Feministory

The success of Senator Al Franken's anti-rape amendment is one step towards greater culpability for sexual assault and sexual harassment on the job. This week's Feministory is another case involving labor, sexual harassment, and Minnesota: the first sexual harassment class action lawsuit.

There's a surprising gap of research, let alone feminist research, on female superheroes from comics. Trina Robbins has turned out some amazing books on women and comics, including one on female superheroes, but she can't do it alone (and good luck trying to find her work at your nearby Barnes & Noble). That's why I'm excited about Mike Madrid's new book The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines not to mention the fantastic online resource he put together to go along with the volume. Read on for more!

If you think politics today is a boy’s club imagine 1860s America. The Civil War was beginning, slavery was not yet illegal, and women were still a good eighty years from receiving the right to vote. Yet one fiery young woman was able to become a national celebrity through her impassioned speeches on social reform. Anna Elizabeth Dickinson had her first anti-slavery piece published at the age of fourteen. As an advocate for black suffrage in addition to emancipation, and equal opportunity and pay for women in addition to the vote, Dickinson was one of the best-known reformers of her time.

The Welfare Rights movement of the sixties and seventies rarely receives the amount of historical attention it deserves, and as a grassroots movement that addressed class, race, gender, and consumption issues all at once. Although made up of thousands of women around the country, Johnnie Tillmon was one of the main activists, who rose from a reluctant welfare mother to Executive Director for the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Credited with inventing the family sitcom, a successful, decade-spanning career in television and radio, author of over 10,000 scripts, and a mother on-screen and off, Gertrude Berg is "the most famous woman in America you've never heard of."

When most people think of underground and alternative comics, Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix or Art Spiegelman’s and Bill Griffith’s Raw may come to mind. But San Francisco was home to more than a few alternative cartoonists, and when women such as Trina Robbins found out what a boy’s club the underground scene seemed to be, they took matters into their own hands and published a collectively edited women-only comic book.