Section
Feminism
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China’s Imagined Pasts and Futures: On YouTuber Li Ziqi
She may not hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, or herd cattle in the evening; still, her over 130 videos testify to the mind-blowing breadth of her abilities.
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The Feminist Press at 50: An Interview with Jamia Wilson
“There was something about the resilience of an organization like this. We are the longest-running feminist publishing house in the world.”[none-for-homepage]
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Women’s Ways of Aging
Studying human evolution reveals that older women have always been essential to the surviving and thriving of the species.
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Public Thinker: Nancy K. Miller on Feminist Lives
“Although I was reluctant to generalize about women’s friendship, I was also thinking about a model that would counter the male model of friendship.”
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Building a Society that Values Care
Aging Americans are cared for by family members or low-paid nurses. Both lack support for their necessary work, which COVID-19 has only made harder.
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Read Feminist Manifestos!
Early manifestos honored a high-stakes feminist anger that swept through the writing. It burns and simmers even today.
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What Next for MeTooLit?
What happens when a woman’s words are believed? And what doesn’t happen? Two years have passed since the viral hashtag #MeToo carried the intersectional movement to end sexual violence to a global audience. With the first wave of #MeToo movement books being published—what we might call MeTooLit1—we are now in a position to ask what…
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Phenomenal Pleasure: Women and the Game
Watching the early minutes of the first match of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup tournament, I was surprised to find myself tearing up …
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“Overpopulation” Is Not the Problem
I first encountered the biological concept of population in high school. We were introduced to the experiment of flour beetles in a jar of flour; each week, we …
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Reading Lives, Writing Lives
My tiny captor sleeps beside me. I don’t know how long it will last, but I welcome such moments of respite. Stolen hours to write, periods in which I feel my foggy …
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Anna Biller on Classic Films and Twitter Feminisms
To date, the independent filmmaker Anna Biller has tweeted somewhere in the …
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Our Mothers, Ourselves
I intended to begin with a personal admission. “I didn’t like being pregnant,” I was going to write, before describing the bodily discomforts (hypersalivation!) and psychic stresses (due date during finals!) I experienced while carrying my children. At the end of the review, I would loop back with a second admission: that reading journalist Angela…
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Carolyn Heilbrun Told You So
Over the course of a few weeks in April, amid the usual tiny indignities that beset women in academe, I read through Carolyn Heilbrun’s entire oeuvre. April …
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Are Sharp Women Enough?
Twitter was a medium made for Dorothy Parker—alas, a century too late. Her famous poem “Resumé” is 141 characters. Her breakout feature in Vanity Fair, a series of Hate Songs, begs for a hashtag …
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Famous and Unfamous Feminists
Meg Wolitzer’s new novel is enjoyably, inescapably “timely,” with its focus on modern feminism and its attention to collegiate rape culture, skirmishes in …
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Women’s Suffrage @100
The woman suffrage amendment passed in 1920, the culmination of what Juliet Mitchell called “the longest revolution, ” because it took 80 years of activism for American women to win the right to vote. What could better illustrate the depth of resistance to sex equality? But for two reasons, 1920 was not the decisive year. First,…
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Charlotte Brontë’s Anger
You might think that a museum show about an iconoclastic Victorian author would, in these postelection weeks, constitute a kind of escapism. Not so when that author is Charlotte Brontë. An Independent Will, assembled by the Morgan Library for the two hundredth anniversary of Charlotte’s birth, provides a lesson in the righteous application of anger. Like other…
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Sex and Socialism
Three recent books tell the stories of four women whose lives both absorbed and propelled the vast, multifaceted socialist movement in Britain from 1870 to 1920: Lizzie Burns, Nellie Dowell, Muriel Lester, and Eleanor Marx. While all of them played roles in the struggle for equality of class, wealth, and opportunity, and all of their…
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The Cult of Girlhood
Is girlhood a cult? Emma Cline’s new novel draws on the history of the Manson Family to explore how girlhood and cults both depend on rituals and intimacies. The Girls seems to tell the story of how one man—Russell, the Manson figure around whom the cult centers—can drive girls of “a different species” to commit…
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Live Through This
I used to refer to my dark times as the IWTDs, when the mental refrain I want to die so dominated my thoughts that I took to writing the acronym in the margins of books I was reading. It was a huge improvement when I began scribbling STFA—stay the fuck alive—in my books instead. One…
