The Witches of El Paso

An excerpt from a new novel on the supernatural power of family

On the bridge to Juárez, Marta peers down at the Rio Grande trickling along its concrete ditch. The air is heavy with diesel exhaust. People walk across the bridge carrying bright blue and red plastic bags, pushing granny carts toward El Paso. Marta thinks back to when she was a girl, ...
Read More
The Witches of El Paso

Christine de Pizan and Women’s Tongues

Why do women bleed milk?

I am doing it again. Teaching Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies. As I always do, I asked at the beginning of class who knew the work before our “Philosophy and Literature” class. This time, a positive surprise! One student had been introduced to de Pizan’s ...
Read More
Christine de Pizan and Women’s Tongues

First, Pick the Right Wife

Why Now? With Claire Potter, Episode 8

A conversation with historian Robin Morris, author of "From Goldwater Girls to Reagan Women: Gender, Georgia, and the Growth of the New Right" about how women activists transformed the GOP ...

Read More
Placeholder

Our Bodies, Ourselves, Online

Historian and activist Saniya Lee Ghanoui explains how a feminist classic entered the twenty-first century

When we started, we knew we needed experts from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Women and gender-expansive people from different races brought their own perspectives, personal and expert, and that would help us address racial health disparities. ...

Read More
Our Bodies, Ourselves, Online

From the Vault: Labor Pains

“One classmate litigator closed up her practice, left a tape of bird songs on her office answering machine, and enrolled in art school.”

Since I hadn’t been able to get Angela to talk about what trial lawyering may have done to her sense of herself, her “identity” as a woman, I shifted to a different lens: Did she feel, I asked, that the presence of more women lawyers was humanizing the criminal law?...

Read More
From the Vault: Labor Pains

Women’s History, An Origin Story

In 1975, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg published “The Female World of Love and Ritual, and changed how my generation of feminists understood the practice of history

I first encountered Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual” in 1978. I was twenty and a junior at Yale. A teaching assistant passed it on to me when I met with her after class: a paper was due and my mind was empty. She said that there ...
Read More
Women’s History, An Origin Story

Believe Me: A Public Seminar Book Talk

Jaclyn Friedman, Samantha Irby, Tatiana Maslany, and Sabrina Hersi Issa talk feminism with co-executiv editor Claire Potter

Almost 150 viewers joined us for an hour of conversation and readings from a new collection of feminist essays that have never been more relevant.  Believe Me asks us to imagine a world in which we not only believe women, but act as though the things they report – harassment, sexual assault, ...
Read More
Placeholder

Evoking Artist As Mother

An Interview With Myla Goldberg

Hayleigh Santra [HS]: How did you come up with the idea for Feast Your Eyes? Myla Goldberg [MG]: For me, the book started with a question: Is it possible to be both an excellent artist and an excellent parent, or to be one of those, do you have to kick the ...
Read More
Evoking Artist As Mother

Women of Color Resisting Hegemony in the Academy

An interview with Manya C. Whitaker and Eric A. Grollman

Counternarratives from Women of Color Academics: Bravery, Vulnerability and Resistance demonstrates how to build collective co-created spaces for “speaking up, speaking against, calling out and calling in”, to make visible the experiences and voices of women of color in academia, and the struggle for infrastructures of inclusion and justice at the ...
Read More
Women of Color Resisting Hegemony in the Academy

Mothers Day at Grand Central Station

Granny Peace Brigade sings to an end of all wars

On Mother's Day the Granny Peace Brigade sang to commuters passing through New York’s Grand Central Station about the need to end all wars. About two dozen women joined by a couple men gathered in a semi-circle, where they sang such songs as "We Rage to End All War," "Take Me Out of ...
Read More
Mothers Day at Grand Central Station