Today is the day we acknowledge everything we’ve accomplished — as a community, as a movement, as a collective of humans of every shade, size, and creed bellowing, “we can do better!” — in these last three and a half years.

In October of 2015, six of us — Nikki Gloudeman, Ruchika Tulshyan, Kelley Calkins, Ijeoma Oluo, Katie Tandy and Jessica Sutherland — set out, buoyed by a preposterously generous and believing angel investor, Shauna Stark. We took to the digital airwaves armed to the gills with the belief that there were too few publications on the whole of the goddamn internet that told stories as diverse as the world we live in.

Four year later it remains exceedingly rare to find publications that grant the marginalized, the silenced, the vulnerable — people of color, womxn, non-binary folks, the LGBTQIA community, the mentally ill, the poor, the disabled, and every intersection in between — the freedom to write about what they want. What their reality is. What threatens their sanity, safety, body, and mind. What turns their gears and gets them up in the morning.

We started The Establishment with the ambition of fundamentally shifting the narrative of
what an expert looks like, whose book gets quoted, and who gets to write the stories that shape media. Over the years our writers covered reproductive justice, the history of bell bottoms, the plight of trans youth, the power of vaginal bacteria, the impact of black nerdom, the socio-political underpinnings of the name Kevin, the economics of sex, and the danger of binge-watching television — not to mention pregnancy loss, menstruation, surviving sexual violence, neurodivergent art, hair and queer identity, and so, so, so much more. We published a kaleidoscopic rainbow of voices and stories and issues that were — and continue to be — deeply underrepresented then and now.

More than 4,000 stories by 990 writers, to be exact. (And we paid every single writer and creator.)

And people responded. More than a million people every month were reading our stories, and the conversations our content provoked were as nuanced and important as the words on the digital page.

During our time at Matter.VC — an incredible incubator focused on championing media and tech for social good — we also launched a Slack community where these conversations could continue in a safe space among the beautiful and brilliant humans supporting our mission.

We hope that in the past 1,090-odd days of The Establishment’s existence, you read stories that made you feel less alone, lanced your psychological blisters, made you think, or made you confront some perspective or implicit bias or prejudice you’d never quite dared to look at. We hope that you found a writer whose words sang such a beguiling song that you promised to read everything they ever published. (And good grief there were so many that sang their siren song to us!)

We hope that, like us, your fear and rage and anger at the infinite ways we harm one another was eased when your eyes found our site, our community of humans who were all fighting the good fight.

Our writers and readers and supporters are the humans who’ve been instrumental in keeping this beautiful ship afloat and a thank you could never suffice, but thank you. Thank you from the bottom of our throbbing hearts, the glinting depths of our souls — thank you, thank you, a million times we holler till we’re hoarse, thank you.

While we’ve tried just about everything — events, subscriptions, branded content, swag, gated content, and good ol’ fashioned donations and desperate pleas to the Internet Gods — the headwinds facing media are intense, and finding a sustainable revenue model is a Sisyphean feat.

WOULD YOU BE BELIEVE IT’S DIFFICULT TO MONETIZE INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST MEDIA?!

We had a feeling you might.

And while we are gutted to close The Establishment — we all feel as though a slice of ourselves has gone missing — we’re also prouder than ever. Together we leave a legacy, a body of work that shows the world as it could be.

Times are dire, but know that you are part and parcel of pushing back. Whether you’ve read us, written for us, shared our articles, become a member, or donated your hard-earned moolah — maybe all of the above! — you have fundamentally helped transform our media landscape into something more inclusive, something bigger and better and brighter than the majority of the world thinks or allows to be possible.

Thank you for sharing that vision with us. We’ll never forget that feeling and we hope you won’t either. They say journalism is the first draft of history. Here’s a legacy we’re proud to help create.

Your comrades in combating the darkness,
The Establishment

PS: Please rest assured that all Establishment content will remain in the digital universe for perpetuity — we will be maintaining the site at theestablishment.co and medium.com/the-establishment, just without publishing new content, so you can continue to read and discuss the brilliant words of our extraordinary writers.

Pleasure has always been policed, in some way or another, in cultures across the world. That’s because pleasure is, in a way, a source of resistance.

In her book Vagina, Naomi Wolf argues that women have a special relationship with pleasure in that, when we have the right kind of it, we are feisty, powerful, and strong, and when we don’t, we can lose our will to stand up for ourselves. The way our pelvic nerves translate pleasure from our sexual experiences to our brains boosts the hormones that make us strong and connected and dampen our vulnerability to depression and lethargy.

Wolf argues that dopamine in particular is “the ultimate feminist chemical. If a woman has optimal levels of dopamine, she is difficult to direct against herself. She is hard to drive to self-destruction, to manipulate and control.” On the other hand, when dopamine is too low, which is a known effect of sexual violence, women tend to get depressed, stop fighting back, and become easier to subjugate.

Wolf argues, then, that there is a physiological reason why women have been suppressed for so many generations: the powers that be knew, probably from experience, that if you damage the vagina, essentially, you damage the brain. Mess with our dopamine flow and we’ll stop fighting back. Rape has always gone along with pillaging not (only) because colonizers are assholes, but because when you can quickly and easily shut down half the population, you cut your colonizing hours in half. They didn’t need a scientific study to prove what they could see with their own eyes: rape a woman and she’ll stop resisting.

There’s good news here, too, though, from Wolf’s perspective. The unique vagina-brain connection might also make people with vaginas more powerful. Wolf writes:

I don’t like any kind of feminism that sets one gender above another, so I do not mean this in any way as a value judgment. Neither gender is “better.” But one gender is theoretically able to get more of a certain kind of dopamine and opioid/endorphin activation during sex, which has a very specific effect on the brain and even the personality. We cannot escape what this math implies for female sexuality, in its unmediated, un-messed-up state: nature constructed a profound difference between the sexes, which places women in, potentially, a position of greater biochemical empowerment.

Great sex, Wolf explains, boosts women’s dopamine, endorphins, opioids, and testosterone. It makes us more willing to take creative risks, to give fewer fucks about what other people think of us. It makes us want to take over the world. And have more sex.

Wolf goes on, “So the fear that patriarchy always had—that if you let women have sex and know how to like it, it will make them both increasingly libidinous and increasingly ungovernable—is actually biologically true!” From this perspective, it makes sense that suppressing and policing female sexuality has always been an aspect of patriarchal society. Knowing our sexual bodies and being unafraid to use them might have made us so full of spunk and fire that our subjugation wouldn’t have been possible.

The patriarchal fear of female pleasure was perhaps most salient during the centuries of witch-hunting when mostly women were tortured (often sexually) and killed in brutal ways. The first trials started in the 14th century and hit a fever pitch in the 16th and 17th centuries. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English put the killings in perspective when they write in their book Witches, Midwives, and Nurses:

One writer has estimated the number of executions on an average of 600 a year for certain German cities—or two a day, ‘leaving out Sundays.’ Nine hundred witches were destroyed in a single year in the Wertzberg area, and 1000 were put to death in a day. In the Bishopric of Trier, in 1585, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant each.

Men were sometimes accused of witchcraft too, but the authors point out that “women made up some 85 percent of those executed.” It’s always been so interesting to me that when we hear the phrase “witch hunt” in our cultural lexicon, it’s usually coming from a white man feeling persecuted after he got caught abusing his power. Why don’t we talk more about the witch hunt era as what it was: a large scale, wide-reaching historical campaign of terror against women?

There’s no evidence witchcraft as a specific religion ever really existed, though as a young teen who would light candles and try to cast spells while blasting the angsty strains of Alanis Morissette, I still can’t help but yearn for a ritualistic practice that literally gave women power. Magic wasn’t really what was being hunted, though: it was any form of power that could belong to a woman, especially if it related to her reproductive abilities.

Before the witch hunts, women were bakers, ale-makers, schoolteachers, doctors, and surgeons. Gynecology was a mostly female profession, with c-sections being performed almost exclusively by women in the 14th century, until male-only universities started popping up to certify men and push the midwives and lay healers out of a job.

The lay healers were mostly women who would provide counsel and a few herbs while, by the 1800s, men were getting certified to perform superstitious rituals like bloodletting and treating leprosy with “a broth made of the flesh of a black snake caught in a dry land among stones.” As Ehrenreich and English point out, a patient would be likelier to die by the hands of a certified male doctor’s bravura than with the “undoubtedly safer” gentle attentions of a female lay healer.

