Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.

A groundbreaking new book demonstrates that even during the days of slavery, African Americans knew a lot more about legal principles than has been imagined.

Four important court cases that have defined the landscape of women’s rights in the United States.

The abortionist Madame Restell is central to the story of how American women’s reproductive freedom was dismantled in the second half of the nineteenth century.

What does the academy have against the mother of second-wave feminism?

An iconic moment deeply shaped by Quaker beliefs on gender and equality.

She was a woman, but she was not the author of the speech attributed to her in popular lore.

Learn more about the story of Matilda Gage, whose writings inspired the witches in "The Wizard of Oz."

In the first half of the 19th century, upstate New York was a hotbed of movements for reform. How visible is that history today?

Uncovering the resort where rich women sought the elusive right to divorce

The pro-life movement needs to know that such culture wars result not in outright victory for one side but in reaction and compromise.

A new book tells the scandalous secrets of a forgotten 19th-century tycoon, Miriam Follin Peacock Squier Leslie Wilde, also known as Mrs. Frank Leslie.

Of mice and men.

The temperance movement wasn’t an example of American exceptionalism; it was a globe-spanning network of activists and politicians against economic exploitation.

Cocktails — the ingredients, the stories, the pageantry — can reveal more than expected about the Gilded Age.

How white feminism failed Native Americans in the late-19th century.

When African Americans allied themselves with the British, the Patriots were enraged, and they acted.

The radical women behind the original “dump him” discourse.

We often think of the temperance movement as driven by white evangelicals set out to discipline Black Americans and immigrants. That history is wrong.

Elements of the Puritans’ unique worldview were handed down for generations and were carried westward by their descendants, the people we call Yankees.