Amanda Reynolds The Screenwriter Boldwood Books, January 2024

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

This title attracted me and, although unattracted to Reynold’s Close to Me in its televised form, suggests that potentially I have found a new source of entertaining psychological thrillers. The Screenwriter has the added attraction of including social commentary together with the staples of this genre, mystery, devious characters and some intriguing plotting.  In this novel, scrutiny of the Hollywood world as the MeToo movement has become part of its public discourse, is woven into the plotting and characterisation.

A prologue introduces Blythe Hopper who, upon looking out of her tower in her home in Hampstead, sees a spire of smoke arising from her garden. Headache forgotten along with the insults she has had to endure from a young journalist and mixed reminisces about her marriage, she hastens downstairs, runs through the kitchen where signs of a fight are apparent, is unable to locate keys to the locked back door, finds instead a gun and …

A month later Marnie Wilde arrives to be Blythe’s ghost writer. She is desperate for the work, for personal as well as financial reasons. Both explain her preparedness to suffer the disagreeable behaviour of Blythe and her business manager, Ludo Villander, the unsavoury accommodation to which she is banished from the well-appointed house, the poor-quality food prepared in a dirty kitchen and numerous rules to which she  must adhere.  However, lest one feels too sorry for Marnie she is also a less than sympathetic character, with her slovenly appearance,  propensity to self-sabotage, and her endless consumption of alcohol. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

Oliver Lewis The Orwell Tour Travels through the life and work of George Orwell Icon Books, Sep 2023.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

Travel to places such as Wigan, Catalonia, Paris, Motihari and Marrakesh referencing Orwell’s novels and insights into the author and his writing – what more could a reader want? That George Orwell was born in Northern India and died in Sutton Courtenay is intriguing in itself – and what happened in between is a story adroitly woven by Oliver Lewis in The Orwell Tour Travels through the life and work of George Orwell.

I enjoyed the pleasure that Lewis so clearly finds in writing about Orwell, associated locations, and indeed in his own approach to the subject. The enthusiasm Lewis feels permeates the book and I felt drawn into a life and places about which I knew something, but little in comparison with Lewis. Unlike Oliver Lewis, I have not read most of Orwell’s work, as I recall from many years back only the two most well-known, Animal Farm and 1984, and Homage to Catalonia and The Road to Wigan Pier. I also came newly to the many places Lewis visits. This does not matter, he unfailingly provides a picture that draws upon the written work, Orwell’s character and the countries from which Orwell took his inspiration. See Books: Reviews for the complete review.

International Women’s Day

Archives at the Art Gallery of NSW

 Los Angeles Review of Books

Reading (and Shopping) with Angela McRobbie

A reflection on the Birmingham School cultural studies scholar’s vision of girlhood.

By Rose Higham-Stainton March 3, 2026

THE PREEMINENT SOCIOLOGIST and cultural theorist Stuart Hall once wrote that, “as an area of serious historical work, the study of popular culture is like the study of labour history and its institutions. To declare an interest in it is to correct a major imbalance, to mark a significant oversight.” I was awakened to Hall’s ideas—the way that racial, class, and gender relations are present at every level of culture—as an undergraduate student in a British art school in the mid- to late noughties. It was Professor Angela McRobbie, one of Hall’s discerning acolytes, who gathered up his ideas and shaped them into something tangible for me as a young woman. I was first introduced to McRobbie when she took to the lectern at Goldsmiths College—which was her academic home then, and mine as an undergraduate student. Nearly two decades have passed, but her perfectly straight white hair, cut into a severe bob, her agile reading glasses propped low on the ridge of her nose, and her Glaswegian hilt are impressed upon my memory. These largely superficial details are important; McRobbie would be the one to teach me this. Her demeanor was angular but not severe, and she had a cool seriousness about her, one that she powerfully applied to “unserious” subject matter: teenage girls’ magazines, British drum and bass, vintage clothes, and shopping. After the lecture, we were split into seminar groups; I spent a blissful hour with one of McRobbie’s PhD students dissecting a Beyoncé video. Textual analysis was not new to me, but its application to my own girlish and fluctuating life experience—what McRobbie called “girls’ culture”—was revelatory.

I had arrived at Goldsmiths a few years before, despondent and apathetic. Like most middle-class kids of my generation, it felt like the only real options presented to me were university or something definitively vocational. Without an aptitude for science or maths but with a vague facility for words, I applied for courses across the humanities. In 2000, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s New Labour became determined to get 50 percent of young people into degree courses, transforming the university from a place of academic rigor and defined outcomes into what McRobbie calls “a mass social and cultural experience,” predicated on a new kind of cultural economy and knowledge but often lacking any clear direction, of which I was an exemplar. By the time I arrived at university, Blair was already losing favor, and unlike the Cool Britannia of the 1990s, the subsequent decade appeared wishy-washy, culturally ill-defined, endlessly unsure of itself. This is also how I felt personally: I was neither a winklepicker-wearing indie rock devotee, a Home Counties boho “rah” (public school–educated and probably horsey), or a middle-class “scally” from the fine art course. I watched as the R & B of the nineties and early noughties faded into something saccharine and poppy, and as the goths and indie kids hybridized into the unpointed, directionless aesthetic of “indie sleaze.”