Women were especially targeted if they had any medical knowledge about reproduction or contraception. In her book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts were a necessary strategy to transition from feudalism into the capitalist era. Women’s bodies were needed to create more laborers for the new economy, so reproduction had to be carefully monitored.

“The criminalization of women’s control over procreation is a phenomenon whose importance cannot be overemphasized,” Federici writes, “both from the viewpoint of its effects on women and its consequences for the capitalist organization of work.”

If Wolf’s argument that targeting women sexually is an age-old strategy of war, the witch hunts make no exception. “In community after community,” Wolf writes, “the women identified by inquisitors or by their fellow villagers as ‘witches’ were often those who were seen as too sexual, or too free. And forms of torture were focused on their sexuality,” such as with devices placed in the vagina or with vaginal mutilation.

When women were shamed for their sexuality and even tortured at their genital source, the theory goes, they would indeed be willing to step back and relinquish their rights. It is interesting, however, that this subjugation and control of women in the service of capitalism took almost 400 years. We obviously haven’t been that easy to subjugate.  

Echoes of this sexual suppression and torture continue on today in communities where girl’s clitorises are cut out or burned, ostensibly for religious reasons. Clitoridectomies are hardly an invention of some other land, however, lest we think we Westerners are somehow more civilized. In 1858, the English doctor Isaac Baker Brown introduced the practice that, Wolf explains, made him “famous and sought after for his ‘cure,’ which took argumentative, fiery girls, and, after he had excised their clitorises, returned them to their families in a state of docility, meekness, and obedience.” Even Western doctors, it seems, understood that damaging a girl’s clitoris would somehow amputate her will to rebel.

Then, of course, there’s our old buddy Sigmund Freud. The (in)famous founder of psychoanalysis has a hidden story that is, in my reading, about his betrayal of womankind. In the last decades of the 19th century, Freud and his contemporaries were greatly interested in hysteria—which was, basically, a catch-all term for women’s psychological problems vaguely associated with the uterus (hystera in Greek).

In his earnest attempt to understand this common affliction, Freud sat down with women and listened to them. Jean-Martin Charcot and Joseph Breuer, Freud’s contemporaries, were similarly focused on the problem. In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman points out that “For a brief decade men of science listened to women with a devotion and a respect unparalleled before or since.

All this listening bore fruit for Freud, at least at first. He discovered that women suffering from hysteria pretty much always had a history of childhood sexual abuse. Freud wrote a triumphant paper called The Aetiology of Hysteria clearly explaining the root of the problem. Instead of being lauded for his discovery, however, he was met with the academic version of an uncomfortable silence. “Hysteria was so common among women,” Herman explains,

that if his patient’s stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice.

That meant that sexual abuse was a systemic issue, a problem of violence against girl children that defied class. Freud’s society was not ready to consider such an earth-shattering possibility, so his theory was rejected. In order to maintain his prestigious position in society, he recanted. Herman goes on,

By the first decade of the twentieth century, without ever offering any clinical documentation of false complaints, Freud had concluded that his hysterical patients’ accounts of childhood sexual abuse were untrue: ‘I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction has never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.’

Betrayal! Freud’s psychoanalysis went on to create a theory of neurosis that did not match women’s actual experience of reality. He insisted that women lie often and that their fantasies were the source of their problems. He came up with the concept of penis envy, that old canard that little girls hate their mothers forever for not giving them a penis. Not to mention his insulting (and evidence-free) idea that women who can’t achieve orgasms from penetration alone are somehow immature, a concept that caused sexual insecurity and an epidemic of sexually frustrated women that still persists to this day.

Women have inherited quite a history of sexual shame, terror, and torture from our ancestral grandmothers, even if we have no history of it in our own lives. It’s no wonder feeling sexual pleasure is so fraught in our time—not only have we not always felt the right to experience pleasure in the ways that work for us (thanks Freud!), but we have echoes of intergenerational trauma from a history of being tortured, murdered, and violated, at worst, and silenced, at best.

For these reasons and more, feeling pleasure isn’t just a little thing we should try to make more time for in our busy lives because it’s fun. It’s a radical act of resistance against a history of suppression and pain. Taking pleasure, whether by enjoying great sex, going dancing, eating good food, or simply having a hot cup of tea on a cool day, is an act of self-determination and choice. Our pleasure is a tool of resistance against our own oppression and suppression. Our pleasure matters.

Dear you,

It’s April, which means National Poetry Month, which means the weather does who knows, which means we’re out of Pisces season and into the more go-get-em Aries (thank god).

I spent March actively sitting with things that scare me. On a work trip to teach patient advocacy at a university in Las Vegas, I used my free time to confront the ways my brain creates problematic patternings that come from hurt, trauma, loss, and scarcity.

Obviously, changing the way one functions, copes, and metabolizes is not something that is done in just one month. Nor should it be. However, the last six months of my life have been full of grief, endless rain, physical pain, stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness; I was ready to work on the common denominator of myself.

So I approached it the way I approach everything: as a scholarly pursuit.

This decision to start actively sitting with wounds and things that frighten me isn’t an entirely new one; I first felt the need to move into another level of therapy and healing last May, while reading Yosa Buson on a park bench in Los Angeles. I was nearly at the end of my tour, I had lost two friends to unspeakable things (one to an accident, one to a long and painful illness), and my dream of having a book in the world had come true. I was strangely undone by the juxtaposition of those two things.

“Coolness – the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell.”

Reading this poem struck me, much like a large piece of resonant metal would, and I’ve never forgotten it. It is always the poem that starts and ends my meditation as I hear the bell chime. “If you ever find yourself wandering off in your practice,” Tara Brach once said, “Just follow the sound of the bell as long as you can.”

I started sitting with the things that scare me (abandonment, not being good enough, social anxiety, grief) because I had reached a place in my healing where it seemed possible to do so without damaging myself; through somatic therapy, talk therapy, EMDR, writing, books, and community (and yes, sometimes even medication) I’ve built a strong base.

I also started meditating because I wanted to be less afraid of dying.

While the death of my maternal grandmother seemed sudden, comparatively, the death of my paternal grandmother was a long, long goodbye. Visiting her was always a practice in sitting with death and dying. At a point, she had been dying for so long that I stopped seeing her hands as they were when I was a child; I gave manicures to nails brittle and aware of time passing.

I’m currently working on translating a collection of poems by an obscure-even-in-his-time Patagonian poet. Today, translating an epitaph on infancy, I came across this line he wrote:

“It is good to understand that we are made of memory,
that time grows without listening to us.
That there are many things we do not understand.”

I turned to a kind of spirituality known for practicing robust and sacred understandings of the rituals of loss and dying, and this was a wise instinct; despite my relatively young age, I’ve experienced more death than most I know who are in a similar station and generation and citizenship in life. It makes good sense to need something larger than our Western framework can hold — and our Western framework does poor work of containing the complex shadow lives of death, dying, aging, grieving.

The white static that happens for people who can’t bear children after they pass their child-bearing years. The solitude of a person who outlives their friends. What to do in the face of a long illness. What to do when your nicest friend is battling terminal illness way too young.

Things that helped change these confront my damaging patterns, my loss of people I love, my creeping self-doubt and bone-tiredness with grey:

• sound meditation (whatever you like, even music, but binaural beats and Tibetan singing bowls worked best for me) 
• visualization (my favorite included imagining being inside of a dirt devil of all of the things I am obligated to do, and then stepping through it to the other side, where a field — in my case, due to my upbringing, cotton — waited for me) 
• disrupting my thoughts with breath* 
• getting right with taking naps (and understanding just exactly how complicated sleep is — for example, we’re the only animals on the planet who force ourselves to get all of our sleep in one fell swoop) 
• active journaling 
• anything & everything by Tara Brach, who combines psychology with mindfulness better than most anyone I’ve seen (and whose voice sounds exactly like my therapist’s, which is comforting to me)

It’s true that your brain cannot be reprogrammed in a month. However, I just went to the same, massive writing conference I go to every year—I just returned last night. It’s 15,000 people who all extrude their loneliness and observative introversion and careful natures and breakup baggage and book deals into the bowels of convention centers at rotating cities every year. It’s a conference I need to go to for my career, and in the past it has filled me with all of the aforementioned toxins, but has also been a beautiful, overwhelming mix of seeing massive amounts of people I love all crammed into bars and coffee shops and libraries and public halls to hear just a few lines of their favorite authors. To click their tongues and shake their heads and say “damn”.

