Blaming Women for Infertility in the 1940s
In the early days of fertility treatments, some doctors theorized that women’s unconscious hatred of their husbands kept them from conceiving.
Ruth Page, the Ballerina Who Danced Poems
In the 1940s, American dancer Ruth Page combined poetry, performance, and personal reflection to create a new type of dance.
How Women Helped to Develop the First Spacesuit
NASA recently cancelled an all-female spacewalk, citing a lack of spacesuits. Ironically, women played a key role in creating the very first spacesuits.
The Bluestockings
Meet the original Bluestockings, a group of women intellectuals. Their name would eventually become a misogynist epithet -- but it didn't start that way.
Defying the Gender Binary in the 1930s
In the 1930s, experimental psychologist Agnes Landis interviewed women who identified as "tomboys."
Voltairine de Cleyre: American Radical
She was a notable anarchist thinker and speaker, but history has largely forgotten Voltairine de Cleyre.
The Woman Who Found the Earth’s Inner Core
Inge Lehmann was the seismologist and mathematician who figured out what the Earth's core was actually made of.
A Glimpse at Women’s Periods in the Roaring Twenties
A 1927 study by famed efficiency expert Lillian Moller Gilbreth revealed how American women dealt with menstruation -- and how they wished they could.
“No Unescorted Ladies Will Be Served”
For decades, bars excluded single women, claiming the crowds were too “rough” and “boisterous” and citing vague fears of “fallen girls.”