lot of people do that with art," Ringgold said. "I want them to look and see. I want to grab their eyes and hold them, because this is America." (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Power in the Painting: Faith Ringgold and her Story Quilts

Through a didactic retelling of history, artist Faith Ringgold uses her story quilts to reframe the past.