Happy Halloween! We’ll keep it brief today because everyone has Halloween parades to attend, candy to buy, and costumes to finish sewing (translation: last-minute plastic masks to buy at the dollar store).

Halloween traces its roots to Samhain, the ancient Celtic festival marking the end of summer and the beginning of the long, dark winter. It was a nigh…

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Every October, we walk into a Halloween store with our kids and play a game we didn’t sign up for. It’s called Count the Sexy Costumes.

There’s the run-of-the-mill Sexy Nurse and Sexy Cat, but recently we learned there’s even a Sexy pizza slice (truly, why). And on every rack, without fail, the sexy schoolgirl: the plaid micro-skirt, the knee socks, the white shirt tied up under the bust, sometimes a lollipop thrown in, just in case anyone missed the point.

We’ve all rolled our eyes at it for years. But this year, a group of teenage girls in England made us stop rolling our eyes and start paying attention. Because that shit isn’t funny.

Four students at a public school in Oxfordshire, members of something called the Little Feminist Bookclub (we are obsessed), started a petition in September asking the UK government to ban school uniforms from pornography. In about a month, it gathered nearly 28,000 signatures.

Their reasoning is so simple it’s almost embarrassing that it took children to say it out loud. School uniforms are worn by children. Porn that dresses performers in school uniforms is designed to evoke children. And the girls who actually have to wear those uniforms, on the bus, on the walk home, at the corner shop, are the ones who pay for it.

One of the girls said she has stopped wearing skirts altogether. Another said the thought of wearing her uniform in public fills her with fear. When a reporter asked how it felt to run this campaign while wearing a uniform herself, one of them answered, more or less: that’s the point. We’re children.

They’re not imagining it. A survey of girls and young women in the UK found that more than a third had received unwanted sexual attention while in school uniform. Some were 12 or younger.

The “sexy schoolgirl” costume isn’t edgy. It isn’t kinky. It isn’t a fun little nod to Grease or a Britney video. It’s a mass-market, shrink-wrapped, $29.99 version of the same idea those girls are fighting: that the clothing of a child is a sexual costume for adults.

And we sell it next to the dinosaur onesies.

We are not interested in telling adult women what to wear to a party. Wear the cat ears, the fishnets, or nothing but a strategically placed pumpkin; honestly, we support you.

But this particular choice reinforces something very specific. The “schoolgirl” isn’t a profession or a fantasy creature or a pizza. She is a child, and she is always a girl. The costume works because she is a child. That’s both the joke and the appeal.

So when we ask who benefits from the sexy schoolgirl, the answer isn’t the woman wearing it to a party. It’s an entire industry, from porn to retail, that profits from blurring the line between girls and women. And the people who pay for that blur are the actual girls, walking home in actual plaid skirts, getting honked at by actual grown men.

The UK has started, slowly, to catch up. A new law passed this year will criminalize porn in which adults are presented as children under 16. But it doesn’t ban school uniforms outright, and it hasn’t even taken effect yet. Which is why four teenagers are doing the work that lawmakers wouldn’t.

What’s worse is that here in the US, nobody is even having this conversation. So here’s our modest Halloween proposal: retire the sexy schoolgirl. Refuse to buy it, refuse to stock it, refuse to laugh at it, and refuse to pretend it’s harmless. Tell the store manager, tell your friends, and tell your sons and daughters why it isn’t funny.

Personally, we think porn itself is the bigger problem, but this is a piece of it and a start at addressing it.

And if you want to see what the future of feminism looks like, look at a group of 15-year-old girls who are tired of feeling unsafe in their own clothes, and who decided to do something about it while still wearing them.

Happy Halloween, everyone! Dress up as something terrifying this year. Like a woman who won’t be quiet about this.

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The news cycle has repeatedly covered the trend of “quiet quitting” in marriage, in which one or both spouses emotionally check out but don’t pursue a separation or divorce. As women in our 40s with a lot of friends who are married to men, we can say with confidence that we see this all around us, in spite of what Instagram might pretend.

