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Crystal Eastman
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Crystal Eastman Plans for After the Election

A reading from 1920 on the fights that follow the 19th Amendment: “Now at last we can begin.”
A homesteader woman feeding chickens.

Some Country for Some Women

As women stretch themselves thin, homesteader influencers sell them an image of containment.
Ella Watson in American Gothic, photographed by Gordon Parks.

She Was No ‘Mammy’

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.
Illustration of Mina Miller Edison in front of news clippings about her.

Mina Miller Edison Was Much More Than the Wife of the 'Wizard of Menlo Park'

The second wife of Thomas Edison, she viewed domestic labor as a science, calling herself a "home executive."
Lucille Walker, a domestic servant, holding a child on a suburban lawn.

Living in White Spaces: Suburbia's Hidden Histories

The Black women and men who worked and slept in white homes are mostly invisible in the histories of suburbia.
Illustration of a 1950s woman surrounded by orange flames, pink background

Reading Betty Friedan After the Fall of Roe

The problem no longer has no name, and yet we refuse to solve it.
A woman giving a presentation about electric appliances to an audience of men and women.

Refrigerators and Women’s Empowerment

The “peaceful revolution” of rural electrification.
A woman with a baby

The Feminist History of “Child Allowances”

The Biden administration’s proposed “child allowances” draw on the feminist thought of Crystal Eastman, who advocated “motherhood endowments” 100 years ago.
White House staff vacuuming

The Secret Life of the White House

The residence staff, many of whom have worked there for decades, balance their service of the First Family with their long-term loyalty to the house itself.

From Home to Market: A History of White Women’s Power in the US

The heart-tug tactics of 1950s ads steered white American women away from activism into domesticity. They’re still there.
An illustration from a book of homes published by a Pennsylvania lumber company in 1920

The Latent Racism of the Better Homes in America Program

How Better Homes in America—a collaboration between Herbert Hoover and the editor of a conservative women’s magazine—promoted idealized whiteness.
Svetlana Stalin being photographed

My Secret Summer With Stalin’s Daughter

In 1967, I was in the middle of one of the world’s buzziest stories.

The Factory in the Family

The radical vision of Wages for Housework.

The Echoes of America's 'Faithful Slave' Trope in Lola's Story

How Alex Tizon’s essay echoes a trope with deep roots in American history

The Turn-of-the-Century Lesbians Who Founded The Field of Home Ec

Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer lived in an open lesbian relationship and helped found the field of home economics.

How Woodrow Wilson’s Privileged Southern Upbringing Influenced His Love Life

In Wilson’s chivalric framework, women were required to be submissive precisely so that men could protect the weaker sex.
A group of children spinning on a merry-go-round.

The Parenting Panic

Contrary to both far right and mainstream center-left, there’s no epidemic of chosen childlessness.
Wet-nurse strike in Chicago, 1937.

No Money, No Milk

Black wet nurses made a show of militance in 1937.
Interior of a Kitchen, by Eliphalet Fraser Andrews.
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Mastering the Art of Reading an Old Recipe

For every moment of historical significance, there is a figure — often hidden — who fed the figures we do remember.
Judith Jones

The Woman Who Made America Take Cookbooks Seriously

Judith Jones edited culinary greats such as Julia Child and Edna Lewis—and identified the pleasure at the core of traditional “women’s work.”
A masculine caricature of an Irish-American woman threatening an American woman in a kitchen.

From Saint to Stereotype: A Story of Brigid

Caricatures of Irish immigrants—especially Irish women—have softened, but persist in characters whose Irishness is expressed in subtle cues.
Irma Sherman, Chair of McMaid Workers Organizing Committee.

How Four Black Women Changed Labor Organizing Forever

40 years ago in Chicago, McMaid workers sparked a movement.
The Osterizer’s Spin Cookery Blender and Cook Book.

Of Potato Latkes and Pedagogy: Cooking for the History Classroom

A cooking assignment helps illuminate the lives of Jewish women in the past for students.
A photograph of Marvel Cooke overlayed over The Crisis' newspaper office.

This Radical Reporter Dedicated Her Life to Fighting the System

"I idolized women like Marvel Cooke," Angela Davis tells Teen Vogue.
A group of white veteran students in 1945, beneficiaries of the GI Bill.

The Blindness of Colorblindness

Revisiting "When Affirmative Action Was White," nearly two decades on.
Painting of ships in Boston Harbor.

Pressured to Leave

Black refugees’ journey from Virginia to Boston after the Civil War.

Liquor on Sundays

A new book sets out to discover how Americans became such creatures of the seven-day week.

Lydia Maria Child Taught Americans to Make Do With Less

A popular writer’s 1829 self-help book ‘The Frugal Housewife’ was based on the same democratic principles that made her a champion of the abolitionist cause.
Disinfection plant at Santa Fe Street International Bridge

From Bath Riots to Blocking Asylum

Public heath and race at the US-Mexico border.
Photo of an elderly Jane Stanford, dressed in lace and beads.

The Robber Baroness of Northern California

Authorities who investigated Jane Stanford’s mysterious death said the wealthy widow had no enemies. A new book finds that she had many.

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