It turned out there was a way to make sense of all this. The disaffection and fleetingness of youth was the stuff of cultural studies as I would come to understand it. As a discipline, cultural studies occupied a liminal space between sociology and English literature and was defined by research subjects “not considered legitimate” enough for either, as McRobbie puts it. McRobbie found her professional and critical start as a discerning acolyte of Hall, the Jamaican-born British founder of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, known to most as the Birmingham School. By McRobbie’s definition, the Birmingham School was not just a mode of thought or a body of research but also a moment in time, in the mid- to late seventies, when pop culture entered academia and became a legitimate subject of study. Hall authored or edited a number of seminal texts (most notably 1976’s Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, co-edited with Tony Jefferson, and 1978’s Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, co-authored with Jefferson, Chas Critcher, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts) on the intersection of race and class, and was, perhaps reductively, crowned the “godfather of multiculturalism.” As McRobbie, who was studying under Hall at the time, puts it, he positioned “race [as] the ‘modality’ through which class was lived.” Though class was central to Hall’s thinking, he considered it “both as lived experience and as an abstract category within Marxist thought,” according to McRobbie, “a category formed through the struggle for domination.”

While Hall’s brilliance was in bringing race into conversation with class, McRobbie brought class into conversation with gender, which, like race, complied with forms of domination. Since those early days with Hall, McRobbie has spent her academic career evolving the field of cultural studies by refracting it through her own experiences as both a feminist and a native of Glasgow, Scotland—“a staunchly working-class city,” she writes, though she grew up middle-class. Like her, I grew up middle-class, surrounded by music and magazines that were quietly predicated on constraining—through the production of images and ideals—the very social groups to which they were marketed. The social groups McRobbie was most interested in were girls and young working-class women, subjects she explored in her early research on Jackie, a British girls’ magazine that ran between 1964 and 1993. For McRobbie, Jackie peddled an “ideology which deals with the construction of teenage ‘femininity’”—precisely the kind she sought to deconstruct. She does so by centralizing the teenage experience in her research, legitimizing it as an area of study, and then reimaging the time-space of teenage life as liminal and potentially radical. Operating between school years and working years, parental jurisdiction and the autonomy of adulthood, teenagers elude institutional control—which is perhaps why cultural studies has returned to them so often—as they loiter at the edges of playing fields or lounge in bedrooms. The peripheral space they occupy is particularly appealing to teenage girls, McRobbie writes, who as children and adults are confined to “safe” domestic spaces associated with femininity.

McRobbie’s early research into Jackie orbits a central theme and sets a precedent for her later work: “the seeming invisibility of girls and, alongside this, the permutations of representation when they became visible,” which largely focus on romance, love, and domesticity. I was one of many girls—generations of them—to whom, and for whom, and about whom McRobbie was speaking in her wide-ranging essays on secondhand shopping and bedroom culture. Although I have not returned to McRobbie’s work often, she is there every time I pull on the thread of some interrogatory idea. It was McRobbie who introduced me to the “cultural capital” of Pierre Bourdieu, the semiology of Roland Barthes, and the gender theory of Judith Butler. A desire to turn my material surroundings—clothes and surfaces, ecology, cultural phenomena—into a vehicle for exploring broader conceptual questions was born from McRobbie’s ideas, both in the classroom and in books like The Uses of Cultural Studies (2005). This was feminism that I could grip on to, with tangible near real-time examples.

McRobbie’s latest book, Feminism, Young Women and Cultural Studies: Birmingham Essays from 1975 Onwards (2024), was prompted by her departure from her full-time teaching position and research post at Goldsmiths in 2020. It traces McRobbie’s thinking about young women and class from the beginning of her career as a scholar and critic to the present moment. It is a book of two halves, beginning with four recent essays by McRobbie looking back at her earlier writing. The new essays provide a contemporary context for her early work on the “seemingly innocent and highly popular” world of girls’ magazines, the “capitalization” of subcultures, the “scripted” sexuality presented to girls by popular music, and the “social hierarchy” of vintage clothing, once deemed derogatorily as castoffs. The second half of the book is composed of the earlier essays, which begin in 1975, when McRobbie was “a post-graduate student and a young mother” living in the working-class neighborhood of Selly Oak in Birmingham, and span two decades, ending with “Rethinking ‘Moral Panic’ for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds,” written with Sarah L. Thornton in 1995. She notes that she chose these seven essays because she found that they “still resonated” with her students all these years later. The pieces also amount to a set of persistent themes that continue to occupy McRobbie, loosely aligning with her time at the Birmingham School.