This is different from the normal ebbs and flows of a relationship. Expecting intense emotional connection all the time is unrealistic and, frankly, sounds exhausting. Marriages go through natural phases of closeness and distance. Quiet quitting, on the other hand, is a more deliberate decision to live parallel lives with one’s spouse while continuing to inhabit the contours of marriage.

The thing is, and the part we just can’t get over, is that quiet quitting is not new.

The media has been branding the hell out of “quiet quitting,” and plenty of men and women alike seem to take solace in the idea that it’s an acceptable trend. But it’s nothing more than a rebrand of what women have been doing under the patriarchy for centuries.

Another word for it is enduring. Enduring a bad marriage, a boring marriage, an unfulfilling marriage, or, in more extreme cases, an abusive marriage.

There are real barriers to leaving a marriage, from financial and logistical constraints to legitimate concerns about safety. We’re not suggesting that leaving is simple, or even possible, for everyone. But there’s also apathy, and at some point, we have to ask where resignation ends and reinforcement of patriarchal norms begins.

So we’re here to advocate for loud quitting. If your marriage isn’t working and can’t be saved, consider quitting loudly. Do it for feminism, do it for your sons and daughters, and for the possibility of a world in which women don’t have to make themselves smaller to make a marriage work.

Because we cannot have a quiet, safe, cute little revolution. We cannot dismantle the patriarchy by trying to make ourselves comfortable enough inside it.

Get messy. Get loud. Quit pretending that a life half-lived is the best you can expect. And quit loudly.

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Tomorrow is World Mental Health Day, you crazy bunch of nut jobs, so get your straitjackets ready.

Don’t worry, we are not in charge of the messaging around it.

But we will use it as an excuse to make the day all about us. Do you think a three-year-old is old enough to pour wine into a stemmed glass yet, or should they stick with the usual tumbler?

OK, OK, making fun of mental health is not right, nor is involving your children in your wine problem. We get it: you are no fun.

But we also get that actually, every day should be Mental Health Awareness Day, because there is clearly a need for it, based on the numbers.

A new national survey of 2,818 mothers found that half had a hard time taking care of their own mental health in the past month. The biggest obstacle wasn’t cost or stigma, but time.

With twenty percent of mothers spending more than five hours a week on paperwork, calls, and coordination for their family’s health, childcare, and school needs, it’s not hard to see why. And in any month involving a holiday, that amount of time substantially increases.

Take October, to give a random example. Before it even rolls around, we have survived the costume dance: your child’s first announcement of what they’ve decided to dress up as for Halloween. This won’t be the one they actually wear, but you still have to take it seriously, as you will have to do with the next two ideas, before you realize that Halloween is two days away and Amazon offers overnight shipping on only one of the costumes (usually the least favorite choice).

And then there is the class party, which you are first alerted to through a single cheerful email from a room parent (who we might as well call the room mom, given the number of dads we’ve met with this title), complete with a sign-up link. You hurry to click the box for napkins, but you’re late to the game and get stuck with “a healthy, fall-themed, non-holiday-specific snack for 31 that is nut-free, dairy-free, dye-free, and looks like a mummy, which can be interpreted in many different ways, culturally.”

So you’re up at midnight on a Wednesday, wrapping string cheese in strips of tortilla and drawing eyes on them with a toothpick. Not only will they taste as gross as they sound, but by the next morning, as you prepare to send the snacks in to school, you’ll notice that the plant-based edible ink around the eyes has bled, and your mummies now look like they’re doing the walk of shame after a hard night out. But whatever. You’re a fun mom!

Then Halloween rolls around, and you have to write a legal code around the amount of candy consumption allowed post trick-or-treating. The rules start out stringent before slowly devolving into, “Fuck it. If you’re barfing later, don’t wake me up.”

Then comes the most invisible job of all, by definition: the slow, strategic removal of the candy bucket from the kitchen counter over the next three weeks, done so slowly that nobody notices.

