Feminist Legal Pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies at 87

Progressives mourn a SCOTUS legend, famous for potent dissents, who saw gender equity as a path to civil rights for all

----------- Today, flowers are strewn on the steps of the Supreme Court, where “Equal Justice Under Law” is carved in stone. More than a thousand people gathered there tonight to mourn the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last night from cancer at age 87. Justice Ginsburg was born in ...
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Feminist Legal Pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsburg Dies at 87

Wages Against Essential Work

Our undervaluation of traditionally female work is coming home to roost

The streets around Highland Hospital, a few blocks from my house in Rochester, New York, are lined with signage “thanking” and “supporting” the “essential” workers who labor there. Many signs are hand-made, propped on porches or taped to light poles; others are mass-produced, like campaign signs, anchored into residential lawns. ...
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Wages Against Essential Work

Leading the Resistance Into Battle

An Interview With Sonia Purnell

The following interview with Sonia Purnell, a 2020 finalist in biography, is part of a series of NBCC interviews conducted by New School creative writing students. In her biography, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, Sonia Purnell captures the ...
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Leading the Resistance Into Battle

Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

The National Book Critics Circle finalist on her biography, L.E.L.

Lucasta Miller, author of The Bronte Myth, returns to the world of 19th century female authors with L.E.L., an extensively researched recasting of the life and career of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Long ignored and dismissed by critics, recently unearthed information has shed light on Landon’s personal life and by extension offered a new perspective ...
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Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

An excerpt from the first radical feminist novel

It was always the same story, in subways or suburbs. From my beginnings in Baybury Heights, a nice neighborhood where we moved because it was “safe,” it was always the girl who was kept in the house after school if a boy molested her, never the boy. Ostensibly she was ...
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Petra Collins is Not Your Savior

A Female Gaze

Petra Collins is the most celebrated, most talked about female identifying photographer/director of my generation. Throughout her career her style has been attributed to the rise of what some are calling “the female gaze”, as an alternative to the one typified by Laura Mulvey in her essay “ Visual Pleasure and Narrative ...
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Petra Collins is Not Your Savior

Spinoza and Feminism Question the Structures of Domination

Is the mind-body problem a gender problem?

Traditional theory on the mind-body problem has been mostly conceptualized by men. The historical debate found its most heated moment in the seventeenth century between Rene Descartes and Benedict De Spinoza; the first advocating for the superiority of the mind over the body, and the latter with his characteristic Monist ...
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Spinoza and Feminism Question the Structures of Domination

Nancy Fraser on Feminism and Neo-liberalism

In the last decade or so an increasing number of theorists and scholars working on gender and sexuality have started paying attention to the relation between gender, sexuality, and capitalism, and to the intersection of gender oppression, class exploitation and racism. This has been a welcome turn in the feminist ...
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What’s Left After Penis Envy?

I am teaching a course called “Feminism and Literature” at the New School that explores how literature can articulate feminist claims in the public sphere. One of the problems we discussed is whether the language we are currently using, as well as the imaginary that sustains it, are actually adapted ...

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Rethinking the Split Between Feminists and the Left

The recent death of Shulamith Firestone marks a milestone in the history of second wave feminism, and encourages an historical perspective. Firestone was one of the most inspired and original political intellectuals of the sixties, and a founder of the modern feminist movement. I can speak personally here of the ...

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