Decolonization Is Women’s Work

March 8, 1950—International Women’s Day—Marked the Embrace of a Feminist Battle Against Imperialism

It was 1950, and the world was in flames: In Vietnam, Iran, Madagascar, Algeria, West Africa, South Africa, Tunisia, Malaya, Burma, and Cuba, wars of counterinsurgency were being waged against colonial powers that refused to leave. Women, with weapons in their hands and the courage to hide soldiers, grow food for the frontlines, and pass messages across their battlefronts, took part in fighting these wars for independence. At the same time, they sought peace, freedom, and women’s rights.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, they erupted in protests to demand an …

by Elisabeth B. Armstrong | March 8, 2023

Bringing Down the Bra

Since the 19th Century, Women Have Abandoned Restrictive Undergarments While Pursuing Social and Political Freedom

by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox | October 14, 2021

In a recent Instagram conversation with fans, actress Gillian Anderson articulated what many women are thinking these days: “I’m not wearing a bra anymore … it’s just too f**king uncomfortable.”

The …

Women’s Movements Can Save the World—by Learning From Each Other

After Many Years of Tilling the Soil, Transnational Feminist Movements Have Growing Momentum

by Jackie Mansky | March 9, 2021

Can transnational women’s movements save the world?

That was the title question posed, on International Women’s Day, to two Arizona State University experts on women’s leadership at a Zócalo/ASU Center on …

When Jewish Wives Beefed With Butchers and Changed the World

If You’ve Participated in a Community Protest or Consumer Boycott, You Can Thank the Great Kosher Meat Strike of 1902

by Scott D. Seligman | November 5, 2020

Sarah Edelson had been pushed too far.

The price of the kosher meat that she and most of the half million or so Jewish homemakers on Manhattan’s Lower East Side …

The Woman Who Faced Down the Mob and Championed a Union

Min Matheson Brought Her Transformative Vision to an Unlikely Corner of America

by Catherine Rios and David Witwer | October 21, 2020

Labor leader Min Lurye Matheson made her name facing down the mob. She arrived in Northeast Pennsylvania in 1944, dispatched by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, or ILGWU, to …

The Incredible Legacy of Newark’s Black Women Activists

Harlem Renaissance Writer Brenda Ray Moryck and a New Jersey Community’s Untold Century of Intellectualism and Artistry

by Noelle Lorraine Williams | September 14, 2020

In 1927, Brenda Ray Moryck, a 32-year-old Black American woman from Newark, New Jersey, published a manifesto in Ebony and Topaz, a prominent Harlem Renaissance anthology of prose and poetry.

In …

women’s history