Yes, Halloween is fun and adorable. But who made it happen? Girl, you did. And every one of the required tasks is so small as to seem invisible. No single item looks like a mountain of work, and when no one counts any of the tiny tasks as work, it becomes harder to divide the labor, and it can very easily land, by default, on whoever has always been the one who notices. And you know who that person usually is, statistically speaking.

So this is all to say that we see you. And if, as a mom, your mental health feels a little tenuous right now, it’s because it’s sort of part of the job description. So tomorrow, if you can, sleep in late, walk in the woods, talk to your therapist, increase your dosage (or don’t), and remember that you are a fun, lovable, amazing, raging psycho.

And if you’re not a mom but you know one, send a good vibe or two into the ether, and then take good care of yourself, too.

SHOP MOMBOD

BECOME A MOMBOD MEMBER

As a woman in my 40s who grew up in progressive circles in Portland, Oregon, I know what resistance looks like.

In fifth grade, I wore a sticker on my rain jacket that read “No on Measure 5,” the Oregon ballot measure that capped property taxes and fundamentally changed public school funding. It was fiercely opposed by the city’s most prominent liberals. In high school, my friends and I marched in the streets, again in support of public education. We boycotted Portland-based Nike over its use of sweatshops and nicknamed a newly developed neighborhood called Forest Heights “De-forest Heights” for the number of evergreens that would be cut down. A friend of mine was bullied at school because her father worked for the lumber lobby.

Sure, there was a certain naiveté to it, but there was also an assumption that the world was moving toward greater equity and justice.

At Vassar, I studied the politics of marginalization and othering, gender representation in the media, and the economics of oppression. After college, I continued my studies abroad, went to rallies, and worked only in jobs that aligned with my deeply vested sense of right and wrong. I pursued a career in the arts and felt that I was making a useful contribution.

And then I got married and became a mother.

Suddenly, the world of equality, modernity, and resistance that I had felt so connected to began to crumble around me.

It started with friends cooing over white wedding dresses and diamond solitaires. The whole thing felt icky and out of place to me, but I tried to conform. When I voiced my reservations, I was treated like some young, naive thing trying to be radical for the sake of being radical. So I had the wedding, too, my small acts of rebellion including a bright red sash around my waist and an officiant ordained in a Wiccan church.

Then I had twins, and the contradiction became impossible to ignore.

Suddenly, people were saying things like, “Work will always be there. You don’t need a big career,” and “Ooh, your floors are so clean!” No one said any of this to my then-husband.

Meanwhile, many of my friends seemed remarkably accepting of men who acted like children. Men who didn’t wake up when the babies cried. Men who looked to their wives, who were also brand-new parents, for all the answers. Men who mocked those same wives for being uptight.

I felt like I had leapt backward into some kind of 1950s movie set. Where was the modern world I thought I had come from?

For years, I had understood inequality as something to study, protest, and dismantle. Motherhood made it visceral. Suddenly, the politics of gender weren’t happening in a classroom, a rally, or a theoretical framework. They were happening in my kitchen, in my marriage, in my career, in the expectations placed on my body and my time, and in the radically different standards being applied to mothers and fathers.

And that is what motherhood continues to feel like to me: feminism’s left-behind frontier.

We have spent decades telling women they can have it all. They can have careers, ambition, independence, and equality. But we have been much less successful at changing what happens when those women become mothers.

In other words, motherhood is where the theory meets the wall.

And that wall is bigger than the division of household labor. It is about whose bodies are valued, whose anger is tolerated, whose ambition is considered legitimate, whose discomfort matters, and who is expected to accommodate everyone else.

It is about the social permission we give men to remain children while expecting women to become infrastructure.

That is the environment we have to reckon with when we look at things like the Cornell case, where 7 men gang-raped and 50 enabled the gang rape of a woman and subsequently wrote essays about the experience. It is the environment in which a Secretary of Defense can stand before American service members and say, “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos,” while presenting exclusion and conformity as a vision for the institution.