Going this year endowed with the ability to disrupt my body’s anxiety response with breath was life-saving. I felt like I imagine Kevin does in Home Alone, when he seeing the glowing red face of the furnace in the basement and yells I’M NOT AFRAID OF YOU ANYMORE!

It didn’t hurt that Portland was falling all over itself in magnolias, and the sun shone for three days straight at 70 degrees, that I had champagne in the sun with friends, that I got a few freckles and got my cheeks kissed by beloveds, that I overheard two young poets I’d never met before talking about my book in glowing ways, without knowing I could hear them. It didn’t hurt that I came home laden with books that I immediately dove into, and that this week, though it’s raining, I have Spring Break and I am only one day in and have felt so inspired that I’ve already written four new poems.

It doesn’t hurt that my life has been here, beautiful and shining, the whole time. When I need reminding, I can just follow the sound of the bell, leaving the bell.

I love you,
July

At the bottom of my Wikipedia page is a tag that identifies me as an “American women novelist.” If I were a man, the tag would read “American male novelist.” My gender should have nothing to do with my career, and yet there it sits, tied to my profession, as if the male novelists and I work in inherently different fields.

But one could easily make a cynical argument that we do.

Studies have shown women’s books are priced lower than men’s, women’s fiction is reviewed less often, and published less frequently in literary journals. Even books about women are less likely to win prizes than ones about men. The fields that men and women run through are different indeed: one of them has a lot more rough spots and potholes.

Over the past few months, as I’ve been looking at large text corpora, I often found myself thinking about gender inequality in the writing world. I wanted to collect banned books by men and women for a machine learning project (I planned to train two text-generating models on the different corpora and place them in conversation), but while banned texts by men are fairly easy to find in the public domain, banned texts by women proved much harder to come by.

As I searched for banned texts on Project Gutenberg, which hosts over 58,000 texts that can be downloaded free of charge, I began to wonder how many of the books—banned or not—were by women. One estimate came from Wikidata, where information found on Wikipedia pages—such as a person’s name, gender, or occupation—is stored in a way that’s machine readable. I found about twelve thousand people (writers, editors, illustrators, translators) who contributed to the corpus.

In this subset, men outnumber women by over 5 to 1. Although gender is not binary, I look at the number of men and women because this is the information available, or estimable, using name-based gender prediction tools.

I’d come to Project Gutenberg to find banned books for my bots, but I started to wonder what they would learn about writing if they were trained on this entire corpus. I have read a number of studies that identify patterns in language that are associated with one gender or another.

Researchers from Aalto and Helsinki Universities compared fiction by men and women in the British National Corpus and found that men use first-person plural (we, us) while women use second-person (you and your) more frequently. Men overuse certain nouns (e.g., ‘man’), women certain verbs (e.g., ‘thought’) and intensifiers (e.g., ‘much’ or ‘very’). The researchers note that such differences might be due to the gender of the intended audience, not the author, but this distinction quickly becomes murky.

What makes a book appropriate for one gender or another? When only the girls were invited to author Shannon Hale’s presentation—a teacher later told Hale, “the administration only gave permission to the middle-school girls to leave class for your assembly”, she noted:

“I talk about books and writing, reading, rejections and moving through them, how to come up with story ideas. But because I’m a woman, because some of my books have pictures of girls on the cover, because some of my books have ‘princess’ in the title, I’m stamped as ‘for girls only.’ However, the male writers who have boys on their covers speak to the entire school.”

If the language we use reflects what is expected of us—or if women’s books are only expected to be read by women—the fact that certain words are more commonly used by one gender or another strikes me as a symptom of systemic bias.

Like when I ran several of the essays I’ve written about technology through two different gender prediction systems and was identified as male by both. I suspect there is an imbalance in the training corpus and that I was called a man because the system had learned from the work it knew that men use words and phrases like “machine learning” and “biased data.”

What makes a book *appropriate* for one gender or another?
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I found over two million words of what I called “banned man” literature just by following the links from a single list of banned books. After poking around for a few hours, I collected around 800,000 words of banned woman literature from the public domain. I’d wanted at least a million words for each bot. I decided to revise my original machine learning plan and look at contemporary work instead.

I turned to Smashwords, where some books are sold and others may be freely downloaded, depending on the author’s wishes. On this site, the gender-related glut and shortages were opposite the ones I encountered on Project Gutenberg. I noticed far more women than men offering their one-hundred-thousand-word novels for free.

At this point, however, my interest in gender and language had eclipsed my interest in bot chatter. I was reading papers about statistical tests to determine which differences in word usage are significant and wondering things like how I could get my hands on a really big corpus. This is how I came across the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words from 220,225 texts collected between the years of 1990 and 2017.

I found this corpus dazzling, not just because I discovered my own work in it, but because when I opened the list of included writers and began to scroll through the names of fiction authors (who represent just a subset of the work), I was struck—in a positive way. Was the corpus as gender balanced as it appeared? I wrote to Professor Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, who maintains the corpus, and asked.

“Actually, the ‘balance’ just refers to the overall balance between the ‘macro-genres’ (spoken, fiction, etc) in COCA. As far as gender balance in fiction, I’ve never really designed the corpus to do that,” he said. He pointed me to the work of Doug Biber and Jesse Egbert, who have written about how to make a corpus representative—which is not a simple matter.

I appreciated Professor Davies’s candor, but was left with my question and a long list of fiction authors. I ran the first names through a gender predictor and the estimated ratio of women to men was fairly even. Men contribute more science fiction, women more of what is labelled as “juvenile work.” But I was frustrated by the uncertainty of the estimates.

The names are not always parsed correctly, the prediction just a guess, and I couldn’t see the women working under men’s names—people like George Madden Martin, Max du Veuzit, Lucas Malet, and Henry Handel Richardson, to name just a few. The irony that women, writing under men’s name to be heard, can so easily escape a search for female writers made me melancholy. I wanted to know who was in this corpus. I decided to try matching the names to biographical records in Wikidata again.

Using Wikidata via a tool called OpenRefine I could match just under half of the subset of five thousand names I tried. Not all of the names matched the correct person. For example, Elizabeth Evans—who is the author of six books and the recipient of an NEA fellowship—does not have a Wikipedia page, but she was matched to another person with the same name. As I was interested only in gender, I accepted this match—it seemed reasonably likely that the gender would be correct. Of the matched names, forty percent belonged to women.

I abandoned this line of inquiry, but I was left with my questions: Who is included in our corpora? Who is not? Whose voice am I hearing? What story does it tell? For the English Wikipedia, according to the estimates I’ve seen, over 80% of the contributors are male. The story there—our history—is disproportionately about men, and the biographies of men outnumber those of women significantly (the latest estimate I’ve seen shows just under 18% of the biographies are of women). I suspect the 40/60 imbalance in my COCA gender estimate belongs more to Wikipedia than COCA, but I know nothing more than that I observed it.

In the case of Project Gutenberg, the work is primarily by male authors and any patterns in the language that belong to men are magnified by this imbalance. If male authors use the word “man” more often than female authors do—as the researchers noted in their study of the British National Corpus—having five times more male than female authors gives that word an even greater prominence.

For the English Wikipedia, over 80% of the contributors are male.
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I think about how imbalances in our corpora magnify bias, not just in subject matter (stories about male characters or biographies of men), but in the words we see and choose. The technologies we are using to generate text—from auto-replies to articles—are learning the patterns in the set of texts we give them. And these technologies, in turn, are not only writing for all of us, but imposing the patterns they’ve learned. Not all people who write (or read) about technology are men, but the story the artificial intelligence knows, based on the words and the associations made from its training corpus, says otherwise.

I would love if my gender weren’t tied to my work, or diagnosed and misdiagnosed by technologies that reflect the biases I work against every day. I am a woman. I am a writer. The 1500 words I’ve written here won’t swing the gender balance in any large corpus, but I’m putting them out into the world, and I hope they will be counted.

Helen Palmer Geisel was attending a dinner party hosted by the Johnstons. As the host hugged her, she turned to him and exclaimed, “You don’t know how I needed that!”.

He had suspected her remark was in relation to the increased workload at Beginner Books, a publishing company that she co-founded with her husband, Ted Geisel. Or perhaps, he wondered, there was a more sinister reason. Perhaps her remark was a cry for help, a sign of her increasing loneliness and unhappiness after an almost 40-year marriage that was bound by obligation, rather than love.