Like most academics, McRobbie has a tendency toward formula, but the book’s tidy division of old and new material turns out to be a useful frame for those intervening years and fits pleasingly with my own chronology. The period from the tail end of second-wave feminism through the mid-noughties when I was at university to the present is a time McRobbie urges us to fill with our own lived experience: permitting us to reflect on those viscous years of teenage rebellion, as well as the veneer of young womanhood. This, I think, is the driver behind much of McRobbie’s research: how, she asks, do we get young women to actively consume and challenge culture? “Our own subjectivity can often add to the force of research,” she writes. “Why should we not be able to admit how we absorb ideas and apply them”—she continues in “The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action” (1981)—be it at the pub with friends, or in bed with lovers? In this polemic essay, she writes that “to maintain a continual flow of ideas, a cross-fertilisation of analysis and an ongoing exchange of descriptions, experiences and feelings, we need words.” See Further Commentary and Articles arising from Books* and continued longer articles as noted in the blog. for the complete article.

Rose Higham-Stainton is a writer whose work explores gender and art-making and is published by Los Angeles Review of Books, Apollo, TANK, Flash Art, Texte zur Kunst, The White Review, Art Monthly, Bricks from the Kiln, and Worms Magazine, among others. She has written several chapbooks, and her debut book, Limn the Distance, came out with JOAN Publishing in 2023.

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More Than A Magazine, A Movement

America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story

3/2/2026 by Janell Hobson

On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, Ms. reclaims the revolution by centering the women and gender-nonconforming people whose words, labor and resistance built—and keep rebuilding—democracy.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a new nation came into being. Amid the hard-fought war for independence against the British Crown, certain leading men residing in its 13 colonies came together to sign off on a document proclaiming, “All men are created equal.”  

The document would be called the Declaration of Independence—authored by Thomas Jefferson and signed by 56 men now recognized as the nation’s founding fathers, immortalized in John Trumbull’s painting that hangs in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. 

They had exchanged ideas about liberty, justice, at the height of this Age of Reason; they even thought to add a statement to abolish slavery. However, they eventually decided against it, given the lucrative profits that came from the chattel institution as slaveholding individuals. And the comfort of their domestic abodes, which fell under the purview of their wives and servants, rarely induced a sense of reciprocity and full equality for the ones enabling their material surroundings.  

One of the signees—John Adams (who would later serve as the nation’s vice president before succeeding George Washington, the first president of the United States)—had received admonition from his wife Abigail Adams to “remember the ladies” in their declarations for freedom and equality; however, one woman at least ensured that her name would be included on the document: Mary Katherine Goddard from Baltimore, the first woman postmaster in the colonies, printed the official documents and added her name at the bottom in typeset.  

Interestingly, Goddard is rarely remembered (if at all) as founding mother in her own right—in contrast to, say, Betsy Ross, whose more feminine, domestic role in sewing the first flag of the new nation secured her position in national memory. However, Goddard’s bold addition of her name to the Declaration of Independence is a prime example of how women throughout history persist and insist on their inclusion. In families. In communities. Even in nation building. Sometimes she held a pen to write her inclusion into existence, even if she remained anonymous or hid under a man’s name (a gender transition of sorts).  

… There is no nation without women at its core, ready to advance beyond the strictures and limits of gender and its attending intersections, even if they had to redefine their roles and strive beyond societal expectations

When she did use her own name—“written by herself”—as the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley did, some dared to question her skill and prowess to call herself, let alone nations and worlds, into being. Despite the restrictions of slavery, Wheatley found freedom first through the pen before her eventual manumission.  

And when the enslaved woman could not write—indeed, deprived of this literacy by law, so potent was the knowledge it could produce—she still left a record of her existence. In the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Beloved by wordsmith master and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the former slave Sethe lamented, “I made the ink”—those indigo marks set to paper that made legible the means of her raced and gendered oppression.  

Reaching through history to rescue the obscure women discounted as political subjects, Morrison did with fiction what other feminist historians like Gerda Lerner, Deborah Gray White, Paula Gunn Allen, Darlene Clark Hine, Paula J. Giddings, Kate Clifford Larson, Catherine Clinton, Annette Gordon-Reed, Stephanie M. H. Camp, Martha S. Jones, Keisha N. Blain and Edda Fields-Black, among others, had done with facts and evidence. They told the simple truth that there is no nation without women at its core, ready to advance beyond the strictures and limits of gender and its attending intersections, even if they had to redefine their roles and strive beyond societal expectations.  

On this semiquincentennial of the United States, Ms. magazine will explore these politics of inclusion through a series on America’s “Founding Feminists.” 

Such an anniversary—set during a time of immense backlash against the progress made in advancing gender equality, racial justice, and various inclusions across gender diversity, sexual orientation, the differently abled and aged, religious, national and ethnic groups—invites a reckoning with this democratic project that began as a work in progress. We have yet to complete it (even after 250 years) in the quest for a “more perfect union.”  

We especially have an opportunity through this series to address these issues from a feminist framework, examining the past to better understand our present and to plan more inclusive visions for our collective future. 

So, we ask: What did freedom and equality mean for those in the past—especially when co-existing alongside chattel slavery, Indigenous dispossession, women’s subordination and class hierarchies. And what will it mean 250 years from now, or even 50 years from now?  

Because the Declaration of Independence left a record stating the potential of equality—regardless of the status of the author and signees as enslavers with unfettered access to both wives and bondspeople in their possessions—it set for the nation a vision of what it could be.  

