Bitchstory- The Blog

We lost another warrior this week, and this one was a personal hero of mine. Gloria Steinem died on September 2 at the age of ninety-two, only eight days after Dolly Parton. Apparently the universe has decided to conduct some kind of brutal staff reduction in the Department of Women Who Made It Possible for the Rest of Us, and I plan to write a strongly worded message to management. Dolly and Gloria carried different kinds of swords. Dolly wrapped hers in rhinestones, humor, songs, and a generosity that somehow never required her to give away ownership of herself. Gloria carried a pen, a microphone, and the radical conviction that women describing their own lives could change the world. One reached people through culture and story; the other helped build the language and political structures of a movement. Losing them so close together feels like losing two different expressions of the same force: women insisting that we belong to ourselves. Gloria Steinem was a journalist, activist,...

There's a pattern that shows up again and again when you start digging into the history of invention: a woman solves a real problem, builds the thing, proves it works — and then a man shows up, takes the credit, and the record quietly rewrites itself around him. Sometimes it's theft. Sometimes it's just indifference until the idea becomes profitable. Either way, the woman disappears from the story she wrote. Here are four of them. Bette Nesmith Graham: She Painted Over Her Mistakes and Built a Fortune In 1951, Bette Nesmith Graham was a divorced single mother working as an executive secretary in Dallas, and she had a problem: the office had switched to electric typewriters, which used carbon-film ribbon that couldn't be erased. One typo meant retyping the entire page. Graham wasn't a great typist. She was, however, an artist who never got the chance to be one — and she noticed that sign painters downtown didn't scrape mistakes off storefront windows, they just p...

This past year has changed me. Not in the tidy, inspirational way people sometimes talk about transformation…as if healing is a thing you discover after a certain number of yoga classes and once you can do that one pose with the weird breathing, you suddenly reach the improved version of yourself. My journey has been messier than that, and I think most journeys are. My path has involved remembering, unlearning, grieving, questioning, rebuilding, and occasionally discovering that something I thought I had healed was simply waiting for me at a deeper level. But this year has also brought me back to a version of myself that feels better, despite all the chipped corners and broken pieces.  I have spent much of my life surviving. You probably aren’t shocked to read that, but I was very shocked to discover this truth!  Because I did not have a dramatic upbringing. My family of Aquariuses are decidedly anti-drama.  But I came into this hellscape…ahem…”world”… as very sensit...

Listen to the latest episode here:  Bitchstory Here’s a surprising subject for Bitchstory- Let’s talk about the King James version of the Bible…the good ol’ KJV and its flowery Shakespearean language.  No, I haven’t fallen and smacked my head. Stay with me… The King James Version has shaped Christianity, literature, and the English language for more than four hundred years. But here’s the part most of us never learned in school. The same King James who commissioned that famous Bible also wrote a book called Daemonologie (aka Demonology) Published in 1597, it wasn’t about faith or salvation. It was a treatise on witchcraft—a guide Let’s talk explaining how to identify witches, how they supposedly behaved, why they were a threat, and how they should be prosecuted. James genuinely believed witches were conspiring with the Devil, and because he was king, those beliefs carried enormous weight throughout Scotland . Whether King James personally hated women is a more nuanced hi...