Two days later, the Geisels’ longtime housekeeper stumbled upon Helen’s dead body in the bedroom of their La Jolla residence.

A prescription bottle that originally contained one thousand capsules, was now filled with just seven hundred and six. A letter, directed to her husband, was found near her lifeless body. “I didn’t know whether to kill myself, burn the house down, or just go away and get lost,” it read. The morning after, members of their inner circle gathered around the house to comfort the new widower.

Their neighbor and friend, Audrey Stone Dimond, had placed herself in front of the window at the Geisels’ ocean-front property and affixed her gaze into the blurred horizon—perhaps ridden with guilt that their affair, not yet exposed—had contributed to Helen’s untimely demise. Or perhaps she was anticipating the agony that would accompany the accusations of moral corruption that were sure to follow; despite everything, she still loved the man and wanted to be with him.

In less than a year, Dimond divorced her husband, sent her children away to boarding school, and did indeed fulfill her utmost desire—Ted Geisel and Audrey Dimond were married.

The suicide letter that Helen wrote for Ted had been signed off with their secret code. A make-believe law firm named “Grimalkin, Drouberhannus, Knalbner, and Fepp.” If such a playful and rhythmic bouncing of words sounds familiar, it’s most likely childhood nostalgia resurfacing. Helen was the uncredited and largely unknown writer responsible for nurturing the creation of one of the most influential authors and artists of the 20th century.

To the world, he’s an American icon, but to countless children all over the world, he’s better known simply as “Dr. Seuss.”

A published author herself, she was once widely regarded as his “chief editor, chief critic, business manager and wife.” For interviewers who had an exclusive with Dr. Seuss, their go-to question is why a famous (and married) children’s book author doesn’t have any of his own.

“You have ‘em, I’ll amuse ‘em,” he quipped in interviews with The New Yorker and Los Angeles Times—an understandably evasive answer to a perhaps overly personal question.

But behind closed doors, in particular in a conversation he had with his niece, Margaretha “Peggy” Dahmen Owens, he dropped the decades-long façade and revealed, “It was not that we didn’t want to have children. That wasn’t it.” In The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, the entire book was dedicated to a seven-and-a-half year-old named Chrysanthemum-Pearl.

In an interview with Robert Cahn for The Saturday Evening Post, Ted explained he created an imaginary daughter as a comfort to his wife. This came in particularly handy for after-dinner conversations at their house, when the guests commenced their braggart statements pertaining to their offspring or grandchildren. He would proudly declare that Chrysanthemum-Pearl could “whip up the most delicious oyster stew with chocolate frosting and flaming Roman candles!” and “carry one thousand stitches on one needle while making long red underdrawers for her Uncle Terwilliger!”

For years the name of Chrysanthemum-Pearl had appeared on the Geisel Christmas cards, but then so had Norval, Wally, Wickersham, Thnud and a dozen other fictional infant-like characters. In a conversation between close family members, it was revealed that in the fourth year of their marriage, Helen had been hospitalized in New York due to worsening abdominal pain. The doctors couldn’t diagnose the underlying cause and thus made the swift decision to remove her ovaries, rendering her incapable of ever having her own children; she was thirty-three years old.

Peggy Owen’s son—named Ted after her famous uncle—recently shared his mother’s favorite photograph of Helen with me. Her deep chestnut brown hair is delicately curled in bunches, bordering her warm, softly featured canvas. Her pale blue eyes offer an agreeable gaze, flanked by an authentic, radiant, all-teeth-showing smile—the sweetness intensified by the red hue of her lipstick. To say that Helen was like a mother to Peggy is an understatement.

Peggy’s own biological mother had died when she was only seventeen years old, and the Geisels had welcomed her into their home when she first moved to California. Two years before Helen’s death, Dr. Seuss had dedicated the book, I Had Trouble Getting To Solla Sollew, to her with the inscription, “For Margaretha Dahmen Owens, with love and thanks,” as a token of appreciation for her staying with them while his wife was ill. Helen had struggled for more than a decade with partial paralysis fromGuillain-Barre syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder where the immune system attacks your healthy cells, which leads to weakness, numbness and tingling.

Two years before Helen’s death, he wrote Peggy, “. . . Yesterday Helen was pretty depressed, but today she’s got her sense of humor back. Besides two baths, she today started Occupational Therapy . . .  starting with lessons on how to dial telephones, unbutton buttons, brush teeth, comb hair, and a first stab at writing.” He solemnly continued,

“Helen sends her love and wants to thank Al for loaning you to us. And so do I. I don’t know how I would have got thru the past two weeks without you. And I can think of no one I have ever met that I would rather have been with during this period. You really took care of everything (including my spirits) . . . and when you left, you left me better organized than I have been since the Spanish American War. Someday I’ll do something for you.”

Before her health had deteriorated, Helen was a talented writer and businesswoman. She graduated from Wellesley College with honors in 1920 and thrived in an environment where the curriculum was focused on languages, literature, and even economics. After graduation, she enrolled in Oxford University, an institution that awarded women degrees for the first time only four years prior to her arrival. Unbeknownst to either of them, Ted Geisel was to also attend Oxford after he graduated from Dartmouth.

In 1925, a young American girl sitting behind a doodling Ted peered over his shoulder and was surprised to see how little he was paying attention to the professor. After being in several lectures with this student, she concluded that he always just seemed to be immersed in his own little world.

A year earlier, she had arrived at Oxford with her widowed mother. Standing at five foot three inches, Helen Marion Palmer, Ted recalls Helen possessing a “certain grace” that was distinctly unique to the other women at Oxford. One day, as she watched Ted illustrate John Milton’s Paradise Lost, she insisted he was on the wrong career path. “What you really want to do is draw”, she said. Her judgment solidified by glancing at another one of his pages, “That’s a very fine flying cow!” University of Cincinnati graduate, Joseph Sagmaster, was also attending Oxford and had introduced the pair having known the both of them personally.

Years later, Ted Geisel would dedicate the book Yertle the Tertle to his friend; legend goes that this honor was perhaps bestowed upon Sagmaster because he introduced Geisel to Helen back at Oxford. Sagmaster himself said this was, “the happiest inspiration that he had ever had.” Their swift romance had all the trappings of Ted’s impulsive nature, with a sharp dash reminiscent of an old Hollywood film. After racing back to Oxford before curfew, Ted proposed to Helen in a roadside ditch after he had taken too wide of a turn on their two-horsepower motorcycle and had accidentally toppled them over.

“So, we became engaged,” Ted said, but for a time it was their secret. Geisel granted his first Saturday Evening Post interview with Robert Cahn, revealing why he became Dr. Seuss, the simple reason he draws the way he does, and the undeniable effect his wife, Helen, has had on his career. Two years ago, a republished article from 1957 had appeared, in which Cahn wrote how the famous author “depends at all times on the level headedness of his wife, Helen” to pull him out of predicaments where his impulse has inevitably led him. Separately, Ted’s sister Marnie had always talked of how Helen had been “a great help to him in his work”.

Around the beginning of 1957, Ted had trouble finishing his Christmas-themed book.

The whimsical tale had featured the “bad old Grinch” who “would try to stop Christmas from coming to Who-Ville.”

In a bid to protest commercialization, the Grinch plotted the sinister mission in destroying any gifts, ornaments, trees and fixings that the Whos had planned for their beloved annual holiday. Then arrived the stumbling block. He wondered how he could wrap it up without injecting a pathetically sentimental ending.

“Helen, Helen, where are you?” shouted Ted from his secluded den into the living room. He planted a sketch and a verse into her lap and continued, “How do you like this?” She shook her head and he was distraught. “This isn’t it. And besides, you’ve got the Papa Who too big. Now he looks like a bug.” Ted rebutted, “Well, they are bugs” to which Helen added, “They are not bugs. Those Whos are just small people.”

Later that fall, How The Grinch Stole Christmas was published.

Seventeen years earlier, he had struggled with another book, Horton Hatches The Egg. At the time, the Geisels were living on Park Avenue in New York City. As Germany began to occupy France, progress on the book was immediately put on hold. Instead, Ted began sketching brutal images of Adolf Hitler, and the benign elephant affectionately named Horton, was momentarily consigned to oblivion. The sudden priority shift didn’t seem to bother Ted, who was quoted as saying, “I didn’t know how to end the book anyway, so I began drawing savage cartoons.” He continued, “I had no great causes or interest in social issues until Hitler.” The conception had originated from an earlier sketch that Geisel had drawn which superimposed an elephant over the branches of a small tree.