This is the vision that made room for the eventual abolition of slavery and women’s voting rights, even if civil rights leaders like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. chastised the nation for delivering a “promissory note” that African Americans could not deposit when widespread discrimination on the basis of race rendered the Declaration of Independence null and void.  

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which grants freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press and freedom of the right to assemble—gave way to additional amendments, as the growing nation moved towards the promise of equality, with the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, the 14th granting birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law, the 19th granting women the right to vote, and the yet-to-be ratified Equal Rights Amendment, penned by suffragist Alice Paul, that would establish gender equality across all spheres.  

This existing foundation also made it possible to expand other rights into law: from the Americans with Disabilities Act, to marriage equality across sexual orientations, the latter recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court.

That these rights could still be chipped away—based on the election or appointment of individuals invested less in democracy and more in demagoguery—demonstrate that freedom and equality cannot be taken for granted. We must work toward their promise as “we the people” (or “we the women,” according to Nora O’Donnell) are still very much a work in progress.

In her seminal work, Our Declaration, Danielle Allen declares, “The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot have freedom without equality.”  

We are still, 250 years later, striving for these twin goals. This series helps us to look back at the journey and determine the best direction to take us toward the fulfillment of these goals.  

Why “Founding Feminists”? 

With its focus on women’s history, the series could easily have been titled America’s “Founding Mothers.” Except some women are not invested in motherhood—at least not the biological kind. History shows that such women have existed across the different eras.

In this series, historian Jen Manion writes of individuals like Jemima Wilkinson who—the same year that the nation came into being—changed their gender identity to take on a genderless persona with a new name: the Public Universal Friend. Revolutions don’t just spawn new nations but new ways of embracing individual freedoms. 

Do such historical figures qualify as “feminists” instead of “mothers”?

The word “feminist” did not even exist until the 19th century—as was first used in French to describe someone of a feminine appearance or who exhibited feminine behavior. The word has evolved overtime to describe a person advocating for gender equality—whether this takes on a liberal edge, such as advancing social and political reforms, or the more radical efforts to dismantle systems of power altogether in the weakening and eventual elimination of patriarchy.

Therefore, the term “founding feminist” risks being anachronistic, given our return to the women—those born or transitioned as such—living at a time before the word formulated its political meaning.  

Indeed, in the series, Oneida Wolf Clan member Michelle Schenandoah argues that the Haudenosaunee, who based their societal structure around matrilineage and subsequently spawned the democracy we now celebrate today, predates feminism since their gender-based egalitarianism is the standard, not the outlaw status that surrounds feminism within patriarchal societies.  

Yet how could we not define those Haudenosaunee as “founding feminists,” given the blueprints they provided to those who found their way on the soil of Turtle Island? Paula Gunn Allen reminds us, “Hardly anyone in America speculates that the constitutional system of government might be as much a product of American Indian ideas and practices as of colonial American and Anglo-European revolutionary fervor.”  

In the same essay, Allen recounts the great rebellion of Haudenosaunee women who organized a women’s strike (or sex strike) in 1600 when men started asserting their authority, then gained back their veto powers over wars and conflicts (a North American version of Lysistrata the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote about and that exists in different versions in more contemporary times—think of the efforts of the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, spearheaded by Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee, which brought an end to Liberia’s Civil War in 2003).

The first recognized women’s protest on the North American continent occurred in the same vicinity of Seneca Falls, N.Y., which launched the first women’s rights convention in 1848. That the great liberator Harriet Tubman would settle her life in freedom less than 30 miles away in Auburn, N.Y., suggests that such feminist lineage is more than coincidental.

These time loops connect us through the past, present and future. If only we remember. 

Feminist Formations in a Time of Revolution 

As Allen suggests, these early Indigenous influences provide “the same vision repeated over and over by radical thinkers of Europe and America, from Francois Villon to John Locke, from William Shakespeare to Thomas Jefferson, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels…” 

The Age of Reason, or Enlightenment, which imagined social contracts, natural rights and equality beyond divine monarchical rule, flourished in the wake of European contact with the Americas. Will we remember the “founding feminists” who planted these democratic seeds?  

Some of our founding feminists also wrote letters, like Abigail Adams, or manifestos—as occurred across the Atlantic with French abolitionist feminist Olympe de Gouges and her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791) and English abolitionist feminist Mary Wollstonecraft with A Vindication of the Rights of Women during this Age of Reason and Revolutions. They wrote specifically at the height of the French Revolution, triggered after France’s support of the American Revolution, which left the country financially bankrupt.  

Other founding feminists presided over religious ceremonies, like the Vodou mambo—sometimes identified as Cecile Fatiman—who helped to ignite the enslaved uprising on the island of San Domingue, which became known as the Haitian Revolution (or the War for Haitian Independence). That this uprising took place in 1791 while European women simultaneously issued feminist statements suggests a transatlantic relational bond that must be interrogated for their cross-racial feminist potential, which extends to other women breaking their chains—such as Solitude, the Guadeloupean rebel (recently commemorated in Paris with a monument in 2022) who resisted slavery’s return on the Caribbean island in 1802 after Napoleon issued its reinstatement post-Revolution.  

