Adrienne Rich with Susan Sherman. Photo by Colleen McKay. c. 1983

The Incredible Versatility of Adrienne Rich

Rich challenged the language of the past in poetry and prose while not quite embracing a fully inclusive future.
Director Julie Dash poses for the movie "Daughters of the Dust," circa 1991

Feminist Film Theory: An Introductory Reading List

Evolving from the analysis of representations of women in film, feminist film theory asks questions about identity, sexuality, and the politics of spectatorship.
Crystal Eastman

“Now We Can Begin”: Annotated

To mark the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, activist Crystal Eastman described the path to full freedom for American women.
Hospital emergency room entrance sign

Medicalizing Domestic Violence

What happens when experts position domestic violence inside a biomedical model of care?
Baby Drew, 1913

Boys in Dresses: The Tradition

It’s difficult to read the gender of children in many old photos. That’s because coding American children via clothing didn’t begin until the 1920s.
Women cooking in a public kitchen, 19th century

Kitchenless Dreams

Escaping the drudgery of housekeeping via collective action became a feminist focus of utopian practitioners and theorists in the later nineteenth century.
Manual knitting machine.

The Vermont Knitters

A major labor law dispute simmered for decades. At its center? Women being paid to do piecework on knitting machines in their homes.
A poster made by Ghazal Foroutan

Was She Really Rosie?

The unlikely, true story of the Westinghouse “We Can Do It” work-incentive poster that became an international emblem of women’s empowerment.
From the cover of Olivia by Dorothy Bussy

Olivia: An Oft-Overlooked Lesbian Novel

It took some fifteen years to bring Dorothy Strachey Bussy’s remarkable roman à clef to print, thanks to André Gide’s lukewarm reception.
The Wrangel Island Expedition team in 1921: Ada Blackjack, Allan Crawford, Lorne Knight, Fred Maurer, Milton Galle, and Victoria the cat.

Women in the Age of Polar Exploration

Opportunities were restricted during the so-called Heroic Age, but women still dreamed of exploration...and sometimes managed to reach the polar regions.