Category: gender
-
Virginia Woolf and the Complexities of Cottage Loaf
WHAT WE MOST OFTEN REMEMBER from Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own are her thoughts on real estate: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Yet Woolf also recommends something that’s less commonly cited, but no less important—a good meal. She writes, “One cannot think…
-
This Writer is Tweeting Everything Sylvia Plath Ever Ate
LIKE MANY YOUNG, ASPIRING WRITERS, Rebecca Brill was obsessed with Sylvia Plath’s diaries. Their luminous, sensual, and often dramatic prose charts the ups and downs of Plath’s internal state with a serious attention that young women’s feelings rarely receive. So when the pandemic lockdown began in 2020, Brill, in the grip of a depression brought on…
-
Why LGBTQ couples split household tasks more equally
For Kara and Jo Chambers-Grant, communication has been key to maintaining equilibrium during the upheaval of the pandemic. The couple, who live in Bath in the UK, married in 2017, shortly after meeting through an online group that offers peer support for women, trans and nonbinary people coming out later in life. Following a whirlwind…
-
25 Years of Intuitive Eating
In 1993, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch were dietitians working next to each other in the same office. Both of them, in keeping with the wisdom of the time, spent their days counseling their clients on nutrition and meal planning, all with the aim of helping their clients lose weight. Yet both of them had…
-
These Powerful Pins Honored Suffragists Who Were ‘Jailed for Freedom’
THE FIRST-EVER WHITE HOUSE PICKET was led by women, lasted for more than a year, and was met with violence from both counter-protesters and law enforcement. In November 1917, after 10 months of picketing, the government’s crackdown on protestors reached a new intensity. Dozens of protesters were arrested and incarcerated at the infamous Occoquan Workhouse, where…
-
A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It
IN THE EARLY 1960S, JULIA Child and her husband handed Barbara Ketcham Wheaton the keys to their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The famous couple was going to California for the summer, but they wanted their young neighbor to be able to continue one of her favorite activities: perusing Child’s collection of historical cookbooks. Now an honorary…
-
Practicing Solidarity in Our Intimate Lives
Often, we find a vision of a better world when we’re most in crisis. I was a young, queer woman in an abusive relationship with a partner who was marginalized in different ways than me. I needed help, but none of the institutions supposedly built for survivors—police, institutional anti-harassment committees, even mainstream anti-violence orgs—spoke to…
-
Taste the Globe With Recipes From New York’s All-Grandma Kitchen Crew
WHEN JODY “JOE” SCARAVELLA OPENED Enoteca Maria in 2008, he was sorely in need of a grandmother. Scaravella grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, where his Nonna Domenica cared for him while his parents worked. “I remember her going to the market everyday, bringing her shopping cart,” Scaravella writes. “She stopped at the vegetable shops…
-
The Chocolate-Brewing Witches of Colonial Latin America
IT HAPPENED, PERHAPS, ONE HOT, humid night, mist over the mountains that bordered the colonial city of Santiago de Guatemala. Melchora de los Reyes, a young, mixed-raced woman, had sex with her lover. When she met him, she was a virgin, a doncella, a status that made her eligible for marriage in the strict, Catholic society of…
-
Why It’s Harmful To Tell Kids “He’s Mean Because He Has a Crush on You”
If you are a child of the 90s, you might remember Helga Pataki. She was blond, had a strangely shaped head like the rest of her peers, lived in New York City, and, most importantly, relentlessly bullied television’s cartoon sweetheart, everyone’s favorite oblong-noggined Arnold. A character on the Nickelodeon kids’ show Hey, Arnold!, Helga typified the…
Reina Gattuso 