Margaret Talbot

Though Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett shared a mission, they took very different approaches. Their rivalry was political, sometimes even personal.

Churchill weaponized her powers of seduction—but Pamela Harriman came into her own when she brought her glamour to Washington.

As a feminist in the adult-film industry, she believed the answer wasn’t banning porn; it was better porn.

Well before the hippies arrived, LSD and other hallucinogens were poised to enter the American mainstream.

The famous disaster razed a metropolis and spread a pack of colorful lies. To sift through the ashes today is to encounter some uncomfortable truths.

The F.B.I. director promised to save American democracy from those who would subvert it—while his secret programs subverted it from within.

The Magnum photographer looks back on capturing an “inconceivable event.”

Anthony Comstock’s crusade against vice constrained the lives of ordinary Americans. His antagonists opened up history for feminists and other activists.

A new release records the musician’s early metamorphosis—unmoored, broke, living for a time in an attic—when her lodestar was her big, strange, unwieldy talent.

The amendment didn't “give” women the right to vote. It wasn’t a gift; it was a hard-won victory achieved after more than seventy years of suffragist agitation.

They played essential behind-the-scenes roles as the American movie industry was taking off. What happened?