He then spent countless days trying to figure out how Horton could have entangled himself in such a way. At that point, Helen swooped in with her creative wit and began brainstorming ways to bring Horton down. In Ted’s words, her pivotal contribution was in the climactic lines that follow the hatching of the egg on which Horton sat on for 51 weeks. Then, suddenly, in an epiphany-like state, Helen and Ted cheered, and cheered and cheered some more.

“My goodness! My gracious!” they shouted. “MY WORD! It’s something brand new! IT’S AN ELEPHANT-BIRD!” Ted claimed his wife is a fiend for a story line and that every idea and every line is worked and reworked until the two of them are happy, coiling into a tight bind their decades-long literary partnership and elevating her contribution as being paramount to everything he’d ever published at that point (14 books in total, including, And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, Thidwick The Big Hearted Moose, If I Ran The Zoo, Horton Hears A Who! and The Cat In The Hat). In 1959, Helen once told interviewer Peter Bunzel that “Ted doesn’t sit down and write for children. He writes to amuse himself. Luckily what amuses him also amuses them.”

Her husband agreed and also remarked at his own disbelief surrounding the conclusion, especially considering the absence of forethought during the writing process. “Ninety percent of failures in children’s books come from writing to preconceptions of what kids like. When I’m writing a book, I do it to please Helen and me. But when it finally comes out, I take one look and think, ‘Oh, my God!’” As with most successful writers, Ted was eventually approached by Hollywood. For first-time screenwriters Helen and Ted Geisel, their synergistic collaboration had materialized into an original screenplay titled Design for Death, which chronicled the events leading to Pearl Harbor. It went on to win the 1947 Academy Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary.

However, despite their well-deserved high-caliber Hollywood accolade that many spend years trying to obtain, they were driven away by “disillusionment with the film industry” and instead proceeded to make The Tower in La Jolla their permanent home.

The Cat In The Hat was published through the company they co-founded with Phyllis Cerf at Beginner Books (an imprint of Random House). Helen had, perhaps in an act of defiant independence, used her maiden name to publish numerous titles under the Beginner Book banner over the years, including A Fish Out Of Water, I Was Kissed By A Seal At the Zoo, Do You Know What I’m Going To Do Next Saturday? and Why I Built The Boogle House.

During her tenure, she had displayed her natural business acumen by heading up as Vice President at Beginner Books until her sudden death in 1967. Harry Crosby is a 96-year-old award-winning author, historian, and La Jolla resident whose parents knew the Geisels. In addition, he had spent some time on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego with Helen. “She was a wonderful woman,” he told me. “I mean, really, she was very intelligent, and she was very generous and polite.”

In the background of the phone call, Harry’s wife can be heard nudging him to add that there has been, “nothing written to show how important she had been in getting her husband into all of those positions and getting his stuff accepted.” He continued, “he became as well-known as he was, certainly in large part, because of her assistance.”

“Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don’t know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, ‘failure, failure, failure…’ I love you so much…I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you . . . My going will leave quite a rumor, but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed . . . Sometimes, think of the fun we had all thru the years . . . “

Her unconditional love and devotion to her husband was palpably apparent in her written suggestion to falsify reasons behind her death. Her concern—even at the edge of suicide—was to protect his wholesome image to friends, family, and most importantly, the millions of readers all over the world who have come to know and love the paradoxically elusive and magnetic Dr. Seuss. Most newspaper clippings from the date of her death chose to omit the details surrounding her suicide—The New York Times, from an article dating October 24, 1967, noted that “she died in her sleep.” It wasn’t until years later that the truth surrounding the circumstances surfaced and family members—including Ted’s former mistress and second wife Audrey Geisel—began to confirm it. Carol Olten, historian at the La Jolla Historic Society remarked to me, “suicide was a taboo subject back then.”

Nowadays, when accomplished authors, fashion designers, artists or other public figures exit the world through an act of suicide, their namesake artifacts inherently carry a heavier weight of fleeting significance, arguably even more so than when they had been alive. The day after Alexander McQueen’s death, retailers reported a 1400% increase in sales. Similarly, sales had increased by 600% the day after Kate Spade’s suicide was announced. In an over-simplified and economic sense, it’s a practical display of supply and demand. Years after Sylvia Plath’s death, scholars are still dedicating themselves to her work in order to dissect and apply speculative theories on the beloved author. In 2013, The Smithsonian reported, “…cultural fascination with her continues to burn brightly despite—or perhaps because of—her premature departure from this world.”

Perhaps the posthumous and rapid consumption of these works represents a greater human condition: that we, despite modern society favoring atomization and individualization, have an embedded desire to commemorate a person or a group of people who symbolizes a positive impact on the wider community, expressed through groundbreaking contributions in the arts, humanities or sciences. Conversely, it can be safely said that most, if not all humans, have an intent to leave a similar mark when our inevitable mortality arrives.

When I asked a long-time La Jolla resident and bookstore owner, Laurence McGilvery, on whether or not he had any memories of Helen Palmer Geisel, he told me over the phone that she had the most “seductive gaze he’d ever encountered.” The comment caught me off guard and I was confused—the description he gave was inconsistent to other accounts I had stumbled upon at that point. I asked him if I could continue this conversation over e-mail considering my Australian accent can be a little incoherent at times. Over e-mail, he quickly corrected himself, “The first Mrs. Geisel! I was remembering the second. It was Audrey who looked up at me on our first and only meeting with the most seductive gaze I ever had encountered.”

He doesn’t recall ever meeting Helen, although her husband, Ted, frequently visited his bookstore. Thirty years after Helen’s death, Audrey Geisel (who has recently passed away) had given University of San Diego, California a multi-million-dollar donation that assisted in the library’s extensive renovations. As a token of their appreciation, the library—easily one of the most recognizable buildings in San Diego thanks in part to its unique Brutalist architectural design—was renamed after her and her second husband, Ted Geisel. With an additional lump sum gift in 2015 came a new café inside the library named, “Audrey’s.”

Five miles south, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, lies a small library embedded in its white-walled corridors and in plain black text it reads, “Helen Palmer Geisel Library.” Much like her own demeanor, the space is unassuming, subdued and notably humble. A lack of online search results questioned its existence, but the Communications and Marketing Manager at the Museum had affirmed that there was indeed a small library dedicated to her. No other information could be found pertaining to the library’s namesake. Helen’s work and her contributions to the creation of Dr. Seuss couldn’t be efficiently exploited through marketing campaigns after her death.

Not only was Helen’s death swept under the rug, but that feat could have only been made possible if she publicly claimed title to his revolutionary success, which she never did. Years earlier, with a keen observation over a young Ted Geisel, she nurtured and fostered a man with an undeniable talent that was yet unbeknownst to anyone else but her.

When evidence of his potential came to light to the young married couple, she had effectively made her life legacy about choice, sacrifice and unconditional love. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the choice to stand by her husband’s career and fade into the background was not an easy one.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises has been successfully running their multi-million-dollar global portfolio almost 30 years after the beloved author’s death, thanks in part to his second wife, Audrey Geisel, who passed away this year. She was known for her stringent control of licensing partnerships and fierce protection over their intellectual property. Her unrelenting clutch of some of Ted and Helen’s work—coupled with expertly tailored marketing and public relation campaigns—assisted in a generally accepted wholesome and sunny legacy of the famous children’s book author. It’s only in recent years that his sordid minstrel past has unsurfaced and Geisel’s work has come under fire for racist cartoon depictions.

But even with his arguably sordid personal life and problematic societal stances, his legend and life remain largely unsullied and the Dr. Seuss juggernaut rolls along, celebrated year after year, bookshelf by bookshelf. And that’s in no small part to the sacrifices of Helen Palmer Geisel; her contributions have affected the lives of millions of people all over the world, and have sprawled across three generations.

Their niece, Peggy, called her death “her last and greatest gift to him.”

In just two days, our societal spotlight will turn to the Dolby Theater for the 91st Academy Awards. Silver-screen celebrities, filmmakers, and every “industry peon” in between will don their designed-to-be-noticed garb and take to the crimson carpet to celebrate another year of filmmaking.

And while the Oscars are an undeniably pivotal moment in movie history every year, this year’s Academy Awards fails—again—to recognize the contributions of women for Best Director and other major categories. While many critics of the Awards wish to criticize the Oscars as culturally irrelevant, outdated, and plagued by insularity and elitism (not to mention plummeting viewership), nominations and wins have repercussions far beyond the glittering lights of the ceremony or the feverish clutching of a glinting gold statue.