In the Founding Feminists series, historian Vanessa M. Holden notes how founding feminists also left their mark through freedom-seeking actions, such as those Black women who escaped slavery during the Revolutionary War period, from Elizabeth Freeman who successfully sued for her freedom, to enslaved Black women running to the British lines on the promise of freedom, to Ona Judge who boldly fled from her enslavement by George and Martha Washington. 

In our myth-making national narratives, few will remember Judge’s history alongside President George Washington.

In their 1859 painting of Washington at his home in Mount Vernon, which hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Pritchard Rossiter and Louis Remy Mignot establish the raced and gendered hierarchies: Washington and Lafayette standing at the divide between the private sphere of home and the public sphere of the exterior yard, while the white women and girl child are seated within the domestic realm, the Black woman in a literal lowered position on the ground, alongside the pet dog, while she tends to the white boy child—the latter in the yard and prepared to explore the public sphere, in comparison to his sister on the verandah consigned to her eventual domestic status. 

The painting appeared at a time of great political divide between pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates, two years before the start of the Civil War. The painting creates by contrast the domestic tranquility of women—both free and enslaved—knowing their “rightful place.” 

Even then, the painters could not imagine the existence of an Ona Judge, who when the moment came, chose freedom for herself by running away with the help of the free Black community in Philadelphia, as Holden documents. It is this imagination—once called an “imperial queen” by Phillis Wheatley (Peters), as Dana Ellen Murphy reminds us in her essay for the series—that artist Nettrice Gaskins galvanizes with some generative AI technological enhancements to conjure the series frontispiece artwork, Founding Feminists.

Having captured a similar portrait rendering Harriet Tubman among the stars for her 200th birthday in our previous series for The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project, Gaskins reconfigures Trumbull’s painting to reimagine those originally excluded now having a literal seat at the table.

A Phillis-like writer sits at the center while an Indigenous woman and a Betsy Ross-like woman sewing the US flag take a seat at either end. The vision imagines a multiracial collective of women—including an Asian woman whose complicated inclusion in the U.S., from the spectacle of Afong Moy, to the exclusion of Chinese women in the Page Act of 1875, to Patsy Mink breaking barriers as the first woman of color elected to Congress who also authored Title IX, perpetually questions the meanings of national belonging.

These imagined women—less the “imperial queens” of Phillis Wheatley’s imagination and more the “democratic divas” of our contemporary digital dreams—assemble in a bold vision of what has already existed and what must continue as we build on the foundations they have already laid. 

Founding Feminists: Series Overview 

The series, launching at the start of Women’s History Month, unfolds over two months, and features 12 articles.

We begin with Schenandoah’s “Haudenosaunee Governance: Matrilineal Legacies and Democracy from Turtle Island,” which recognizes the Indigenous roots of U.S. democracy and argues that it is incomplete precisely because of its “foundational omission” of the values outlined among the matrilineal Clan nations, notably “women, children, all genders and peoples, the natural world, and the generations yet to come.” 

Following is Allyson M. Poska’s article on the legacy of Spanish-speaking women, who settled on the continent more than half a century before the establishment of English settlements, a history that contradicts the targeted deportations of Latinas currently taking place and that reminds us this is “their country too,” as was already heightened with Bad Bunny’s halftime show earlier this year, and before him, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s literal recasting of the founding fathers through the multiracial hip-hop generation in his Broadway musical Hamilton.  

Charles Upchurch’s “Claiming the Revolution: Sexual Politics and 1776” provides the wider historical context for the development of the Revolutionary period and how it generated new ideas about gender and sexuality, while Murphy ruminates on the poetic legacy and “imagination” of Phillis Wheatley (Peters), who became the first African American of any gender to publish a book of poetry.  

Jacqueline Beatty explores how women of the period petitioned for their rights, using the language of traditional femininity, and argues for its radical potential—rather than its retrenchment.

Manion, as previously mentioned, examines “queer possibilities” during the era, when those born as women found opportunities to change genders and engage in same-sex relationships at a time when social upheavals allowed for social change.

Holden examines these themes of freedom through the history of Black women changing their status from enslaved to free.  

Jessina Emmert looks specifically at the legacy of Sally Hemings—the enslaved mother of six of Thomas Jefferson’s children—and argues for her status as the nation’s Founding Mother because of the “reproductive governance” she exercised to ensure the freedom of her children, if not for herself, thereby putting into practice the goals of freedom about which her enslaver emphatically wrote.

Manisha Sinha, author of the award-wining The Slave’s Cause, details “The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism,” while Anne Anlin Cheng explores “The Curious Case of Afong Moy,” a pop-culture figure believed to be the first Chinese woman to enter the United States. A conversation with feminist disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson examines the significance of making the category of “disability” visible in these histories, and Nimisha Barton, a historian on the subject of diversity, equity and inclusion, closes out the series with a reminder that our own contemporary period of regression is an echo of the past in “Educating Women: A History of Elevation—and Backlash.” 

