Bitchy History

Thank you LeftieProf , Kit Thornton , Karma , Annabelle , Maura , and many others for tuning into my live video with Dana DuBois and Letters from a Feminist ! I had so much fun on the show! Get full access to Bitchy History at www.bitchyhistory.com/subscribe

In this episode of Bitchy History , we take on Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist career woman who built a very successful career telling other women that feminism would ruin their lives. Using Schlafly’s own books, debates, and the modern afterlife of her arguments, we unpack how she helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment by selling women’s legal and economic dependence as “protection.” Schlaf...

History didn’t forget women. It decided they didn’t matter. In this episode, we dive into the work of Gerda Lerner—the historian who helped build women’s history as a field and, in the process, exposed how traditional history erased half the population while pretending to be objective. From The Creation of Patriarchy to The Female Experience , Lerner shows that patriarchy is not natural, feminist...

Gossip Girl was never just a teen soap about rich kids in absurd headbands making terrible decisions on the Upper East Side. It was also a glittery little blueprint for influencer culture, public shaming, digital surveillance, aspirational wealth, and the deeply American habit of packaging cruelty as glamour. In this episode of Bitchy History , I’m joined by Lindsay Denninger to talk about her boo...

We love to treat the Seneca Falls Convention as the moment feminism began. A group of women gathered, declared that “all men and women are created equal,” and kicked off the fight for the vote. Simple. Inspiring. Done. Except… not quite. In this episode, we take a closer look at what actually happened in 1848—and what didn’t get included in that story. Because while the Declaration of Sentiments u...

The women’s rights movement didn’t begin in 1848. Long before the Seneca Falls Convention, Black women were already speaking publicly about freedom, citizenship, labor, and political power in a nation that denied them all four. In this episode, we move beyond the tidy origin story and look at the women who came first—Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—and how their...

Maria Mitchell discovered a comet, but she also calculated data for the U.S. Coast Survey, built one of the first rigorous observatory programs for women in the United States, supported abolition, worked alongside suffragists, and challenged institutional pay inequality. In this episode, Professor Meredith steps back and lets her sister lead a conversation about a woman who refused to be professio...

For the final episode of Arc III: Pretty Cages , we’re ending where containment gets subtle. No laws. No contracts. No sermons about obedience. Just vibes. In recent years, the language of the “divine feminine” has exploded across social media and wellness culture. Women are encouraged to soften, surrender, receive, flow, and “drop into their feminine energy.” We’re told that masculine and feminin...

This isn’t the story you were told about girlhood in the 1950s. It’s the story about the girls who disappeared. In postwar America, Britain, and Ireland, “good girl” culture wasn’t just a moral vibe. It was infrastructure. If you got pregnant, you vanished. If you reported harm, you risked social death. If you disrupted the script, institutions activated. Between 1945 and 1973, more than 1.5 milli...

Marriage is sold to women as safety. Not just emotional safety. Structural safety. Safety from poverty. Safety from suspicion. Safety from being treated like a free-floating problem in a world that prefers women attached to something male and respectable. But historically? Marriage wasn’t just romance. It was paperwork. In this episode of Bitchy History , we break down the legal architecture under...

This week on the podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Gigi Berardi — professor, journalist, and now historical novelist — to talk about her forthcoming book Bianca’s Cure , a Renaissance-set novel about women’s knowledge, early science, and what happens when a woman refuses to stay in the role history assigns her. The conversation fits perfectly with the arc we recently wrapped up on the podcast, which has...

The Victorian “Angel in the House” was supposed to be gentle, pure, domestic, and self-sacrificing. She was praised endlessly for her virtue, placed on a pedestal, and told she was the moral center of the family and the nation. She was also legally erased by marriage, economically dependent, sexually policed, medically controlled, and blamed for everyone else’s bad behavior. In this episode of Bit...

People love to say “chivalry is dead.” In this episode, we pull apart what “chivalry” actually is—and why it keeps coming back every time gender roles get uncomfortable. Because chivalry was never just about manners. It was a system. A story that turned hierarchy into romance, control into care, and women’s safety into something conditional. We start in the present, where “chivalry is dead” gets u...

