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09/02/2026

A year ago, I told you about Laura Bassi — one of the first women ever to hold a university professorship.

That story was true.

It was also incomplete.

Bologna celebrated her brilliance, paid her, paraded her before Europe — and still restricted her ordinary teaching ratione s*xus.

By reason of s*x.

Laura Bassi was not invisible. She was hypervisible.

Her fight was turning visibility into authority.

And sometimes going back to a woman’s story is where you finally find the part history polished away.

09/01/2026

A woman looked at bitter, gritty coffee and said: absolutely not. ☕️😂

In 1908, Melitta Bentz used a brass cup and blotting paper from her son’s school notebook to create the paper coffee filter.

She patented it, started a business from home, and built what became the Melitta company.

Sometimes innovation isn’t dramatic.

Sometimes it’s just a woman being deeply annoyed by bad coffee.

08/31/2026

Here’s what happened to women last week.

In Nigeria, hundreds of women, children and older people were reportedly abducted after a deadly mosque attack.

In Greenland, new findings concluded that Denmark violated the human rights of Indigenous women and girls through a decades-long forced contraception campaign.

In Iran, women continue resisting renewed pressure to enforce compulsory hijab laws.

In the U.S., 23 states sued over new restrictions tied to Title X family-planning funding, while a federal judge approved a $72.5 million settlement for women who accused Bank of America of facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse.

Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields raised $20 million for organizations supporting women and girls.

And this week, we lost Dolly Parton.

A songwriter. A businesswoman. A philanthropist. A woman who came from poverty, owned her work, built an empire, and then spent decades quietly putting books into the hands of children who might otherwise never have had them.

Hell of a woman. Hell of a legacy.

Women are resisting. Organizing. Demanding accountability. Funding one another. And leaving behind things that outlive them.

That’s what happened to women last week.

08/30/2026

Three hundred years ago in Kandahar, an Afghan woman was studying, teaching, writing poetry and advising a king.

Her name was Zaynab Hotak, also known as Bebe Zainab.

A scholar of Pashto and Persian literature, Quranic studies, and Islamic jurisprudence, Zaynab taught women within the royal household and became a trusted political adviser during one of the most turbulent periods in Kandahar’s history.

She was also a poet. When her brother Mahmud died in 1725, her grief turned toward the political future of her family’s kingdom:

“The crown of their kingdom
Is on the verge to fall.”

Educated Afghan women are not a modern invention.

They were already there.

Their history didn’t begin when the rest of the world started paying attention to them.

Her name was Zaynab Hotak. Now you know. ❤️

Image: artistic reconstruction. No known portrait of Zaynab Hotak survives.

08/29/2026

Women in History: Gargi Vachaknavi

Before Socrates was born, a woman in ancient India was already asking what lies beneath the universe.

Her name was Gargi Vachaknavi

Preserved in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Gargi stood among learned scholars and challenge the sage Yajnavalkya with questions about space, existence, and ultimate reality.

Women weren’t absent from the history of philosophy.

Sometimes, we simply stop teaching their names.

Now you know hers. ❤️




08/28/2026

Cesária Évora didn’t become an international star until she was nearly 50.

Born in Cape Verde, she brought morna - the music of longing, love, separation, and home - to audiences around the world, singing primarily in Cape Verdean Creole.

Known as the “Barefoot Diva,” Évora became one of Africa’s most celebrated voices and won a Grammy in 2004.

Her name was Cesária Évora.

08/27/2026

Women in History: Esther Lederberg learn to finish important work quietly before telling her husband.

According to her second husband, Matthew Simon, Esther said that when she discovered something important in Joshua Lederberg’s lab, he would take her off the project and assigned the work to someone else.

So she adapted

Decades later, when she found the F factor credited elsewhere in a history of molecular biology, she wrote a correction in the margin:

“No, I did discover the fertility factor.”

Full essay: No, I did discover.

❤️💞❤️

“No, I did discover the Fertility Factor.”Esther Lederberg wrote those words by hand in the margin of a history of molec...
08/26/2026

“No, I did discover the Fertility Factor.”

Esther Lederberg wrote those words by hand in the margin of a history of molecular biology that credited someone else.

She discovered lambda phage. Her work on the F factor helped reshape our understanding of bacterial genetics. She co-developed replica plating and helped uncover specialized transduction.

In 1956, the press called Esther and Joshua Lederberg a scientific team.

Two years later, he received the Nobel Prize.

Esther spent decades doing the science anyway.

No, I Did Discover…the story of Esther Lederberg with the receipts.

Read now in The Reading Room.

08/25/2026

Women proved their effectiveness in combat a decade ago. The Pentagon is reviewing it anyway.

Last week, women demanded transparency from the military, countries joined forces to close research gaps affecting female athletes, hundreds gathered to demand that postpartum mental health be taken seriously, and Sophie Adenot became the first French woman to perform a spacewalk.

One week. Four stories. And women are still fighting to have their work, their bodies, and their warnings taken seriously.

08/24/2026

Kabuki is one of Japan’s most famous theatrical traditions. Today, it’s known for it’s all male cast. But it began with a woman.

Around 1603, Izumo no Okuni took the stage in Kyoto, dressed as a man, borrowing the swagger of the rule, breaking kabukimono, and turning it into something entirely new. Women followed her onto the stage.

Then, in 1629, women were banned from performing it. Kabuki didn’t begin as a male tradition.

Women were there first.

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