Claudia Schreier choreographed her first dance, a solo for her summer camp talent show, when she was twelve years old. In her sophomore year of high school, she did it again, choreographing a pas de deux for herself and her best friend, Kaitlyn, which they danced as the school orchestra played music from Swan Lake.…

On the eve of her 10th wedding anniversary, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, appeared on the steps of St. George’s Chapel in Windsor for a very different sort of formal royal occasion: the funeral of the 99-year-old Prince Philip. She was appropriately somber in a black coat dress and matching hat, with a veil over…

In Jezebel’s newest series Rummaging Through the Attic, we interview nonfiction authors whose books explore fascinating moments, characters, and stories in history. For this episode we spoke with Lynell George, author of A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler, a biography that delves into…

Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, has died at Windsor Castle. He was just shy of 100 years old, and he had been married to Queen Elizabeth II for more than seventy years.

Joye Hummel, the first woman writer hired to write Wonder Woman comics, has died at the age of 97.

When I was 21 and just out of college, I felt, like many people that age do, a little aimless and a little rootless. I had no concrete sense of what I wanted to do with my life, which stretched before me like a dark tunnel, but I knew that I somehow wanted to put the lessons I had gleaned from my Asian American…

Sharon Stone isn’t like other people. This she reminds us several times throughout her new memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice. “Yes, I was odd, but not on purpose,” she writes of her youth as an exceptionally bright child in rural Pennsylvania (or as she calls it on practically every reference, “Penna”). “I still…

“This is me, you understand?” Octavia St. Laurent declares triumphantly to the camera. “I love myself for who I am, what I am. I’m beautiful, I’m talented, and there’s no woman who can stand out there next to me. And if they can? Bring it on down.” Thirty years on, and there hasn’t even been a contender.

In 1927, Edwina Parra was leading a charmed life as a 19-year-old debutante engaged to be married to a handsome young medical student. But all it took to break that charm was a small, stubborn rash on her upper thigh. After two doctors examined the spot and diagnosed Parra with Hansen’s Disease—better and known as…

The logline on Italian arthouse cinema writer-director Lina Wertmüller’s mark on her medium is that she was the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director. She was alone in the designation from 1977 to 1994, when Jane Campion was up for The Piano. But to frame the honor solely in terms of…

Call Me Max, my early reader that ignited protests from angry parents in Utah and Texas, is written for a first or second-grade audience. It has a carefully controlled vocabulary and short sentences; it’s divided up into four chapters, despite being very short. It’s a book designed for kids just learning to read, who…

The history of acting is full of stories about women who clawed their way into the business through a combination of wits, beauty, talent, and sheer, unmitigated determination. But first, there was “pretty, witty” Nell Gwyn, a poor London girl who leaped from selling oranges to theatergoers to the stage and then to…

In March 2017, Celeste Bell, the daughter of late punk trailblazer Poly Styrene, along with writer Zoë Howe and director Paul Sng, launched a crowdfunding campaign to create a documentary about Styrene and her time as the lead singer of the band X-Ray Spex. The project, titled Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché after one of…

In 2008, two years after Edna Lewis, the Grand Dame of Southern Cooking died, Gourmet published an essay written by Lewis that serves as a de facto manifesto for the way she lived her life through food. In it, she acknowledges that the food we traditionally think of as Southern now was the food made by “blacks, men…

In 1904, tenement residents living on New York City’s Lower East Side stopped paying rent. The tenants, mostly Jewish garment and trade workers crammed into small apartments, could barely afford the rent as it stood. So hundreds of residents, organized primarily by women activists, fought against it, organizing the…

In 2013, a blonde-haired woman in a “sexy nurse” costume (low neckline, high hemline) worked a booth at the Food Expo of Natural Products, pitching a new option: Powerful Yogurt. She offered passers-by ultrasounds of their stomachs so they could “find their inner abs,” the brand’s tagline. The packaging further…

Conservatives who rant about cancel culture actually love canceling children’s books that include content that makes them personally uncomfortable. 

In Jezebel’s newest series Rummaging Through the Attic, we interview nonfiction authors whose books explore fascinating moments, characters, and stories in history. For this episode, we spoke with Michelle Duster, author of Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells, a biography of one of the…

It was supposed to be a fairy tale for the contemporary age, a media-savvy biracial American professional woman who could charm a willing institution into a new era with the support of her loving Prince Charming. It was the narrative climax of two important connections to the princess mythos for a generation of…