Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award.
Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".
Katie Roiphe is an American author and journalist. She is best known as the author of the non-fiction book The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism (1994). She is also the author of Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (1997), and the 2007 study of writers and marriage, Uncommon Arrangements. Her 2001 novel Still She Haunts Me is an imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She is also known for allegedly planning to name the creator of the Shitty Media Men list in an article for Harper's Magazine.
Ms. is an American feminist magazine co-founded in 1971 by journalist and social/political activist Gloria Steinem. It was the first national American feminist magazine. The original editors were Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mary Thom, Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, Mary Peacock, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, and Gloria Steinem. Beginning as a one-off insert in New York magazine in 1971, the first stand-alone issue of Ms. appeared in January 1972, with funding from New York editor Clay Felker. It was intended to appeal to a wide audience and featured articles about a variety of issues related to women and feminism. From July 1972 until 1987, it was published on a monthly basis. It now publishes quarterly.
Feminists for Life of America (FFL) is a non-profit, anti-abortion feminist, non-governmental organization (NGO). Established in 1972, and now based in Alexandria, Virginia, the organization publishes a biannual magazine, The American Feminist, and aims to reach young women, college students in particular.
The term postfeminism is used to describe reactions against contradictions and absences in feminism, especially second-wave feminism and third-wave feminism. The term postfeminism is sometimes confused with subsequent feminisms such as fourth-wave feminism and xenofeminism.
Smurfette is one of the protagonists from the comic strip The Smurfs. Smurfette was created by the evil wizard Gargamel, the Smurfs' archenemy, in order to spy on them and sow jealousy. However, she decides that she wants to be a real Smurf and Papa Smurf casts a spell that changes her hair from black to blonde as a sign of her transformation. She was the only female Smurf until the creation of Sassette. A Granny Smurf was also later introduced, although it is unclear how she was created. Thierry Culliford, the son of the comics' creator, Peyo, and current head of the Studio Peyo, announced in 2008 that more female Smurfs would be introduced in the stories. Smurfette has stereotypical feminine features, with long blonde wavy hair, long eyelashes, and wears a white dress and white high heels. She is the love interest of almost every Smurf.
Kimiko Hahn is an American poet and distinguished professor in the MFA program of Queens College, CUNY. Her works frequently deal with the reinvention of poetic forms and the intersecting of conflicting identities.
Wendy Shalit is an American conservative writer and author who has written the books A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, published by Free Press in 1999; Girls Gone Mild: Young Rebels Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good, published by Random House in 2007; and The Good Girl Revolution: Young Rebels with Self-Esteem and High Standards, published by Random House in 2008.
Jennifer Baumgardner is a writer, activist, filmmaker, and lecturer whose work explores abortion, sex, bisexuality, rape, single parenthood, and women's power. From 2013 to 2017, she served as the Executive Director/Publisher at The Feminist Press at the City University of New York (CUNY), a feminist institution founded by Florence Howe in 1970.
The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus is a 1993 book about date rape by author and journalist Katie Roiphe. Her first book, it was reprinted with a new introduction in 1994. Part of the book had previously been published as an essay, "The Rape Crisis, or 'Is Dating Dangerous?'" in the New York Times Magazine.
Amelia Richards is an American activist, organizer, writer, television producer, feminist, and art historian, currently residing in New York. She produced the Emmy-nominated series Woman, which airs on Viceland. She is the president of Soapbox, Inc., a feminist lecture agency.
Merle Hoffman is an American journalist and activist.
Camille Anna Paglia is an American feminist academic and social critic. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.
Leslie Cannold is an Australian philosopher, ethicist, educationalist, writer, activist, and public intellectual.
Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women is a 1994 book about American feminism by Christina Hoff Sommers, a writer who was at that time a philosophy professor at Clark University. Sommers argues that there is a split between equity feminism and what she terms "gender feminism". Sommers contends that equity feminists seek equal legal rights for women and men, while gender feminists seek to counteract historical inequalities based on gender. Sommers argues that gender feminists have made false claims about issues such as anorexia and domestic battery and exerted a harmful influence on American college campuses. Who Stole Feminism? received wide attention for its attack on American feminism, and it was given highly polarized reviews divided between conservative and liberal commentators. Some reviewers praised the book, while others found it flawed.
The Smurfette principle is the practice in media, such as film and television, to include only one woman in an otherwise entirely male ensemble. It establishes a male-dominated narrative, where the woman is the exception and exists only in reference to the men. The concept is named after Smurfette, the only female among the Smurfs, a group of comic book creatures.
Lucinda Cisler is an American abortion rights activist, Second Wave feminist, and member of the New York-based radical feminist group the Redstockings. Her writings on unnecessary obstructions to medical abortion procedures in many ways predicted anti-abortion strategies in the 2010s, called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) by abortion rights advocates.
Ann Barr Snitow was an American feminist activist, writer and teacher. She was a co-founder of the New York Radical Feminists, and the (co-)author and (co-)editor of several books.
