Re-Feminist History (aka Bitchstory)

  Listen to the latest episode here:  Bitchstory Join Patreon and get weekly  Bitchscopes  & more!    There’s a version of history most of us were taught… neat, clean, predictable… a handful of (mostly white, mostly male) inventors lined up like a greatest hits album. Light bulb. Telephone. Cotton gin. Repeat until graduation. Meanwhile… actual life? Way messier. Way more interesting. And, inconveniently for the textbook industry, built by a lot more people than they bothered to mention. Including Black women… who were out here solving real, everyday problems while being ignored, dismissed, underpaid, or straight-up shut out. And somehow… we all just collectively learned nothing about that. Cool cool cool. So let’s fix it. The Women Who Made Everyday Life Work What I love about these women is that they weren’t sitting around trying to invent something flashy or impress a room full of men in suits… they were solving actual problems. Laundry. Per...

  There are certain women history quietly tried to keep in a filing cabinet labeled “miscellaneous.” We’re not doing that. This week on Bitchstory, we’re riding straight into the hills of Kentucky during the Great Depression to talk about the women of the Pack Horse Library Project — a New Deal program under the umbrella of the Works Progress Administration. Translation: the federal government paid women to strap books onto mules and ride through the Appalachian mountains delivering literacy door to door. Yes. That happened. And it is exactly as badass as it sounds Context: Poverty, Mountains, and Zero Infrastructure In the 1930s, parts of Appalachian Kentucky had some of the lowest literacy rates in the country. Roads were barely roads. Schools were scattered and underfunded. Libraries? Mostly nonexistent. So the WPA did something radical: They hired local women — many of them poor themselves — and paid them about $28 a month to deliver books across rugged terrain. These...