For all of Ruth Hale’s attempts to preserve her name, the journalistic prodigy and innovator has mostly been lost to history. Indeed, if Hale is remembered today at all, it is mostly as a footnote in the biography of her better-known husband, Heywood Broun, a fate against which she fought fiercely while she lived. As…

The relationship between the U.S. government and the news media has long been a contentious one. That tension is particularly clear when we look back at the lives and careers of women journalists of color who spent decades battling with the federal government for the minds, opinions, and favor of the American people.  Participants in…

While the Center for Women’s History exhibition, Cover Story: Katharine Graham, CEO,  is on view in the Joyce B. Cowin Women’s History Gallery through October 3, 2021, Women at the Center will explore the lives and professional experiences of women in media—and how their work transformed journalism while fighting against persistent, systemic biases, including sexism, racism,…

The history of women’s activism over the past 200 years is the story of countless, courageous individual women—collective action begins when just one person confronts injustice, and then another joins her, and then another. Some of these women’s names may be familiar to us, but many Black women’s stories were deliberately left out of a…

By all accounts, 2020 was an eventful and historic, yet difficult year. From the public health crisis to social unrest and increasing activism, and from commemorating the suffrage centennial to celebrating breakthroughs in women’s political participation, Women at the Center has sought to uncover silver linings of this difficult time buried not too deeply within…