In all, the series articles illuminate and interrogate the meanings of inclusion across the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, and disability among other social factors. They reveal untold stories and re-examine the more well-known ones. They center those who otherwise were excluded from the original documents founding this nation. In this way, they help us to commemorate the feminist foundations on which a more inclusive feminist democratic future can emerge. 

Other features include a timeline, public syllabus and interactive haiku. The public haiku is included to invite readers to imagine what our future will be, beginning with the opening line “Fifty years from now…” Does U.S. democracy have another 250 years, or have we reached a point of no return as “strongman” politics with fascistic tendencies advance globally? How might we recapture a different vision as we move forward during this semiquincentennial? 

A political cartoon from 1897 once depicted a “Future Inauguration,” articulating the fears of the supposed logical outcome of the women’s suffrage movement: one in which women have assumed positions of power while men are busy taking care of the children. (The horror!)

As dated as this vision seems, such fears recirculated when the nation came close to electing a woman for president of the United States—first with Hilary Rodham Clinton who won the popular vote back in 2016, then with Kamala Harris who won 75 million votes in 2024 but came up short, both losing to a man who ran on openly sexist and racist campaigns. These fears, therefore, hardly seem outdated, as we are currently where we are because the nation failed to imagine and trust women’s leadership.  

We certainly have made ardent strides in the past 250 years, but where we go from here is anyone’s guess. Let us hope that we remember and recall the founding feminists who left us a guide as we plan our next moves for this ongoing and unfolding democracy.  

8 Female Gothic Writers Who Inspired Modern Horror

From Mary Shelley to Louisa May Alcott, these women writers helped shape the horror genre.

Eden Gordon|Mar 3, 2026

A little over two centuries before Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 film adaptation of Frankenstein starring Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth came to the big screen, Mary Shelley set her mind to writing a ghost story.

What emerged was Frankenstein, an iconic contribution to horror literature that has inspired countless adaptations and spinoffs and has, safe to say, left a permanent mark on the horror genre. Shelley is far from the only woman whose work has shaped modern horror, though. Countless women across time have allowed their imaginations to spin dark and terrifying stories, and these are just a few of the most influential to do just that.

Ann Radcliffe

Radcliffe was an English novelist best known for being one of the pioneers of the Gothic genre, which is generally defined as literature suffused with a feeling of dread, mystique, and terror.

Radcliffe anonymously published her first two novels, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and A Sicilian Romance (1790). Her third novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), shot her to fame, but her novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) made her a literary icon in England. 

This novel follows a character named Emily St. Aubert as she undergoes a great number of cruelties. Most of the story takes place in the grim and macabre castle of Udolpho, and haunted, mysterious castles and crumbling, labyrinthine architecture would become hallmarks of the Gothic genre in the decades to come. 

Radcliffe was known for her Romantic sensibilities and her artistic, poetic approach to writing dark and disturbing stories. Her work influenced everyone from Lord Byron and Mary Shelley to Jane Austen, and helped shape Romanticism and horror on the whole. Today, her books are widely beloved for their strong female heroines and their pervasive, atmospheric sense of decay and misery, expressed through images like ruined castles that clearly reflect characters’ distress. 

In her essay entitled “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” Radcliffe explained her approach to writing by defining the differences between horror and terror. “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them,” she wrote. Her books certainly fall into the realm of terror, and helped to inspire countless psychological, artful Gothic fiction and film projects.

Mary Shelley

In 1816, an 18-year-old Mary Shelley accompanied her future husband, Percy Shelley, to Lake Geneva to visit Lord Byron. In order to entertain themselves amid an unusually dreary, cold, and stormy summer, Byron challenged his guests to write ghost stories.

Soon after, Shelley began to write Frankenstein, which was meant to be a short story. Fortunately, it blossomed into a novel that still stands as a centerpiece of horror literature and is also often called the world’s first science fiction novel. The book tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who assembles a monster, only to greatly regret his creation later. Frankenstein has generated countless adaptations and also helped shape future genres like sci-fi horror and body horror, and it has even had an impact on actual medical science.

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson’s unsettling Gothic masterpieces include the macabreThe Haunting of Hill House, the stunningly violent short story “The Lottery,” and the chilling We Have Always Lived in the Castle. While Jackson didn’t receive extensive critical acclaim in her lifetime, her work has gone on to leave an indelible impact on horror and popular culture. 

“The Lottery,” a short story published in The New Yorker in 1948 about a group of townspeople who participate in a sacrificial rite, went on to influence similar narratives from The Hunger Games to The Wicker Man. Jackson’s novels also added scope and depth to the haunted house archetype, a particularly common staple in modern horror, as she utilized ruined, crumbling manors as metaphors for the declining psyches and oppressive lives of her typically female protagonists. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a feminist and leading contributor to the women’s rights movement in the United States in the late 1800s. She was also a writer best known for her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which depicted a wealthy housewife’s mental unraveling. 

The story became a Gothic classic upon its publication, and is filled with classic Gothic themes, from a gigantic and isolating home to a sense of claustrophobia and impending doom. It has also retroactively been read as an indictment of Victorian patriarchy and a society that shut women away to “rest” when they were displaying signs of unhappiness. The story helped pioneer psychological horror and the use of unreliable narrators, and also served as a powerful early example of a horror story embedded with social critiques.

