International Women’s Day by Melissa Cole

International Women’s Day (IWD), celebrated on March 8 in countries around the world, was originally chosen to commemorate a strike by women textile workers that took place on that day in New York in 1857. These women were protesting extremely poor working...

The Underground Railroad that Wasn’t

One wintry night of December, 1860, Phoebe Harris Phelps, her face was disguised with heavy veils, showed up at the door of Susan B. Anthony looking for help. Anthony listened to her story with horror: Phoebe had been beaten, coerced, and separated from her children...

The Birth of Women’s Sports

Accompanying the explosion in feminism in the late 19th century was an explosion, or really a birth, of women’s sports. Middle and upper class women seized onto the bicycle, which gave them a freedom to travel and escape chaperones. Since long dresses were...

The Ancient Secret Language of Chinese Women

In the ancient villages of southern China, women had developed a secret language with its own unique script called Nu Shu. The women developed this language over hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, when women were forbidden formal education. Men could not understand...

Amazons of an Ancient World

The Amazons, the moon-women of ancient times, were not peaceful like other matriarchies, and they were not a detached, destructive patriarchy. They lived, some feminists theorize, at the cusp of a widespread changeover from the preeminence of egalitarian matriarchal...

Amazons of an Ancient World

  The Amazons, the moon-women of ancient times, were not peaceful like other matriarchies, and they were not a detached, destructive patriarchy. They lived, some feminists theorize, at the cusp of a widespread changeover from egalitarian matriarchal societies to...