One of the themes of our exhibition,  Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg—organized by the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and on view through January 23—is RBG’s decades-long work to expand and protect reproductive rights. Last month, the Supreme Court heard the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,…

From observing parallels between current events and the British invasion of the capitol in 1812 to mourning of bell hooks, Women at the Center has spent 2021 demonstrating how women’s history speaks to our present moment and can reveal new understandings of our collective past. In this post, the Center for Women’s History looks back…

How were the women’s pages “enormously revolutionary”? That’s how the New York Public Library’s Julie Golia put it during a virtual panel hosted earlier this year as part of our 2021 Diane and Adam E. Max Conference on Women’s History virtual conference, Breaking News, Breaking Barriers: Women in American Journalism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, newspapers…

The Center for Women’s History mourns the passing of bell hooks, a cultural critic and writer who reimagined the world of feminist action to include the experiences of Black and working-class women, reshaping the fields of gender studies and women’s and gender history. Just 69, hooks died on December 15 at her home in Berea,…

What was the Barbizon Hotel, and how did it fit into a changing social and architectural landscape broadening opportunities for women in the 20th century? The Center for Women’s History hosted a recent women’s history salon with author and historian Paulina Bren, in conversation with New-York Historical’s Valerie Paley, to discuss the “modern women” who took up…