The Feminist Reclamation

Why women sitting in circles terrifies systems of control, and what the research says about the neurobiological and political effects of women’s intentional witnessing A group of women sit in a circle. They take turns speaking. They are not interrupted. They are witnessed. When each woman finishes, the circle holds a silence before the next…

How Kurdish women in northeast Syria built feminist political philosophy into the foundations of a new society In 2012, as the Syrian civil war fractured the state’s control over its northern territories, the Kurdish-majority regions of northeast Syria declared autonomous self-governance. What emerged was not a conventional state, not a military dictatorship, and not a…

Walking marriages, maternal households, and what happens to domestic violence rates when women control property and kinship On the shores of Lugu Lake, straddling the border between Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in southwestern China, approximately 40,000 Mosuo people live inside a social structure that most Westerners cannot quite believe when they first encounter it. There…

What the material record actually tells us, and what Victorian archaeologists projected onto it There is a story we tell ourselves about the inevitability of patriarchy. It goes something like this: men have always dominated women because biology demanded it. Strength determined hierarchy. Fatherhood demanded control. The nuclear family is ancient. Women have always been…