The story of women’s political activism in America and their battle for voting rights has often pivoted around the 19th Amendment. But in her powerful new work of history, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, Professor Martha S. Jones of Johns Hopkins dramatically…

Hunched over my laptop in the middle of my very beige kitchen in whatever leggings I picked up off the floor this morning, I feel the need for some glamour. A specific sort of at-home glamour, one that involves silken loungewear and fussy lamps and toiletries with art decor lines. I want a boudoir. Fortunately, the…

Ellen Terry wanted to look like a snake. She wanted her body to glimmer on stage, hard and soft at once, as though she were wearing the finest chainmail, the lightest armor. She was going to play Lady Macbeth, and Terry could be fussy about what she wore onstage. Not because she was vain, but because she understood…

It’s come to this: the longrunning cookie contest between the spouses of presidential candidates won’t happen this year. That’s because the institution that hosted it—Family Circle, one of the legendary “seven sisters” of women’s magazine publishing—shut down last year. But it’s hard to imagine an election tradition…

One of my fondest memories is having tea with a friend at the Jane Austen Center in Bath, under a portrait of Colin Firth in character as Mr. Darcy. While I actually prefer the 2005 movie adaption of Pride and Prejudice, starring Matthew Macfayden looking like a smoke-show, when it comes to perfectly camp Jane Austen…

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 Alexis Coe, author of You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington, a biography that examines the life of…

It’s March, but also September, and therefore somehow already Halloween. Normally I’d decry the early arrival of pumpkin merch as more consumer culture fiddling with the calendar, but this whole year has felt like one big jack-o-lantern with a rotten face collapsing on itself, so if anything it’s a nice chance to…

A few pages into Chasten Buttigieg’s just-published memoir, I Have Something to Tell You, he conjures an image that justifies his husband Pete’s campaign to become the president of the United States, and, by extension, this book that spends a lot of time focusing on said campaign. It occurs when Chasten and Pete, are…

Despite Donald Trump famously being a man who does not read, his time in office has been an incredible boon to the publishing industry, which seems to churn out a book about his presidency every hour, on the hour. As the New York Times reported, more than a thousand books have been published about Trump and his…

Christian Dior’s haute couture collection for the Spring/Summer 1992 season was not genre-defining per se. Named In Balmy Summer Breezes, it was “a very feminine collection, for a Parisian woman feeling the Parisian breeze, its colors and its flowers,” as the creative director Gianfranco Ferré told the Italian press.…

One of the lesser-known tactics employed by the American women’s suffrage movement: crowdsourced pro-suffrage cookbooks. They’re the subject of a new book, All Stirred Up: Suffrage Cookbooks, Food, and the Battle for Women’s Right to Vote, which collects many of the recipes that were included and adapts them for the…

Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate is trying to claim ownership over the version of the character featured in Netflix’s upcoming movie Enola Holmes because the Sherlock Holmes featured has ~feelings~.

On Election Day in 2016, visitors covered Susan B. Anthony’s Rochester, New York grave in “I Voted” stickers, a tribute to the woman whose name has been most associated with the cause of women’s suffrage in America. It was in keeping with the Clinton campaign’s repeated use of suffragist imagery and history, like her…

Of all the various pots famous people have their fingers in, perhaps the most beguiling is celebrity fragrance—an area of business that most celebrities have no real reason to be involved in, yet do so repeatedly, all the time. The best part about these business endeavors is not the product itself—though Sarah Jessica…

There are many wonderful time capsules scattered across the internet. However, for my money, nothing quite beats photographs from book signings by celebrities.

The documentary podcast Once Upon a Time...in the Valley, which follows the story of 1980s porn star Traci Lords and the bombshell news that she had been underage for the entirety of her career, begins with the same intro each episode. Veteran magazine journalist Lili Anolik reminds listeners that this story aims to…

Prince Andrew didn’t even make the cover lines on the October 18, 1976 issue of People magazine. (That was Captain & Tennille.) He was just 16 years old, and the focus was his relentless and—at that point—appropriately juvenile practical joking: “On some distant and solemn day, when Prince Charles is crowned king of…

Recently, clicking around Getty looking for pictures to illustrate summer, I landed on a series of photos that can only be described as highly specific: a series of photos of three “chorus girls” cavorting on a London theater rooftop with a giant block of ice. Once again I’m forced to ask: This is a…

Dolly’s Tennessee Mountain Home is a small, rough-hewn cabin tucked away in the middle of Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s eponymous theme park at the edge of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. Its very name conveys the all-important, utterly foundational place of Parton’s childhood home in her enduring public persona, the…

“Post-truth” may not be the first phrase that comes to mind when you think of Jay Manuel, America’s Next Top Model creative director and on-air staple. And yet the label fits his new novel The Wig, the Bitch, and the Meltdown like couture. Consider the layers of reality at work, and then consider how one obscures the…