It strikes me that although the veil shielding this environment was not lifted so blatantly until I became a mother, the undercurrent was always there.

Alongside all of that political activism and all of the theoretical frameworks I was positioning myself within, men were doing unforgivably gross things to me and to virtually every other girl and woman with a pulse all along.

We just weren’t trained to see the whole picture clearly, and now motherhood has trained me to see it.

It taught me that the personal really is political, and the systems surrounding motherhood reveal, with startling clarity, who is expected to sacrifice, who is expected to serve, and who gets to remain free.

Now, there are no blinders. The men in power are telling us who they are, and they are acting on it. And women, especially mothers, need to return to our anger, our urgency, and our collective power.

Because motherhood should not be the place where feminism goes to die. It is one of the places where feminism has the most work left to do.

And moms are one of the most powerful voting blocs in American politics, so we need to keep acting like it.

Because Mama, the Revolution Has a MomBod.

xo, Emily

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It’s a beautiful day in this part of the country. The leaves are changing color, the apples are ripe for picking, and somewhere in the distance, we can hear the sounds of the Utah moms are getting out their fall hats and long faux fur vests.

On the flip side, a dangerous nor’easter is developing, AI might end the world pretty soon, and mortgage interest rates have jumped to a worrisome level. Also, if you haven’t heard, a 2024 case of gang rape at Cornell University has come into public view, and it couldn’t be a more distressing example of how persistent misogyny and violence are.

It’s never a good time to fall into complacency, but a much-needed step back is also never a bad idea. Insanity and overwhelm can strike at any time. For us it might look like the impulse to dye our hair darker “for fall” or splash out on a cartful of $7 autumnal decorations at the Dollar Tree. If this is you too, it’s okay. The fumes from those pumpkin spice candles probably won’t kill you, at least not today. And those rolled cake loaves filled with icing are a totally normal thing to buy off a shelf that also holds canned beans…like, probably (OK, maybe ask your doctor). After all, It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.

Luckily, there are some activist-y things you can do while drinking a pumpkin spice latte and “romanticizing your life” and watching a C-grade movie in the background. Here’s our nutmeg-scented list:

• Feed a family. Food banks feel every economic squeeze first. Drop off a bag of groceries, donate online, or grab something from our Well-Fed Mama collection, where proceeds support The Roundtable’s work fighting food insecurity.

• Check your voter registration. The midterms are Tuesday, November 3, and registration deadlines in some states are coming up fast. It takes about ninety seconds at vote.org. While you’re there, look up your early voting options and put the date in your phone like it’s a dentist appointment you actually intend to keep.

• Text your representatives. No phone call, no small talk. Resistbot lets you send a letter to your elected officials by text, and 5 Calls gives you a short script if you’re feeling brave enough to dial. Pick one thing that’s keeping you up at night (campus sexual assault, AI safety rules, housing costs, climate) and tell them you’re paying attention.

• Back the people fighting campus sexual violence. Stories like the one out of Cornell don’t end with the headline. Organizations like Know Your IX and End Rape on Campus support survivors and push for stronger Title IX protections. A small donation, a follow, or a share goes further than you’d think. And if you have teenagers, this is a good week for a real conversation about consent. Awkward is annoying but silence is worse.

• Look out for your people before the storm. Before the nor’easter hits, check on an elderly neighbor, a new parent, or anyone who might lose power without a backup plan. Sign up for your local emergency alerts at ready.gov. Mutual aid starts on your own street.

• Add your voice on climate. Stronger storms are part of a bigger pattern. Moms Clean Air Force makes climate advocacy doable for busy parents, with pre-written petitions and action alerts you can complete between school pickup and dinner.

• Show up locally on housing. High mortgage rates are a national problem, but zoning and housing decisions happen at your town or city council meetings, and many of them now stream online. Watching one (latte optional, snacks encouraged) is one of the most underrated forms of civic power there is.

