Don’t Ms.: Feminist Coming Out Day, International Women’s Day, the Ms. Blog Birthday Party and More!

With FOUR feminist holidays–plus the soon-to-be-globally-recognized Ms. Blog Birthday–we’ve got a jam-packed week of feminist events ahead! Everywhere: Tomorrow is International Women’s Day. It’s customary in many countries to give flowers to the women in your life. Attend events around the world and stay tuned for Ms. International Women’s Day posts from every continent. March 8 [...]

Top Ten Ways to be a Feminist in 2010

We at the Ms. Blog were charmed and inspired by Amy Klein’s heartfelt post on how to be a feminist, and she graciously agreed to let us reprint it. What would you add to the list? 1. Stop making rape jokes. These jokes are becoming really popular right now and they are not funny. The [...]

We Heart: The Real Housewives of SNL

Bravo’s The Real Housewives reality show is everywhere, whether you watch it on TV or not. On the radio you can hear Kim Zolciak or the Countess LuAnn singing about money or parties. At the supermarket you can see Teresa Giudice on the cover of a tabloid, refuting claims that her husband is cheating, or [...]

For Colored Girls: The Reviews Are In

The 70’s saw an efflorescence of works by and about African American women, spurred by the overall women’s movement. Black women have always been telling their stories, whether in formal literature–see Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl from 1861 or Ann Petry’s The Street from 1946–or around kitchen tables or in [...]

Black-Grrl Power: Willow Smith and Sesame Street

There has been quite the response–supportive and enthusiastic–to Sesame Street‘s ode to loving black girls’ hair, and it’s deserved: Not since bell hooks’ children’s book Happy to Be Nappy has there been such an enthusiastic celebration of black hair for kids. For so many of us black women, who grew up with external messages informing [...]

Jill Johnston Taught Me to Be a Lesbian

Jill Johnston was the boldest lesbian of her time. I religiously read her Village Voice columns in the 1970s and ’80s, and her classic book Lesbian Nation was probably the first I ever saw with the word “lesbian” in the title.That was my coming-of-age time as a lesbian feminist, and push-the-envelope Jill Johnston serving as [...]

Listening to bell hooks and Gloria Steinem

On September 20, Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall[1] facilitated a conversation between bell hooks and Gloria Steinem before an overflowing auditorium at Spelman College. These feminist icons courageously shared their aspirations, anxieties, joys, and valuable life lessons. bell hooks stated, “Integrity is congruence between what you think, say, and do.” Here are some take-aways about how to live a life of integrity:

Catching Up on Feminist Theory, 1: bell hooks

I’m your classic Second Waver–I came to feminism reading this familiar canon: The Feminine Mystique, Sisterhood is Powerful, The Female Eunuch, Lesbian Nation, The Second Sex, Against Our Will, Women and Madness, Sexual Politics, Towards a Recognition of Androgyny, Ms. magazine (I especially loved Jo Freeman’s essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”), Chrysalis and Heresies magazines, [...]

The Other L-Word: How bell hooks Dared Me to Love

My paternal grandmother should have never had children. Instead, she had five well before leaving her twenties. On the surface, my grandmother was emblematic of the post-World War II American dream. She married my grandfather, a young, first-generation Polish American who fought his way out of poverty by enlisting in the Army and moving swiftly [...]

bell hooks’ Love for Black Men

People may be surprised to know how much bell hooks loves men–especially black men–but she does. I say surprised, because the general tendency–especially among men–is to confuse feminist politics and political activism with being anti-men. So if you couple this tendency (to conflate feminist politics with being anti-men) with the undeniably harsh realities that confront [...]

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