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Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future
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Stories and literature

Her blazing world

Margaret Cavendish’s boldness and bravery set 17th-century society alight, but is she a feminist poster-girl for our times?

Francesca Peacock

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Film and visual culture

‘Bags here are rarely innocent’ – how filmmakers work around censorship in Iran

8 minutes

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Wellbeing

Born in China, Zee seeks a gender-affirming life in the American Midwest

11 minutes

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Politics and government

How it looked to Afghan women to see the Taliban return to power

33 minutes

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The ancient world

The six priestesses who kept the flame of ancient Rome alight at risk of death

5 minutes

Artwork depicting a family group composed of angular lines and triangles, some but not all coloured, on a paper background
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Family life

A patchwork family

After my marriage failed, I strove to create a new family – one made beautiful by the loving way it’s stitched together

Lily Dunn

A group of girls walk past the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, DC
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Gender and identity

Silencing of the girls

Girls are still in a bad bargain with patriarchy: the price of relationship is keeping their true thoughts to themselves

Carol Gilligan

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Human rights and justice

Witch hunts persist as a horrifying, deadly reality in pockets of rural India

24 minutes

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Gender

When aggression is viewed as brilliance, it hurts women in science, and science itself

5 minutes

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The ancient world

The horrors of Pompeii

The name ‘Eutychis’ was etched into a wall 2,000 years ago. Finding out who she was illuminates the dark side of Rome

Guy D Middleton

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Gender

The ‘sworn virgins’ of Albania who trade femininity for freedom

10 minutes

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History

The life of Wanda Półtawska

Her closeness to Pope John Paul furnished him with anti-abortion ideals, fuelled by her survival of the Ravensbrück camp

Joy Neumeyer

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Politics and government

Join the spirited debate at a women’s hair salon before a pivotal election in Tunisia

19 minutes

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Human rights and justice

Lydia Maria Child, abolitionist

Taking up arms against slavery, the famous novelist foreshadowed the vexed role of the white woman activist today

Lydia Moland

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Art

Milk, pity and power

Since antiquity, artists have depicted a perverse scene of a daughter breastfeeding her aged father. What does it mean?

Margie Orford

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Gender and identity

A manly divorce

Straight men rarely write about the end of their marriages. Our enduring ideas about gender explain this silence

Joshua Coleman

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Thinkers and theories

Masham and me

Were it not for her friendship with John Locke, the radical feminist gems of philosopher Damaris Masham might be unknown

Regan Penaluna

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Art

The female Abstract Expressionists of New York shook the world of art

15 minutes

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Music

Enter the conductrice

Will a new generation of women on the podium perpetuate the tyrannical charisma of their male predecessors or overturn it?

Xenia Hanusiak

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History

Women at the barricades

The transgressions of working-class women formed the revolutionary heart of the 1871 Paris Commune

Carolyn Eichner

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History

The doxxing of Rose Mainville

When a young street vendor found her name in a guidebook to the sex workers of Paris, she couldn’t live with the shame

Amanda E Herbert & David N Woodworth

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Work

Living out of a truck, Maikhuu finds promise and peril on Mongolia’s ‘coal highway’

25 minutes

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History

From manners to mud – two women recall coming of age in Victorian London

10 minutes

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Religion

Sisters in dharma

In Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, Parwati Soepangat pioneered a Buddhist feminist theology with deep roots

Jack Meng-Tat Chia