Previously little-known directors find their names vaulted into a national discourse with nods from the Academy Awards; the historic and systematic exclusion of women from these nominations hobble the careers of women directors.

This year’s Academy Awards fails—again—to recognize the contributions of women for Best Director and other major categories.
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There are myriad examples of male white directors’ careers experiencing an adrenaline rush after their success in securing an Oscar nomination. Sam Mendes’ first film American Beauty (1999) won him Best Director and resulted in a series of major films including Road to Perdition (2002) and several James Bond movies.

Oliver Stone had directed movies with middling box office and critical success until he won Best Director for Platoon (1986) which launched him into the big leagues. In another instance, after getting several Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay for Memento (2000), Christopher Nolan went on to direct several other blockbuster and critically-acclaimed movies like the recent Batman trilogy, Inception (2010), and last year’s Best Picture nominee Dunkirk.

After being nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015, Damien Chazelle became a media darling and soon saw a Best Director win for La La Land; his star has definitely risen, directing the well-received First Man (2018).

In terms of good old-fashioned capitalism, Oscar nominations have a huge impact on the box office returns of movies as well. In a 2011 study of films between 2006 and 2010, IBIS—a major market research firm—found that best-picture-winning movies receive an average of $20.3 million after being nominated and another $14 million after winning. Also in 2011, Box Office Quant found that a Best Director win bumps up the movie by an additional $10 million.

While further studies about the recent financial impact of Oscar nominations seems long overdue, these studies suggest that Oscar nominations (and wins) have a salient impact on the bottomline and the future viability of filmmakers’ future projects. Cash is king; hose bumps in dollars and critical recognition open up innumerable doors.

In terms of good old-fashioned capitalism, Oscar nominations have a huge impact on the box office returns of movies as well.
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When we look at the other half of the population however? The numbers are dire. No women—none—were nominated for best director this year. In fact, in the 91 years of Oscar nominations, only five women have been nominated, and two were in the last ten years. That’s approximately 1% of all the Best Director nominations in the history of the Oscars.

Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to have won the award, and it’s no accident that her 2009 film, The Hurt Locker, focused entirely on the lives of men at war. Greta Gerwig made Oscar history in 2018 by being the fifth woman nominated, but only six women total won any awards in 2018; two were in categories of Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. Women’s Media Center found that 2019 saw 75% of all behind-the-scenes nominees were men. The only category where women have fared worse is Cinematography, where Rachel Morrison alone has been nominated, for Mudbound in 2018.

Women have received just 1% of all the Best Director nominations in the history of the Oscars.
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And despite what the industry sputters and pontificates, it’s not for a lack of movies led by women directors. FF2, a media organization led by Jan Lisa Huttner, which has been tracking and publishing about the problem for years, notes that 2018 saw 260 movies written and/or directed by women. Many were lauded by critics with almost perfect Rotten Tomato scores. Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace received a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and has been nominated for several awards including Independent Spirit Awards, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and others. It won two awards from the National Board of Review in 2019, but was completely shut out of the Oscars.

Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? also did very well critically, winning the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actor, among other awards and nominations. The film did pick up two acting Oscar nominations, including Best Actress for Melissa McCarthy, as well as best adapted screenplay. Chloe Zhao’s The Rider topped many critic’s top ten lists for 2018 including the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and others. For these three films, the Oscar campaign efforts ranged from a little for the indie The Rider and a lot for Can You Ever Forgive Me?  

Female directors have missed out on 91 years of Oscar nominations offering similar accelerants to their careers. Courtney Hunt directed Frozen River (2008)—which won many accolades including AFI Movie of the Year (2009)—and received two Oscar Nominations, but she didn’t direct her next major motion picture film until 2016 with the poorly received The Whole Truth.

Cash is king; hose bumps in dollars and critical recognition open up innumerable doors.
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Lisa Cholodenko’s film The Kids Are All Right (2010) won several awards—including Golden Globes’ Best Motion Picture for Comedy or Musical—but has not directed a major film until the forthcoming Toni Erdmann. More recently, Patty Jenkins directed Monster (2003) that garnered a Best Actress Award for Charlize Theron, but she did not have another major motion picture release until Wonder Woman in 2017.

Dr. Martha M. Laurzen of Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film points out:

“Being excluded from the race to be crowned king—or queen—of Hollywood directors has short- and long-term consequences. The first, and most obvious, is that these filmmakers miss out on the avalanche of publicity in the run-up to, and following, the Oscars.”

And this publicity can aid them in securing their next film.

In 2015, Dr. Darnell Hunt, the director of the Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, noted, “The Oscars set a standard. The Academy establishes benchmarks… An Oscar win increases likelihood for more alternative points of view, if they’re being rewarded.” And of course, this cycle is perpetuated itself when women and minorities are left out.

In the Women Media Center’s annual report, Jane Fonda, a co-founder, said, “A nomination for an Academy Award can open doors. With three out of every four non-acting nominations going to men, women, again, are missing that stamp of approval.” Not only were women not nominated for Best Director in this Oscar nominations round, WMC notes, women were not nominated for cinematography, editing, visual effects, or original score.

There’s been a lot of discussion about supporting the diverse voices in filmmaking but it seems to be just that—discussion. Institutions are not providing the resources—funds for filming, critical recognition, advertising dollars—to help non-white male voices find success on a national or even international scale. The Academy claimed to diversify its membership as a way to expand the nominations, but these efforts seem insufficient to garner real change.

Only five women have been nominated for Best Director in the history of the Oscars and two were in the last ten years.
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Part of the problem lays in the embedded structure of film criticism in the U.S. In a 2018 Thumbs Down report by Martha Lauzen, she found disproportionate numbers of male critics compared to their female critics: “Men comprise 68% and women 32% of all film reviewers.”

Moreover, the study found that women reviewers were more likely to review films with female protagonists than men: “51% of the reviews written by women but 37% of the reviews written by men are about films featuring at least one female protagonist.” However, Lauzen noted that: “63% of the reviews written by men, but 49% of those written by women are about films with male protagonists.”  

This skewed coverage and implicit bias impacts the movies getting pushed out to the award associations and the folks clamoring to the theaters—and the great wheel keeps spinning around itself. This broken system resides in a profound catch-22 wherein the industry desperate needs stories from and by more diverse communities, but the industry doesn’t reward these stories with awards, publicity or money, which in turn makes it more difficult to make them, so those same diverse voices shy away from trying to produce those films.

And of course, numbers for minority women are even more miserable—there are a host of more-than-worthy female directors of color—including Ava DuVernay for Selma (2014) and hard-hitting documentary 13th (2016), and Dee Rees for Mudbound (2018)—who have not been nominated. Of the meager five Best Director nominations for women, none were women of color.

Other major categories also boast dismal stats for WOC; per WMC, Hannah Beachler is the first African American woman to be nominated for Production Design for her work in Black Panther. In fact, April Reign, now activist and former lawyer, started the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite in 2015 in reaction to the paltry nominations for minorities of color. Spike Lee credits her for his Best Director nomination.

Of the meager five Best Director nominations for women, none were women of color.
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Amid the sea of these disturbing stats, there are some small glimmers in the Oscar pool will be more equitable. Notably, minorities found success in recent Oscar nominations including Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther for Best Picture and Spike Lee’s nomination for best director for BlacKkKlansman. Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro won for best director and film last year for The Shape of Water. Perhaps this year will pave the way to more promising wins and more equitable award nominations; after all, despite the controversy of the Oscars, it’s still a hell of an accolade.  

To borrow a line from The Maltese Falcon, Cinema is “the stuff that dreams are made of.” Let’s make that true for all people.

Last June, shortly after associate justice Anthony Kennedy announced he’d be retiring from the Supreme Court, Minneapolis-based writer and activist Robin Marty started a thread of tweets about abortion. “FACT: There is absolutely no way that the next Trump appointee won’t vote to overturn Roe,” she tweeted. “That’s inevitable. Work from that assumption.” The thread picked up enough likes and retweets to catch the eye of an editor at the Huffington Post, who asked her to compile her thoughts into a post for the site. After her article went live, it received over 30,000 shares. Things snowballed from there and Marty found herself with a book deal for a one-of-a-kind guidebook on abortion that she’s completed and released just in time for the 46th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, January 22nd.

