Escaping the drudgery of housekeeping via collective action became a feminist focus of utopian practitioners and theorists in the later nineteenth century.

“The medieval game of chess provided an active (and often interactive) register of the cultural and intellectual climate to the Middle Ages, affording us a window into the anxieties that surround an individual’s social and political identity, and in particular gender identity.”

Many women have claimed to be the model behind the iconic poster. But in the end, it may be that the historical personification of Rosie the Riveter is more important than her real identify.

During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, American women turned to boxing and wrestling as well as imported martial arts as an expression of empowerment through physical training. Needless to say, some men denounced the women for being indecent and unnatural.

“Even with the individual and general sexism in the history of philosophy, Harriet Taylor Mill would probably not have drawn quite so much ire if she had just ‘behaved herself'. But Harriet refused to play the role of the traditional Victorian subservient ‘lady.’ She asked questions that irritated and provoked nearly everyone but John Stuart Mill.”

Few people know that Captain America and Wonder Woman both premiered in comic books in 1941 as anti-fascist superheroes.

In 1952, a government administrator named Mary Dublin Keyserling was accused of being a communist. The attack on her was also an attack on feminism.

Every generation of medical professionals has issued the same warnings about high heels. For hundreds of years.

Top hat connoisseurs, friends of princesses and poets, tchotchke models, dog lovers, cottage keepers…lesbians?

In 1776, New Jersey’s new constitution defined voters as adult inhabitants who had lived in the state for a year and were “worth fifty pounds” or more. For women, this essentially meant the unmarried, since a woman’s property became her husband’s on marriage. This stands in contrast with other state constitutions that specified voters as “male person,” “male inhabitant,” “man,” “freeman,” “white male inhabitants,” and “free white man.”

The Russian intelligentsia was a unique cultural movement, made up of people from across Russian society who were united by that thirst for knowledge and passion for living out the full consequences of their ideas—whatever the consequences. One of those ideas was the emancipation of women. For the nineteenth century, especially in the context of Russia’s patriarchal autocracy, the intelligentsia was surprisingly feminist. Even girls’ secondary schools were hives of radicalism, long before the 1917 revolutions.