Matilda Joslyn Gage should be one of the most recognizable names in the history of American women’s rights. Instead, she’s often treated like an optional footnote. In this arc finale, we take Gage seriously on her own terms: not just as a suffrage leader, but as a political thinker and historian who refused to make women’s freedom small or respectable. Gage didn’t want the vote as a polite reform....

When pundits complain that “identity politics is ruining everything,” they’re accidentally name-dropping a group of Black lesbian feminists in 1970s Boston. This episode tells the history behind the buzzword: the Combahee River Collective. We follow their journey from the National Black Feminist Organization to forming their own Boston-based collective; their work on welfare, housing, reproductive...

In this episode, I start with a guy in my YouTube comments insisting I “teach feminism, not history” and then take him on a little field trip to 17th-century Boston. Quaker women like Margaret Fell and Mary Dyer weren’t marching under a “feminist” banner, but they were doing something genuinely explosive for their time: preaching, publishing, and claiming spiritual authority in public while female...

Every few years, the Girl Scouts accidentally start a culture war. You’d think an organization best known for cookies and camping would be safely boring. Instead, they keep ending up at the center of national freakouts: heavy metal lawsuits over Thin Mints, boycotts over “woke” cookies, outrage over letting trans girls join, hand-wringing because some troops show up at marches or dare to talk abou...

Buy Me A Coffee This episode is about witch hunts, but not the Halloween kind. We’re talking about how early modern Europe went from relying on women healers and midwives for everything to torturing and killing them as witches, and how that panic helped clear the way for male-dominated, professional medicine. I walk through how climate crisis, war, plague, and sky-high infant mortality created a p...

Joan of Arc has been everything to everyone: saint, witch, nationalist mascot, feminist icon, medieval teenager who simply refused to stay in her lane. In this episode, we cut through six centuries of myth to get to the girl in the armor — the one who heard divine voices, out-strategized grown men, terrified theologians, and paid for it with her life. We look at how a France in crisis accidentally...

Thanksgiving is right around the corner for my American listeners, so let’s revisit an early episode of Bitchy History today, because it’s seasonal. Remember that Thanksgiving is a propaganda holiday and the Puritans sucked. But while it may be a sham, as Buffy reminds us, it’s a sham with yams. Get full access to Bitchy History at www.bitchyhistory.com/subscribe

The Black Death (1347–1351) killed ~40% of Europe and blew a hole in the labor market. Women stepped in, running farms, shops, and guild work; inheriting property; training apprentices; and powering textiles, silk, and brewing. Then, as populations recovered, elites used laws, guild charters, inheritance rules, and moral panics to shove women back to the margins. Crisis granted responsibility; rec...

Episode Summary Empires didn’t just conquer continents—they colonized identity . This episode unpacks how European colonialism exported a rigid gender binary across the globe, dismantling Indigenous systems of gender and sexuality while dressing patriarchy up as “civilization.” From the witch trials of Europe to the British census in India, from Two-Spirit resistance to modern decolonial feminism,...

Welcome back to Bitchy History , where we cheerfully dismantle the greatest hits of misogyny—and this week, we’re putting science itself on the stand. In Part I, we met the philosophers and theologians who invented “woman” as a cosmic afterthought. Now, in Part II, we enter the age of lab coats, skull calipers, and nervous diagnoses—the glorious 19th and 20th centuries, when “objective” men in fro...

Welcome back to Bitchy History — the show where we cheerfully dismantle everything you thought was “just natural” and replace it with the ugly truth: it was made up. Usually by men. Often badly. We’re kicking off a brand-new arc: Inventing Womanhood. Because here’s the deal — “woman” isn’t a biological constant. It’s a cultural invention, one that’s been redefined, repackaged, and re-sold more tim...

Edit: There was some sound editing issues on this episode which have now been fixed. Apologies! Well, I’m back. After packing up my entire life, moving across the Atlantic, and preparing to dive headfirst into a Master’s in Gender Studies (yes, I am now an even more insufferable feminist — send your condolences to anyone stuck in seminar with me), Bitchy History is officially alive again. And I’m...