In a Handbook For A Post-Roe America Marty leans on her decade of experience as a journalist covering reproductive justice—she is a SheSource expert on reproductive rights at the Women’s Media Center and spent five years as a senior political reporter at reproductive justice site Rewire News—to explain the ins and outs of the fight for reproductive freedom in America.

Abortion access in America is dwindling; there are already seven states with only one abortion provider left. “This isn’t a crisis the Trump administration caused,” Marty explains in the book. “This is only a crisis that Trump has brought to the main stage.” Through consultation with abortion providers, lawyers, cybersecurity professionals, and reproductive justice advocates, she has assembled a practical action plan for readers that explains why you should quiz your doctor, how to take advantage of existing abortion care networks, why you should be mindful of the electronic trail you’re leaving, and other invaluable lessons that will help you obtain the abortion care you need.

Last month I spoke to Marty about her new book, and about why we should be worried regardless of whether or not Roe v. Wade is actually overturned.

The book reads like a survivalist guide for an impending emergency.

One of the things that I said when I pitched it originally was that I wanted it to be the anarchists handbook of abortion. What if I want to do menstrual extraction? What if I want to try to do my own abortion with pills? What if I want to go sneak cytotec across a country line and through a checkpoint? I wanted all of that information to be available just because people are going to look for it anyway. At the very least in this way it’s all in one place, and it’s all easily accessible for everybody. In certain cases there’s also caveats to let people know that there are people who have died from using parsley to try and end a pregnancy, or there are people who have been arrested because they tried to induce their own abortions, so all of those concerns can be addressed as well.

What is it about the current climate that made you feel like we had finally reached a tipping point where abortion rights are concerned?

Oh, well, to be fair, I think that we reached that tipping point a long time ago. What’s happened now is that we’ve reached a point where the general public has noticed it. The general public is actually in the place where activists have been for years. We have reproductive justice groups that are run by people of color and women of color that have been fighting this for decades already. It’s just that with Trump getting elected and with this last Supreme Court justice coming on and making it almost certain that Roe v. Wade could be overturned, all of the privileged people who have never really had to think about how this might affect them realize now, we might be in trouble because it might be my abortion that is on the line.

A 2017 study conducted by researchers from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco found that “there appears to be more online searches for abortion in states with more restrictive abortion laws.” Can you explain your concerns about the significance of surveillance in a post-Roe America?

I think that it is something that we really have to watch out for. A really great example is in Indiana in 2015—I think it was when Purvi Patel was charged with inducing her own miscarriage. She was charged with murder and one of the things they used against her was the fact that they looked at her phone records and saw that she’d said that she was not happy about being pregnant. She said that she had researched things online. They used that and the fact that when she showed up at the hospital she appeared to not care enough about the fact that she had gone into labor as signs saying that she must’ve decided that she was definitely going to try and procure an abortion on her own. So, we have to be especially careful with what sort of research we do online, what sort of things we say over the telephone. Are our telephone systems secure? Are we using encrypted messaging to talk to each other? Are you clearing your cache when you go to look up abortion information?

All of the privileged people who have never really had to think about how this might affect them realize now we might be in trouble — now it might be *my* abortion that's on the line.
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I like the “When in doubt, print it out” motto you have at the end of the book.

Yeah, I firmly believe in that. I have an entire cabinet full of all sorts of information because I never know when it might disappear. It’s really important especially if you look at the beginning of the Trump Administration. They were redefining the definition of ‘person,’ they were going through and removing all of the language around trans rights, all these different things that they just kind of wiped clean and now there’s no backup of any of it.

You worked as a political reporter before going freelance as a writer and activist. When and why did you make that jump?

I was working for Rewire and I spent a bunch of years there basically tracking state-based legislation. I think it just became time for me to go and move into freelance because I wanted to do more than just track state abortion laws. I got interested in what was going on in the anti-abortion movement so I started spending more time looking into what’s going on with their movement, their movement leaders, actually going to abortion clinics, and going to protests and really trying to leave the legal and legislation part behind and tell the story of the people who were being affected on both sides of the divide.

Are our telephone systems secure? Are we using encrypted messaging to talk to each other? Are you clearing your cache when you go to look up abortion information?
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Time magazine named “Guardians and the War On Truth” as person of the year for 2018. Given the state of media do you think journalists have a responsibility to also be activists?

That’s a good question and it’s complicated. I’ve watched journalism and activism go back and forth. My actual background is as an activist originally. I started out doing a project called the Center for Independent Media. Really for me, coming of age and becoming a journalist was always a form of its own activism.

All the people I interview who oppose abortion, they all know exactly where I stand. They are all completely aware that I’m a pro-choice activist and in some ways they appreciate that because they know that I can’t use a bias towards them. I have to report everything accurately because people are going to be looking for my biases. They already know where I am and so I in some ways have more of an obligation to make sure all of my reporting is the truth and is accurate and reflects exactly what happened because they’re expecting it not to be—they expect that activism to show up. So in some ways, by being an activist, it actually makes me a better journalist because people know that the writing that I do has to be verified and has to be true.

A positive by-product of the advice you provide on reproductive rights activism is that you provide a framework for what white allyship should look like when it comes to activism in general, especially when it comes to performing acts of civil disobedience. Why was it important to you to include this?

I think it’s really important right now, especially in Minneapolis we have a lot of racial injustice that’s happening primarily in our community around police activity. This is happening everywhere but in Minneapolis it’s really noticeable because we are predominantly white, and so with the Black Lives Matter movement happening out here it’s become very obvious that it’s the white allies who need to step up and who need to make this change, because we are not the ones who are being targeted by the police.

We are the ones who can use our privilege without having to worry about somebody shooting us or hurting us or murdering us because of our activism. That’s something that we need to bring to a national scale and I think that’s what a lot of people are doing, but we need to recognize that there’s two parts of white allyship right now that we can really focus on.

1. We have the ability to confront police without usually getting harmed, we usually have more financial means to be able to bail ourselves out of jail, to miss work, things like that.
2. We’re also the people least likely to be suspected of breaking laws if we’re trying to do something that is outside the legal bounds. (Plus, we have an obligation to because we have been getting so many advantages from the system of systemic racism as is.)

You facilitate workshops on reproductive justice activism in red and rural states where many of the U.S.’s “abortion deserts”—regions where a person would need to travel over 100 miles to receive abortion care—can be found. What’s that like?

So, I haven’t done that work as much anymore because in complete honesty there are so many other groups that can do it so much better than I can. People ask me to speak to my own experiences about talking to members of the anti-abortion movement and all of the stuff that I do talking with pro-life people.

One of the things I do talk about with red state people is the fact that there’s this consensus that when it comes to the idea of red states being pro-life that there’s not a lot of common ground we can work on, whereas I find that there is an intense amount of common ground we can work on—maternal mortality, working on more rights for women, more rights for people who want to try to continue pregnancies or support their families.

There’s this idea that pro-life and anti-abortion are the same thing whereas in a lot of cases people who say that they’re pro-life will find themselves agreeing in many circumstances with the decision to abort a pregnancy, it’s just they don’t like the idea of it being accessible and readily available. Anytime you give an example about a woman who is ready to finally go back to work and support her five children and then she finds out that she’s pregnant again they’ll often say well ok in that circumstance I agree with it. Often when you approach them with real life situations they will find that that’s that exception that they’re willing to say in this case it’s ok but overall they still stay that they’re pro-life and against abortion.

Being an activist actually makes me a better journalist because people know that the writing that I do has to be verified and has to be true.
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It sounds like just personalizing it for people is the key to changing their mind.

Basically. There’s this saying that abortion providers have when they talk about how people who oppose abortion come in and actually get abortions—which is a pretty common phenomenon—they say that there’s this belief in the three exceptions: rape, incest, and mine.

One of the most striking facts in the book was that there’s a lack of abortion training in places where you assume it’d be a given like OB-GYN training practices. According to a 2015 piece in The Atlantic this training problem extends to American medical schools too. Should we be worried about a decrease in the number of trained abortion providers in the coming years?

Definitely, and not just because of abortion itself. Obviously abortion is something that should be part of all medical training in general because it’s another part of controlling reproductive rights, but also because so many of the abortion procedures are used in either managing a miscarriage later on, or should a person need an abortion later to save her life, which is something that happens quite frequently. You don’t want to find yourself at an emergency room at a hospital and find out that there’s no provider inside that hospital who actually knows how to do the type of procedure that you need.

The abortion conversation tends to revolve around what’s happening at the federal level but in this book you make the case that our eyes should really be on local politicians.

