Nestled amidst Allen Ginsberg’s dildo, some vanilla-flavored underwear that offers sexually-transmitted infection (STI) protection, and a Braille issue of Playboy magazine, the plastic Unisex Toy sits proudly behind a glass panel in New York City’s Museum of Sex. It’s shaped like a spinning top, with one end elongated into a pole and the other curved… Read more →
Tag: Feminism
A Return to the Abortion Handbook?
During one of my last visits with abortion activist Patricia Maginnis in 2015, she handed me The Abortion Handbook for Responsible Women. Published in 1969 and coauthored by Maginnis and her friend and fellow activist Lana Clarke Phelan, The Abortion Handbook was a no-holds-barred assessment of the problem facing abortion-seeking women in the years before… Read more →
What Feminists Did the Last Time Abortion Was Illegal
As the US Supreme Court heard arguments over the Texas and Mississippi laws that threatened to weaken Roe v. Wade substantially, my thoughts turned to the abortion rights activists I interviewed in California in the wake of the 1989 Webster decision. Webster v. Reproductive Services also involved a Mississippi statute, one that required viability testing… Read more →
The Women’s Health Movement and the Dream of the Diaphragm
Half a century after the emergence of the women’s liberation movement, “the pill” remains ingrained in the iconography of second-wave feminism. Although the drug now comes in a sleek blister pack, the image of a retro Dialpak remains an aesthetic touchstone—a symbol of bodily autonomy now emblazoned on enamel pins, earrings, and rubber stamps. It… Read more →
It Just Wasn’t a Good Fit
Charity Adams Earley’s winter coat didn’t fit. At the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps Training Center in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1942, women had been issued winter overcoats designed for enlisted men. Earley’s coat was too short in the arms, but many other Army women found their coats too large. And, although Earley was training to… Read more →
Fight Cancer like a Feminist
On May 2, 2018, I was coming out of anesthesia from an emergency appendectomy when I learned I might have cancer. After an excruciating five days in the hospital, my surgeon confirmed that I had moderately differentiated adenocarcinoma but was unsure as to the type of cancer. While it may sound cliché, my life quite… Read more →
Glitter Conservators: Thinking Conservation through Feminism
A golden sculpture of a winged woman holding a laurel wreath with her right arm and a broken chain with the other rises stoically above Mexico City. She is standing on her toes, bare chested, on a stone column erected over a base with five male figures known as the “Apotheosis to the Father of… Read more →
Showing Up, Building Community, and Creating Grace: A Review of Lindy West’s The Witches Are Coming
At 11 am CT on January 20, 2017 — just as Donald Trump was being sworn in as the forty-fifth President of the United States in Washington, DC — I was sworn in as a brand new American citizen in Rock Island, Illinois. It was an odd day. On the one hand, knowing that the… Read more →
For Keeps: Teenage Girls and Anxiety around Sex during the 1990s
In 1995, I was sixteen and experiencing the excitement of my first real love. As if out of a 1990s teen rom-com, my boyfriend asked me to “go with him” by drawing a picture of roses and placing them in our shared locker. Once, when we were shamelessly making out in the band room between… Read more →
Manly Firmness: It’s Not Just for the 18th Century (Unfortunately)
The references to “manly firmness” are everywhere in late-18th-century political sources. For example, Edward Dilly wrote to John Adams from London in 1775 to praise the men in the Continental Congress, “for the Wisdom of their Proceedings — their Unanimity, and Manly firmness.” In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson listed the crimes of the… Read more →