On September 12, 1851, a small item appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune, the city’s largest and most progressive newspaper. “Miss Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., has recently returned to this City, from a two years’ residence abroad,” it announced. “Miss Dr. B., we understand, has just opened an office at No. 44…

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 Wendy Moore, author of No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain’s Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During…

In recent years, it’s been popular for mainstream celebrity profiles to crown individual celebrities as “feminist”—something a lot of mainstream outlets were ready to do as “feminism” became trendy. The narrative of an individualized ascension within a feminist context or landscape is often popularized in this way,…

I once thought of, “Shut the fuck up,” as one of the nastiest things one could say to another person; now I say it to myself regularly. This is progress: I have spent so long building myself in my head, only to realize that there is great happiness and calm in quieting the near-constant internal narration that…

You know about A Christmas Carol, but Dickens was far from the only author of his era to set a ghost story during the holiday; for several years running, Valancourt Books has been collecting them in anthologies. This turn-of-the-century story, “The Christmas Ghost,” follows a group of young people who gather for some…

Fans of Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children series (me) and Jean Auel herself will likely be devastated to learn that there’s a new theory floating out there about the purpose of those Paleolithic statues of shapely, big-breasted women—they may be less about fucking and honoring the Great Earth Mother, and more related to...…

Friendship over with insane story about a journalist who fell in love with Martin Shkreli. Chilling piece about a mysterious hacker who is making authors’ manuscripts disappear for no apparent reason is my new best friend.

In the pilot episode of CW’s Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Rebecca Bunch, the title character played by Rachel Bloom, is about to go on a date. As she starts prepping in her nondescript bathroom, she begins belting the pseudo-R&B “Sexy Getting Ready Song.” “I’m primpin’ and pluckin’ I’m brushin’ and rubbin’,” she sings, as her…

There are many things I have wished for this year, some of them noble and generous and most of them small and petty and selfish. But if I’m very honest, the thing I have wished for most is a guest room. The room I imagine isn’t even anything fancy. The guest room would be down an extra hallway, separated from the rest…

It was Charlotte Zolotow, then a forty-eight-year-old senior editor in the Harper Books for Boys and Girls division, who first saw the earliest version of Harriet the Spy. In her department, any editor could open submissions that came in the mail, and if an editor found a manuscript she liked, and the higher-ups…

It’s a simple fact, obvious to anybody who’s ever so much as wandered through the Met Museum Store looking at ornaments and reproduction Roman earrings, that there’s nothing better than a really excellent museum gift shop. A good one is full of delightfully creative little oddities, pegged to whatever interest brought…

Everyone sleeps alone. One might go to bed with a partner or friend or stranger, but no one ever truly sleeps with anyone. In our private unconscious, each of us exists, regardless of our surroundings, in a state of complete solitude. Yet despite this fact, romantically partnered adults are expected to bunk up like…

In 1929, Virginia Woolf famously posited that in order for a woman to write fiction, she must “have money and a room of her own.” In 2020 Pinterest moms have one-upped Woolf by investing in small houses of one’s own, wine bar optional.

If, as Tolstoy claimed, happy families are all alike, and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, how to explain the mid-20th century convention of the family room? It sprung up sometime after the Great Depression as a hub for the communal needs of family members—a down-to-earth alternative to the stuffy,…

In April, a photo of Nancy Meyers’s personal kitchen circulated on the internet. It’s a lovely, well-appointed space, appropriate for a woman whose movies about wealthy middle-aged women are famous for their inclusion of expansive, beautifully kitted-out kitchens. But what struck me most was the presence of not one,…

The Republican deification of Ronald Reagan has been sharply focused, effective, and completely revisionist, particularly since his death in 2004. Reagan’s canonization as the president of small government and austerity—the first president to campaign on “making America great again”—is a convenient narrative for a…

The wife has fallen—metaphorically and literally. Collapsed at her husband’s feet, she clasps her hands in abject penitence and burrows her head in the hollow of her arms. The sleeves of her white blouse are blotted with red, mirroring the crimson wallpaper; both imply the presence of her sin. Meanwhile, the patriarch…

The cover of a Better Homes and Gardens “Do It Yourself” supplement makes a big promise: “Organize Your Life: 18 Weekend Projects to Help You Store More.” The image they’ve chosen to accompany the guide depicts an expansive entryway space with a custom bench, cubbies, and beautiful built-in storage. The bench has…

It’s the time of year when white YA writers like to engage in vitriolic Twitter wars that expose biases, necessitate hasty apologies, and require an English degree to understand. In this year’s battle, some harmless tweets about Moby Dick being boring ignited a Twitter altercation in which a well-known YA author lost…

The Crown is a problem for the Crown. Now in its fourth season the show, which takes as its subject the intertwined stories of Queen Elizabeth II’s life and the course of the 20th-century monarchy, is finally tackling the destructive public scandals of the 1990s—particularly the implosion of her heir’s first…