Change doesn’t require a total personality overhaul or a free Saturday you don’t have. But it should definitely include some wardrobe activism and pretty much always goes down better with a seasonal beverage.

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BECOME A MOMBOD MEMBER

As you know by now, a couple of weeks ago, sports betting company Novig featured Sydney Sweeney in various states of undress in its now-infamous ad campaign.

“Sports,” she says, over and over again, holding footballs in front of her naked breasts or sprawled out naked on a pool table, to drive home the point that the betting app is all about betting on sports and nothing else. “No betting on wars, or deaths. And no politics,” she explains, lying on her stomach in nothing but soccer socks and cleats while balancing a ball on her feet.

Sweeney says the word sports a lot, but doesn’t actually do any sports in the ad, unless you count her cringeworthy golf swing or her remarkable ability to balance her bare ass on a basketball hoop. Apparently, if you put enough balls in the vicinity of a naked woman, you’ve made a sports commercial.

The backlash has been swift, particularly from women athletes who have worked hard to be taken seriously for what their bodies can do rather than what they look like.

But we’ve also been hearing from a familiar chorus of women begging us to stop judging other women’s choices. “The new feminism is all about making the best choices for yourself,” they argue. “Stop trying to drag other women down,” they chant.

This is choice feminism in a nutshell: the belief that a woman’s choice is inherently feminist simply because she made it, and that questioning or criticizing that choice is itself a betrayal of feminism.

Um…we disagree.

To be clear, believing that women should have the right to make their own choices does not mean believing that every choice a woman makes is inherently feminist, empowering, or beyond criticism. Those are two very different things.

We can defend a woman’s right to choose while still asking hard questions about the choices available to her, the circumstances surrounding them, and the systems that benefit from them.

A woman can absolutely choose to sexualize herself for a sports betting company. She can choose to pose naked, sell beauty products, pursue a career in pornography, take her husband’s last name, or stay home with her children. She can make any of these choices. We just don’t have to pretend that every one of them is empowering, or that feminism requires us to.

Choices don’t exist in a vacuum. We must ask what circumstances shaped this choice, who benefits from it, who bears the cost, and what larger systems it reinforces.

Importantly, we must also ask who else bears responsibility for bringing this ad to fruition.

Then there’s the other claim in the ad (aside from the bizarre insistence that this app is not about betting on wars and deaths…do people do that?): “No politics.” Except, of course, that deciding what is and isn’t political is itself political.

Sports are not some magical little island floating peacefully above society, untouched by money, power, gender, race, nationalism, labor, public funding, or the question of whose bodies we value and why. And there is certainly nothing apolitical about using a woman’s body to sell a product in an industry overwhelmingly built around entrenched masculinity and gambling.

So no, we’re not interested in policing women’s choices. We’re interested in being able to talk honestly about them.

If feminism means we can never question a woman’s choices, then we’ve reduced it to the most superficial possible version of empowerment: she chose it, therefore it’s feminist.

Which is less a feminist philosophy than a total cop-out. We can, and should, demand more than that.

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As we remember the events of 9/11/2001 and the devastating loss of life, we also take stock of the cultural temperature of our country then versus now. We contend with the memory of a nation that, in 2001, largely felt that something terrible had happened to us. Today, in contrast, it often feels as though something terrible is happening between us.

The divisiveness plays out glaringly on the political stage, in our news broadcasts, and on social media. Perhaps even more poignantly, and certainly more invasively, we see it increasingly in our personal lives. “The personal is political,” a phrase long associated with feminist thought, has taken on a new resonance in an era when government policy is increasingly concerned with how Americans structure their private lives and families.

This is why the Trump administration’s reported plan to provide child-care subsidies to certain married couples with a stay-at-home parent should make us pay attention. The proposal, a priority of J.D. Vance, would allow some married couples to receive roughly $9,000 per child each year from an existing federal child-care program if one parent stays home while the other works at least 35 hours a week. The catch is that the money would come from the same pool currently used to help working parents afford child care. In other words, the proposal would not simply create a new benefit for stay-at-home parents; it would expand the program to favor a particular family arrangement. Specifically, a family with married parents.