Daphne du Maurier

Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 classic Rebecca tells the story of a woman haunted by the specter of her new husband’s first wife, Rebecca. It takes place in a typical Gothic setting—the sprawling and atmospheric manor Manderley—and tells a story of jealousy, lies, and mental decline. Rebecca was an early and seminal entry in the “domestic horror” pantheon perfected by Shirley Jackson, and it embodied a modern, non-supernatural kind of horror where ghosts only exist in memory but still manage to wreak havoc on the living. It helped shape the modern suspense genre as well, showing how the simplest domestic moments can be filled with ominousness in the hands of the right writer.

Other celebrated works by Du Maurier include the novels Jamaica Inn and Frenchman’s Creek and the short story “The Birds,” which inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name. She was also a playwright who detested being called a “romantic” writer, instead preferring her work to be looped firmly into the realm of Gothic and psychological literature.

Emily Brontë

While Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights might typically be branded as a romance novel, the story is actually quite filled with elements of Gothic horror. From the windswept moors and dreary manor that gives the novel its name to the tortured, haunted character of Heathcliff, the novel is every bit as much of a horror story as it is a romance.

Brontë is believed to have drawn inspiration from the crumbling, ghost story-shrouded manor homes she explored while growing up on the English moors, and the atmosphere of dreariness and dread that pervades Wuthering Heights helped shape modern tales of disturbed romance and obsession. The novel also helped earn stories with elements of Gothic horror their place in the literary canon.

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott may be best known for her decidedly un-horrific Little Women, but she also wrote a number of Gothic short stories and novels under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, some of which include Lost in a Pyramid, Behind a Mask, and the short story “The Abbott’s Ghost.” 

Alcott mostly wrote these stories to support her family early in her career, and like many female writers of the time, she used a male pen name. Her stories depict unruly, often unlikable women, and helped provide an early blueprint for future morally gray, complex, rebellious, and even villainous women in horror, such as those featured by Gillian Flynn and in films like Robert Eggers’s The Witch. “Lost in a Pyramid” is also one of the first known Gothic takes on the classic mummy’s curse story in American literature. 

Anne Rice

Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire changed horror forever, adding a sophisticated twist to vampire stories by giving monstrous characters scope and psychological depth. The novel is considered a cornerstone of modern Gothic fiction, and it has influenced the entire pantheon of modern vampire stories, from Twilight to True Blood and beyond, by creating the archetype of the glamorous, philosophical vampire. 

Rice’s 37 books also explored everything from witchcraft to werewolves, and she put her signature spin on all of them and ultimately helped cement the modern horror trend of telling monster stories through a nuanced and distinctly human lens.

Female writers and readers have been challenging the patriarchy for more than 200 years

Roberta Garret

Published: March 5, 2026

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Roberta Garrett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of Wuthering Heights has been pulling in the crowds recently, which is quite a feat in troubled times for cinema. Published in 1847, Emily Brontë’s tale of psycho-sexual power dynamics is just one of many enduring female-authored 19th century novels exploring female sexuality and desire for autonomy. These characters existed within a system that allowed women few education or career opportunities.

The ever-popular work of canonical British female writers such as Jane Austen, the (other) Brontë sisters and George Eliot were very different in style and tone. But they also draw attention to various forms of gender inequality.

Their novels focused on issues such as inheritance and property laws, the pressure on young women to marry for financial security, the sexual double standard and the lack of career prospects for women. In doing so, they gave voice to the frustrations of an expanding female readership in the 19th century.

The work of these and lesser-known female authors was crucial in shaping and fuelling public debates on what was referred to in the mid-Victorian period as “the woman question” (women’s right to vote). It later became the first-wave feminist movement in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The emergence of two inventive new literary forms in the early 20th century were key. One was modernism and the other the new printed paperback; both were intertwined with the expansion of women’s concerns and desires in the social and cultural sphere.

Modernism saw the burgeoning of experimental female writers such as Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys in the 1920s. Then came popular genres such as mass market romance and what is now described as “cosy” crime fiction in the 1930s. Women writers and readers were creating spaces in high art and mass culture that centred female experience and domestic and personal life from the beginning of the 20th century.

The second wave

Given the importance of novels and reading to the history of feminist struggle, it is not surprising that second-wave feminism drew heavily on women’s literary heritage. This saw the publication of landmark academic studies of women’s writing such as Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). And with them came the proliferation of university courses on women’s writing.

The 1960s and 1970s also witnessed the birth of polemical feminist bestsellers. This included Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and “consciousness raising” popular novels, such as The Woman’s Room (1977) by Marilyn French.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a more diverse group of feminist writers came on the scene. Writers like Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler and Rita Mae Brown, continued to shape and expand the political and cultural scope and influence of women’s writing into queer, black and postmodernist forms.

