Author: Hanne Blank

Hanne Blank is a writer, a historian, a cook, and a domestic worker. She is the author of various books including Virgin: The Untouched History (Bloomsbury, 2007), Unruly Appetites (Seal Press, 2003), and the forthcoming Straight (Beacon Press) and Homework: Sex, Politics, and the Soul of Keeping House. A Midwesterner by birth and inclination, she currently lives, works, and teaches in a nineteenth-century stone millworkers' cottage on a dirt road in Baltimore.

A New Name for Your Hymen?

Renaming the hymen in a way that is more reflective of its actual nature (as historian Kathleen Coyne Kelly of Northeastern University has pointed out in her book on virginity, it is no more a specific bodily organ than the instep of the foot) is a good thing.

Jacques Rifflet: “A Girl Is a Small Catastrophe”

To say that Rifflet richly deserves the condemnation he’s been earning in the Belgian press and the Muslimah blogosphere is an understatement. On the official side of things, the backpedaling has been reasonably strenuous. Rifflet has offered feeble excuses, while the Belgian Minster of Defense has officially disowned him in front of Parliament.

The Mystery of Women’s History

To what extent can we, as the National Women’s History Project urges, “Write women back into history,” without perpetuating factual and perceptual errors? Women are half of humanity, and women’s history is half of history. We owe it to ourselves as women to take a harder look at what that means.