That distinction matters. About 80 percent of the roughly 870,000 families currently receiving child-care subsidies have a single working parent, most of them mothers. Expanding the pool of eligible families without increasing the fund could therefore mean more families competing for the same limited resources.

As Jessica Grose argues in The New York Times, the proposal is difficult to understand as simply a warm-hearted attempt to recognize the value of domestic labor. Its structure has the potential to privilege married, single-income households while leaving many of the single parents who rely on child-care assistance to remain employed at a disadvantage. As Grose writes, the administration’s approach seems meant to “pit stay-at-home parents against working ones,” or to punish single parents and their children who need support.

But we think the implications are broader than a policy bias against single parents. They go to the question of what kinds of families the government should encourage and incentivize, and what kinds it should discourage.

The proposed benefit is not available simply to a parent who chooses to stay home. Under the reported draft, marriage is part of the eligibility structure: one spouse must work at least 35 hours a week while the other provides care at home, subject to income requirements.

Unmarried couples and single parents would not qualify under the reported framework. That means the government isn’t merely saying that caring for your own children has value. It is attaching a financial incentive to a particular family arrangement.

And that is where the larger and more troubling cultural question comes in. We can value caregiving without prescribing the family structure in which that caregiving should happen. We can recognize the enormous economic value of raising children without deciding that marriage, rather than parenting itself, is the gateway to that recognition. And we can support parents who want to stay home without making parents who work, or parents who parent alone, pay the price.

Golden handcuffs, if $9,000 a year per child can even be considered golden, are still handcuffs.

On 9/11, Americans were confronted with a profound sense of us: something had happened to the country, and for a moment our differences seemed secondary to that shared experience. Twenty-five years later, one of the most unsettling differences is how readily “us” has become divided into categories of deserving and undeserving, “traditional and nontraditional,” married and unmarried, working and stay-at-home.

Remembering 9/11 does not require pretending that the America of 2001 was unified or uncomplicated. It wasn’t. But perhaps the anniversary gives us a reason to ask what kind of country we want to be now: one that recognizes the many ways people care for one another, or one that increasingly uses public policy to tell us which ways of living are worthy of support.

In 1963, a wardrobe mistress zipped Gloria Steinem into a satin bunny costume so tight she had to be told to inhale, then stuffed plastic dry-cleaning bags into the top for extra cleavage. Gloria was 28, and by then, she had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key from Smith, completed a fellowship in India, and had a byline in New York Magazine. She also had a gyn…

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If you grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, you might remember a cute little party trick you could use to impress your friends at school. With your best Casio solar-powered calculator in hand, you’d recite the following story while inputting each number, along with the multiplication sign:

Dolly Parton’s boobs weigh 69 pounds each. That’s 2-2-2 much. So she went…

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It’s Friday, and we’re still obsessed with the Lindsay Clancy trial, and we know many of you are too. The good news in this horrific tragedy is that it has served as a searing indictment of patriarchy, and we should all be encouraged by the conversations it has sparked. Important questions are being asked about maternal support, women’s mental health, g…

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Hi, it’s Alexina!

This week I’m writing from Aspen, where I’m spending the week for the Aspen Institute’s Food Leaders Fellowship. As I write, I’m sitting in a room full of people who believe that every kid and every mom in this country deserves food that nourishes them. It’s a privilege to be here by any measure, and part of that privilege is something …

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We wrote a bonus article earlier this week, and many of you reached out asking us to share it for free. So here it is, because who are we to disappoint, and because the mental health of moms in this country is something we should all be talking about.

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As mothers, most of us are gripped by the Lindsay Clancy story because we recognize the world behind it. Most of us have never experienced postpartum psychosis, as Clancy did, but many of us know what it feels like to become invisible the moment the baby arrives, and to be expected to hold everything together while needing help ourselves.