Bookgroups, BookTok and the feminist novel

In our own era, while men are reading fewer and fewer novels, female writers and readers are keeping the world of fiction alive. Aside from being the major purchasers of fiction, women are far more likely to enhance and socialise their literary interests. Local book groups and online review and recommendation communities such as Booktok are popular spaces for exploring new literature.

They are also the driving force in the creation and consumption of successful new literary cycles. For example, one of the publishing success stories of the last ten years in English language fiction was the female-centred psychological thriller/domestic noir crime novel. This included the likes of Gone Girl (2014), The Girl on the Train (2016), Big Little Lies (2017) and The Housemaid.

As feminist literary critics have pointed out, not only are these novels predominantly written and narrated by women. Through widespread circulation and screen adaptations, they have also continued to bring to light key gender and power issues such as coercive control, domestic violence and the murder of women. At the lighter end of the spectrum, the recent explosion of “romantasy” fiction (a romance-fantasy hybrid) focuses on female desire and pleasure.

The boundary between literary and genre fiction is becoming increasingly blurred. But contemporary female writers such as Rachel Cusk, Bernadine Evaristo, Anna Burns and Eimear McBride continue to produce innovations in style and form. And younger female writers of “rage” and “sad girl” novels like Ottessa Moshfegh, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Rachel Yoder, Raven Leilani and Aria Aber are not afraid to explore edgy and unsettling accounts of women’s experience.

In life-writing, creative non-fiction and autofiction, women’s stories have also proliferated. Post #MeToo bestsellers such as Acts of Desperation (2022) by Meghan Nolan, and Three Women (2020) by Lisa Taddeo, tearing down comfortable myths of equality and exposing the persisting inequalities in women’s personal relationships.

For more than two centuries, women’s writing has not only reflected the constraints of patriarchy but actively challenged and reshaped them. As long as women continue to write, read and reimagine the world through fiction, novel reading will remain a vital site of feminist resistance and possibility.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org; if you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Australian Politics

Progress for women doesn’t happen by chance. It happens by choice.

And the incredible women in our Labor government are helping drive that progress every day. That’s why I’m proud to lead Australia’s first government with the majority of women.

Cheaper child care. Extending paid parental leave with super applied on top. 33 endo and pelvic pain clinics. Making contraception and menopause medicines cheaper.

And this week, closing the gender pay gap to a new record low.

There’s more to do – and we’ll keep working every day to deliver progress for women.

Art at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney

All the reviews are positive, as are the comments from the audience members recorded on Facebook. This was a fantastic show- marvellous actors, a great script, a good set…and a stunning painting.

After seeing the role of a painting in the play, and such a painting, with the discussion it inspired, it seemed appropriate to record this piece of art … first in my photographs of some of the exhibitions at the gallery.

The Art Galley of New South Wales

Difficult women are in the news lately, and there has been a lively debate on Facebook on the subject. I was pleased to see this photo in the exhibition, and am making clear where I stand …I hope that I can be recognised in that tiny figure in the Trouble Maker frame!

Myth of the Western man (White man’s burden)1992 Artist Gordon Bennett Australia 1955 – 03 Jun 2014

1788 Colony established. Flag raised.*

1796 First legally sanctioned massacre of Aboriginal people – Hawkesbury River area – troops sent from Parramatta.

1799 – First murder trial of five whites for the murder of two Aboriginal boys – found guilty but released – pardoned three years later.

1802 – Pemulwuy killed and decapitated, his head sent to England.

1803 – First colony established in Tasmania

1804 – First massacre of Aboriginal people in Tasmania, at Risdon Cove.

1813 – Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson cross the Blue Mountains into Wiradjuri land.

1824 – Massacres of Wiradjuri people.

1838 – Myall Creek massacre in northern New South Wales. First white man hung – against public opinion and in a retrial after acquitted in first trial – for the murder of Aboriginal people. This creates a climate of secrecy around further murders.

1857 – Yeeman people (near Roma, Queensland) massacred.

1861 – Largest massacre of whites by Aboriginal people in reprisal for hundreds of Aboriginal deaths, at Cullin-la-Ringo Station, Queensland by the Kairi people.

1869 – Tasmania, William Lanney – touted as the last Aboriginal male – died. His grave is looted and skeleton stolen.

1876 – Tasmania, Truganini – touted as the last Aboriginal female – died. Her skeleton is put on display (against her last wishes) in the Tasmanian Museum.

1928 – Coniston massacre in the Northern Territory, near Yuendumu. Those responsible vindicated in an official (cover up) inquiry ending 7 February 1929.

1971 – Yirrkala, Gove Peninsula, land rights thrown out of court.

1972 – Aboriginal Tent Embassy set up in Canberra. Gough Whitlam elected and Blue Poles by Jackson Pollack purchased for Australia (public outraged).

1976 – Truganini’s bones cremated and her ashes dispersed in the wind.

1992 – Mabo case is won – Terra Nullius overturned.* These dates appear on the painting and are not clear in my photograph. They are worth recording here, with information from the Art Gallery of NSW site.

Information provided by the artist.

© Australian Art Department, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2006

American Politics

Sunday thought: We will prevail

Finding courage in a dark time Robert Reich March 8, 2026.