Throughout history, Black mothers have been characterized as symbols of crisis, trauma, and grief. But in doing so, society robs them of their agency, flattening their complex identities.

While still in his mid-20s, François Poulain wrote three books which constitute the first rigorously reasoned attack on the patriarchy. Before that, proto-feminist women tended to defend their sex by citing the accomplishments of queens and heroines of history and myth. Poulain instead used logic to demonstrate the absolute equality of women and men, and to make the case for their right to equal treatment under the law, equal access to education, and equal professional opportunities.

The historian Jill Lepore has encapsulated the problem of women in relation to the wide scope of American history, writing that the “archive of the past … is maddeningly uneven, asymmetrical, and unfair.” The study of the history of African American women is particularly challenging because the keepers of records often overlooked them altogether.

People tend to think of they, Mx., and hir as relatively recent inventions. But English speakers have been looking for better ways to talk about gender for a very long time.

Everyone expects Harris to run for president again one day, but her job requires her to avoid even the appearance of preparing for her political future.

She’s always been an A-lister. But her new film, Those Who Wish Me Dead, reflects Hollywood’s impulse to stifle female action heroes once they hit a certain age.

Ask people for adjectives to describe Nicola Sturgeon and the same few words tend to crop up: poised, perfectionist, regal. Another adjective often attached to Sturgeon is feminist. All the more striking, then, to realize that feminist issues are what have recently thrown this most polished of leaders off balance.

The competing demands of work and motherhood have some white-collar women choosing part-time work—and loving it.

A new cohort of directors - all women - is making new contributions to a very old genre. In doing so, they’re united by an interest in probing the isolation and alienation of people on the American “frontier”—and in critiquing the frontier illusion itself, the fantasy that fleeing toward the next horizon offers riches as well as freedom from the waste and damage left behind.

Care work is just as essential as roads and bridges.

The U.S.’s failed efforts to rescue the Chibok girls kidnapped by Boko Haram illustrate the limits of its power.

For now, many women are too busy trying to hold everything together to translate this anger into political action. But could this heightened awareness of the modern economy’s unfair load shape politics over the next decade?