The failures behind this story are both structural and cultural.

Culturally, we’ve built a version of motherhood where depletion is normal, asking for help feels like failure, and a mother doing everything is treated as evidence that she’s doing motherhood “right.” We praise women for carrying impossible loads instead of asking why they’re carrying them alone. We raise future husbands who lack the emotional bandwidth to address and bear equal responsibility for parenthood.

Structurally, one in five American mothers experiences a maternal mental health condition.

Fewer than one in five is ever screened for one, and most never receive treatment.

But this is the statistic that really struck us: Mental health conditions, including suicide and overdose, are the leading cause of pregnancy-related death in the United States.

Most struggling mothers are not psychotic. Postpartum psychosis is very rare, affecting roughly one to two births in a thousand.

The issue is that the failures stacked up behind postpartum psychosis are not rare.

Most struggling mothers are exhausted beyond language. They’re anxious, not sleeping, crying in the car before they go back inside, wondering if they’re failing at the one thing everyone promised would come naturally. But the system often misses the entire gamut, from psychotic to non-violently depressed and anxious, because one mental health screening at six weeks, if at all, isn’t a safety net, but a checkbox.

Today, we’re writing about a murder trial, not because it’s salacious, but because it’s the loudest possible version of something happening quietly to women everywhere.

The Lindsay Clancy trial is a murder trial, and it’s also a receipt.

In a courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a woman in a wheelchair watches photographs of her three children appear on a screen. Cora was five, Dawson was three, and Callan was eight months old. On January 24, 2023, their mother killed them in the basement of their Duxbury, Massachusetts, home before attempting to end her own life. She survived and is now paralyzed, and sits on trial for three counts of first-degree murder.

We aren’t here to tell you what verdict the jury should reach. Prosecutors argue that Clancy acted intentionally and rationally. Her defense says she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis after months of escalating psychiatric treatment. Whether she is legally responsible now belongs to twelve jurors.

The question we’re interested in began long before January 24.

It began four months earlier.

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Feminism can feel like an uphill battle. The tiny, incremental changes required. All of that patriarchy scattered everywhere. The constant reminders that we have so far to go…it’s all exhausting.

Challenging the status quo is hard. Add in doing it all lady-style while also being a couple of cis, straight(ish), white(ish) women earnestly trying to explai…

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Last year, the USDA quietly killed the annual report that has tracked hunger in America since 1997.

Two months earlier, Congress cut $187 billion from SNAP, the largest cut to food assistance in U.S. history.

Translation? They’re changing who gets help putting food on the table, and they’ve stopped counting what happens next.

Here’s what the final report t…

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Summer is the best time of year: campfires, s’mores, fireflies, tennis whites, crisp white wine on the deck, and garden soirées with our closest friends and neighbors. Kids race through sprinklers laughing, spend long days at sailing lessons with friends, and come home smelling of sweat and sunscreen after hours of blissfully screen-free play.

Wait, oops…

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Every summer we get the same assignment: shrink.

This year the message is louder than usual. Ultra-thinness is in fashion, and the target keeps moving toward smaller and smaller bodies.

Here’s the thing about a body built to a standard of bone thinness: it’s brittle. Literally. Under-fueling costs you bone density, muscle, hormones, sleep, focus, and year…

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Fourth of July weekend is here, and this year the celebrations come with extra fanfare. America is gearing up for its 250th birthday, which means we’re going to witness some truly unhinged expressions of patriotism. The best part is that there are going to be so many costumes, and honestly, we can’t wait.

Boston Harborfest promises colonial reenactments,…

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Stop the presses, everybody. NPR recently ran a story under the headline, More people are juggling work and kids — and finding they can’t give 100% to both.

Which raises the obvious question: why doesn’t anyone listen to women?

Yes, it’s newsworthy that more parents are struggling to balance work and caregiving. But the idea that our workplaces and public…

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