HollabackPHILLY, a branch of the anti-street harassment organization Hollaback!, hasn’t taken many breaks in the last few months. They’ve placed campaign posters on Philly subway trains, have met with companies about removing pro-harassment messages from their advertising and, last Thursday, the group sent their newly finished anti-street harassment comic book to the printer. Hollaback! started in 2005 [...]
A longtime favorite of feminists, author/poet/social activist Marge Piercy wrote a short story, “Saving Mother From Herself,” that we published in the last issue of Ms. magazine—it’s about a women who resists her family’s efforts to clean up what they consider her messy life. We talked to Piercy about the story, her writing and her [...]
The three mistresses of Headmistress Press, which launched four months ago to publish poetry by lesbians, sat down in cyberspace to talk about their poetic new venture. Mary Meriam: What came over me? I’m not sure, but suddenly I wanted a press, and I wanted it now. So last December, I asked Jessica Mason McFadden [...]
Does the name Mary Sidney ring a bell? No, I thought not. According to Tudor Place, she was born into the aristocracy in 1561; was “carefully educated, acquiring a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew;” became a member of Queen Elizabeth’s Royal Household in 1575; lost her mother, father and brother (Sir Philip Sidney) in [...]
I’ve never met Raquel Cepeda in person, but we come from the same family. That is, the family of adult children of immigrants with our feet in two or more lands, inextricably torn between the lands of our ancestors and those of our descendents. Cepeda’s latest project, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina, is [...]
I’m perhaps not the best reader of Nicole Brossard’s new book of poems, White Piano, first published in 2011 in French as Piano Blanc and translated for this 2013 Coach House Books edition by Erin Moure and Robert Majzels. I’m not a translator, I don’t read many poems in translation and I tend to be disappointed by [...]
You may not know it yet, but there’s a new hero in town—specifically, in Gloria City, the Gotham-esque setting of the innovative online comic book My So-Called Secret Identity which just published its first issue last week. Rife with violence and bursting to the seams with a cadre of grandstanding superheroes, Gloria City is also [...]
In the new issue of Ms. magazine, available on newsstands Feb. 26 and immediately on our new digital platform, we review the new biography Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson by Barbara Ransby. Most of us have heard of singer/actor/activist Paul Robeson, but Ransby reminds us that his wife was remarkable in her own [...]
Robert O. Self aptly dedicated his newest book, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, to “my family.” True to its title, the book explores the political and cultural changes in America from the 1960s on, as well as the impact these transformations had on American conceptions of the family [...]
Last month marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. What began as a celebration, however, has turned into another occasion for the hand wringing that seems to follow most momentous events in Plath’s posthumous literary life. This time the agitation is over the cover design of the anniversary edition [...]
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