womens history

Why Has Medicine Looked at PCOS Through the Lens of Fertility Instead of Pain?

by Alaina DiSalvo

Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome has had a complicated history in medicine. But its path toward recognition has been unfortunately colored by a concern for preserving fertility instead of improving women's quality of life—even in groundbreaking feminist health guides like Our Bodies, Ourselves. 

Lady Vols Country

by Jessica Wilkerson

The author remembers Pat Summitt's championship women's basketball teams at the University of Tennessee as a demonstration of how sports "encompass a battleground for determining how gender manifests in the world, how women and girls can use their bodies, and who can access self-determination."

New Book Says Cure for Girls in Crisis is Revolution

Mattie Kahn's new popular history of girls' activism spans centuries and class and ethnic divides, showing the power of young women to change what they can't accept. 

Sports Historian Victoria Jackson: Trans Bans in Sports Part of History of Suspicion toward Women's Sports

Recent state laws regulating the participation of transgender athletes in girls' sports are part of a long history of policing gender in athletics. 

The Power of Dependency in Women's Legal Petitions in Revolutionary America (Excerpt)

by Jacqueline Beatty

It's anachronistic thinking to ask whether the American revolution improved women's status; a legal historian's new book seeks to understand change and continuity in women's status through those women's own worldview, which often involved leveraging their dependent status in specific claims. 

Recovering the Story of the Empress Messalina After a Roman Cancellation

by Honor Cargill-Martin

After the empress Valeria Messalina's fatal fall from favor with her husband Claudius, her name and image were stricken from public and private spheres, an episode that reveals the tightly-regulated dissemination of imperial women's images (and puts current "cancel culture" panic and whisper networks into perspective). 

What We Can Learn From—and Through—Historical Fiction

by Carol K. Kammen

"I have written this to praise historical fiction when it respects the line between our times and the past, when it adheres to the known-truth and does not pervert it for excitement—or for book sales."

A Biography of Writer Lydia Marie Child Exemplifies a Revisitation of 19th Century Women

by Susan Cheever

A biography of the writer seeks to rectify a widespread phenomenon: women influential in their own time whose significance has been obscured in later histories. 

A Servicemember in My Family was Never the Same after WWII—My Mother

As part of the Clubmobile service of the Red Cross, Phyllis McLaughlin was an indirect witness to the traumas of the soldiers she served with hospitality, even before the jeep accident that ended her own service after nearly killing her. 

Mary Wollstonecraft's Diagnosis of the Prejudices Holding Back Girls' Education Remains Relevant Today

by Victoria Bateman

Since Wollstonecraft's 1792 condemnation of the strictures of modesty and sexual purity as unjust impediments to the education of girls and women, they remain principal justifications for keeping girls out of school. 

Ayahs, Amahs and Empire: The History of Domestic Care Work under Colonialism

by Julia Laite

The history of domestic and child care work has become increasingly robust, but museums and public exhibitions have struggled to find ways to represent the work and experiences of women, many from south Asia, who traveled with white colonial families to perform this labor, putting marginalized people in charge of the empire's children. 

How to Get Americans To Embrace Constitutional Amendments Again

by Kate Shaw and Julie K. Suk

As recent Supreme Court decisions on guns and abortion rights have made many Americans fear the loss of basic rights, reviving the effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment can remind Americans that nine people in robes don't have to be the final authority on the Constitution. 

Authors Call for a Rethink of Birth and Motherhood

Peggy O'Donnell Heffington makes an assertive argument that the United States has a long history of official involvement in motherhood, from making reproduction near-compulsory for white women on one side of the color line to eugenics and sterilization on the other. 

Black Mothers Bet on Themselves and Changed Las Vegas—Can Their Ideas Still Change America?

by Annelise Orleck

A courageous and politically imaginative group of women challenged the most powerful interests in Las Vegas to win better public aid and build an organization for community service and empowerment. A historian explains who they were, how she came to tell their story, and what it means today.

Medical Drawings of Pregnancy Have Centered Fetuses and Uteruses—While Erasing Women

Early depictions of the fetus in utero—imaginative as much as descriptive—were a boon to obstetric medicine, but also placed the fetus above the mother in terms of the medical system's concern, contends medical historian Rebecca Whiteley

After Dobbs, Women Have Been Pushed Out of the Legal Debate on Abortion

by Felicia Kornbluh

Federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk's recent ruling focused on his interpretation of the rights of fetuses and physicians, while ignoring the real-world health and reproductive concerns of women. Reproductive freedom advocates can learn from earlier generations of women who stressed the rights of women before Roe. 

Rep. Patricia Schroeder's Career Shows Real Effects of Electing More Women

by Sarah B. Rowley

Policymakers have too often ignored women's lived experiences in many areas when legislating. The late Congresswoman from Colorado showed how those experiences could be represented. 

Florida Legislation Recalls the Tragic History behind Fights for Sex Education

Legislation that would bar discussion of menstruation in Florida schools will likely put girls at risk of emotional distress when their periods begin. Historians stress that women have always sought this information despite stigmas against providing it. 

Nikki Haley's Campaign May Capitalize on Gender Stereotypes, but at a Cost to Women

by Jacqueline Beatty

The former South Carolina governor and UN Ambassador is seeking to separate herself from other conservatives by leaning into certain gendered stereotypes; this reinforces the idea that women leaders are fundamentally different, which has historically kept women from equal political footing. 

History of Reproductive Law Shows Women in Power aren't the Solution

by Lara Friedenfelds

The end of Roe v. Wade makes difficult pregnancies and miscarriages potentially legaly perilous for women. The history of how the law determines fault in a lost pregnancy shows that women are as capable as men of participating in a regime that punishes other women for the ends of their pregnancies.