Menu
Aeon
DonateNewsletter
SIGN IN

Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future
A group of girls walk past the Washington Monument on the National Mall in Washington, DC
Save

essay

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

Save

video

Human rights and justice

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

24 minutes

Save

video

Gender

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

5 minutes

Save

essay

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

Save

video

Gender

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

10 minutes

Save

essay

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

Save

video

Politics and government

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

19 minutes

Save

essay

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

Save

essay

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

Save

essay

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

Save

essay

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

Save

video

Art

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

15 minutes

Save

essay

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

Save

essay

History

Women at the barricades

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

Carolyn Eichner

Save

essay

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

Save

video

Work

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

25 minutes

Save

video

History

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

10 minutes

Save

essay

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

Save

video

Fairness and equality

How the first woman of colour to be elected to the US Congress remade education

21 minutes

Save

video

History of ideas

Tantra is, and was, a subversive philosophy of feminine power

19 minutes

Save

video

Economics

We all play by economic rules set by men. What could a feminist economics look like?

30 minutes

Save

essay

Art

Her body is a problem

When 1970s women artists put the female body under the female gaze, why did the critics see only obscene monsters?

Lauren Elkin

Save

video

Biology

In the jungle of Suriname, Maria Sibylla Merian discovered insect metamorphosis

4 minutes

Save

essay

Thinkers and theories

More than muses and martyrs

In the long 19th century, many women philosophers were marginalised or ignored. We need to rediscover them

Kristin Gjesdal & Dalia Nassar