In 2021, JD Vance told Fox News that senior Democrat women were just “childless cat ladies”, lacking cultural or social value compared with their married and procreating counterparts. When Taylor Swift looked... Read more »
Even in 1480s rural Essex, women were battling the gender pay gap. On one farm in Stebbing near Braintree in 1483, 27 men and 16 women were hired to bring in the... Read more »
What does a woman in midlife want? The opening scene of Susan Minotâs new novel, âDonât Be a Stranger,â hazards an answer. Ivyâa writer, early fifties, divorced, devoted mother of a young... Read more »
In 2011, Harriet Wistrich got a call about Sally Challen, who had been convicted of the murder of her husband, Richard. Sally had bludgeoned him to death with a hammer at their Surrey home... Read more »
When Yuan Yang was four years old, she tells us, her parents brought her from China to the UK as they pursued new educational opportunities. Although Private Revolutions, her vivid and detailed... Read more »
Feminist Harriet Wistrich had been a solicitor for 20 years, many of them with the noted human rights firm Birnberg Peirce (the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six) when, aged 55, in 2015,... Read more »
When the journalist Elizabeth Flock was in her early twenties, she took a trip to Rome with friends. They hired a guide for a day, a bearded man a few years older.... Read more »
In 1532, when the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina became the law of the Holy Roman Empire, it specified that witchcraft was a serious crime, punishable by execution by fire. The Carolina was often... Read more »
A new literary character has logged on. It’s unclear how long she’s been here; her arrival itself went unnoticed. Instead of speaking, she lurks. Her profile picture is the default “girl” emoji,... Read more »