feministory

I think this year is the first time President's Day has felt worth celebrating! Considering the historic nature of our country's first African-American President, here are just a few other ground-breaking American political campaigns.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. day, and our Adventures in Feministory takes us to Fannie Lou Hamer, who like many women activists of the American Civil Rights Movement (and social movements in general), is often overlooked despite her staggering contributions to social change.

Let's saddle up the wayback machine, kids, and travel to the year 1866. It was this very year, when baseball was deemed too difficult and violent a sport for ladies to play, when the Vassar Resolutes hiked up their giant, heavy skirts to run the base paths anyway. I found this photo of the Resolutes (and, OMG—can you believe they were called the Resolutes?) in an advance copy of Jennifer Ring's Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don't Play Baseball, which will be available from the University of Illinois Press in March 2009...

Today's adventure takes us to the lawless seas of the early eighteenth century, where Anne Bonny and Mary Read cutlassed and cross-dressed their way through feminine convention.

As a graphic designer, my interests in innovative women of history are often strongest for those involved in visual arts. And as a former student of Russian and a devoted Russophile, my obsession with designers of post-revolutionary Russia is off the charts. Enter Varvara Stepanova and Liubov Popova.

Each week, a few brave souls here at Bitch jump into our feminist time machine and travel back, back, back in time to pay homage (femage?) to a feminist pioneer of the past. Join us this week as we journey to the year 1637 and gain a bit of feminist insight into the life of Massachusetts Bay Colonist Anne Hutchinson.