I’ve been yelling that from the rooftop for years now. If you look at Guttenmacher and their studies about how I think there are nearly 300 [edit:288] different abortion bans that have passed since 2010, most of those passed between 2011-2013 and that was when we needed to pay attention. We kinda missed that boat. Now they’re coming back around again which is really frightening because a lot of these abortion laws that popped up in the first place—I talked about them a lot in my first book, Crow After Roe—that were meant to overturn Roe v. Wade, now these laws are coming back because they know that they have a different configuration on the Supreme Court.

Can you explain why city councils are, in your words, “abortion clinic gatekeepers”?

I think that in a lot of cases city councils have the biggest influence when it comes to the right to an abortion. A lot of times it’s because if you look at red and rural states they have a very anti-abortion legislature. They’ll do everything they can to make abortions hard to get, but the cities themselves are usually fairly progressive. In a lot of cases even if there’s multiple clinics in a state, there’s only one or two cities that actually have abortion clinics. So if you can be a gatekeeper that is on city council you can pass noise ordinances, make sure that building codes and variances are allowed that will keep these buildings open or allow new clinics to open within your cities — in that way you can gave a huge impact on the access your state has even though you’re just working on a city level.

There’s this belief in the three exceptions for pro-life abortions: rape, incest, and mine.
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St. Louis is a really good example of this because St. Louis is fairly progressive. Their city council tried to pass a general nondiscrimination act and one of the things they said was that you cannot be discriminated against because of race, gender, orientation, but also reproductive health care choices. The idea was that you could not fire somebody or refuse to hire them, or refuse to let them into a shelter, or refuse to give them services, based on the fact that they had had an abortion or worked for a place that offered abortions, worked for a place that offered birth control, that they were using birth control and they weren’t married, any of that.

That passed and I can’t remember—it was like the Catholic Council of something or other [edit: the Archdiocese of St.Louis]—challenged it because it said that it would force them to give up their religious beliefs. It was never about that. Missouri is obviously not—in any way shape or form—a progressive state, but the city was trying to take action to at least protect where they could and part of  it had to do with the abortion clinic because St. Louis has the only one in the state. So, work on your city. Use your city to try and keep abortion accessible, keep people from being attacked over their beliefs and over their sexual health care and basically hope you don’t get sued because man they sue a lot.

According to the polling numbers the majority of Americans don’t want the Roe v. Wade ruling overturned. Do you think that’s enough to keep Roe intact or is its overturn an inevitability?

I honestly don’t believe that Roe is going to be overturned. I think that on the Right it’s way too easy to organize, to get voters in, to do fundraising—all of their activism basically revolves around this idea of abortion being made illegal. If you make abortion illegal that would take so much momentum off the table for them for preparing for elections. I just can’t see that happening, it’s way too easy of a tool for them to use.

What I do see happening is the Supreme Court either choosing not to take up any abortion bills or deciding that as long as abortion is technically legal it doesn’t matter what kind of restrictions you pass on it. So, for instance, in Iowa—where the heartbeat ban is being debated again because it went up to the state supreme court—I could see the Supreme Court saying, ‘Ok we believe that you can pass a heartbeat ban because you are not technically making abortion illegal in your state.’ [edit: the Iowa fetal heartbeat abortion restriction was declared unconstitutional.] There’s still legal abortion even though it’s almost impossible to get one before six weeks.

If they do that, then all the states that want to can pass heartbeat bans, abortion is almost illegal in the state—it’s technically still legal—but Roe was never actually overturned. I see some scenario like that happening where maybe in Mississippi they will finally allow the admitting privileges law to go into effect—no doctors in Mississippi can get admitting privileges who are working at abortion clinics, the clinic closes down and ok, technically abortion is still legal in Mississippi, you just can’t get one anywhere in the state.

I see that sort of thing happening in all of these red states without Roe ever being overturned and then that way the Right still has the ability to politicize Roe and to do their activism around it, but they also get the added benefit of abortion being made inaccessible in a lot of states.

If you make abortion illegal that would take so much momentum off the table for the Right preparing for elections.
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And you think that loophole behavior of not overturning it but still creating a de facto ban is going to escalate in the next few years?

I would be highly surprised if we don’t have a state where abortion is either illegal after six weeks or there’s no clinic. Honestly, I think the first thing that’s going to happen is we’re going to have a clinic-free state within the next twelve months. If I were going to put money on it I’d say it’s Missouri.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

A middle-aged woman roamed the streets with a bag of colorful wax crayons. She stopped at public walls and gates, filling them with what seemed like incoherent sentences, insignificant dates, and fragments of a geography lesson. When the walls were painted to cover her marks, she returned. Scribbling, re-writing, and overwriting on them again and again.

This the story of Deepa Saxena, a former teacher who, for the past ten years, has been inscribing her words on the walls of Meerut; a small town in Northern India. When asked why she continued to do so, Saxena, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, told the Times Of India in 2014, “I write on the walls for I’ve no one to talk to, nobody wants to listen to my story. I need some way to express my thoughts, which is why I pen them down on the walls.”

A year later, Palak Mittal, a Delhi-based photographer, would decide to listen and tell this narrative of mental anguish through her haunting photo series —The Woman Who Conquered Town. Mital was visiting Meerut, her hometown, for the summer holidays when she first noticed  

Saxena’s writings on almost every street wall in the town’s cantonment area; at times as far as a 5km radius. She found it odd that nobody talked about these writings, and when she asked around the answer was curt if not unconvincing; it’s by the crazy lady in town.  

While the common consensus seemed that Saxena’s mental illness was a result of being abandoned by her husband, Mittal later found that she was never married. As Mittal sifted through urban legends and facts, some part of the truth began to reveal itself. “Her parents were very selfish and dependent on her. She never really invested in her own personal life. When everyone she knew went away or died she became lonely,” says 23-year-old Mittal, who was in touch with Saxena’s family friend. “Though I have never really spoken to her personally because  I don’t think it’s fair for me to bring back her trauma.” She prefers to refer to Saxena as ‘the lady.’

Mittal’s photo series is a heartbreaking revelation of apathy not only towards Saxena but to most people who seek mental health care in India. An estimated 150 million people across India — that is larger than the entire population of Japan— are in need of mental health care interventions, both short and long-term, according to India’s latest National Mental Health Survey 2015-16. The survey also found that, depending on the state, between 70% and 92% of those in need of mental health care failed to receive any treatment. Which further accounts for the reason why in India one student commits suicide every hour.

However, Mittal has stayed away from statistics in her work. “Mental health has always been something that has been going on in somebody’s head and you really cannot see it,” she says. “That is why I think photography is the best medium for this story. Here the suffering is tangible.”

I caught up with Mittal to chat about her experience of capturing these wounded walls of Meerut, the stories she uncovered through them and India’s relationship with mental health conversations.   

Payal Mohta: Did you find that that Saxena’s writings were able to tell her story?

Palak Mittal: The writings on the walls might seem hazy but if you study them closely they are very precise. They state clear bank details, dates and people’s names, in both English and Hindi. The lady is calling those people out who refused to help her and even financially cheated or deserted her. Another theme that recurs is of marriage and divorce. There is this one phrase that she wrote that keeps coming back to me —’Why Indian Girl Must Marry.’ It’s so relatable because women across different sections of Indian society find that marriage becomes more of a regulation that comes with age rather than choice.

What was the most challenging part of shooting the story?

The biggest challenge of this project was to be able to capture and allow the viewers to know the magnitude of it. The lady has written all over town, sometimes as much as through a 500 meter stretch of walls. To show this scale with my camera took a bit of strategizing. I finally decided to do a few panoramic photographs where a wider area can be captured in a single frame.

Did you find yourself drawn to any one particular wall?

Yes, I did. There are these set of walls belonging to a convent school around my home which has verses from the Bible inscribed on it. These phrases are written in English and then translated into Hindi. It is on these walls that the lady has written and rewritten. As a photographer, this was visually very interesting for me because it reflected an ironic juxtaposition; messages from God on selflessness and kindness existing with the lady’s unanswered calls for help.

What did you find most tragic about the story?

The people of Meerut knew that there is this lady who roams the street and writes on walls for years. They treated it like a monotonous activity. Nobody cared or bothered to know more about what troubled her or rather did not want to take any responsibility for it. That is for me the most tragic part of the story.  

Every time I broached the topic of why nobody had tried to help her in the past in Meerut, people had a standard excuse—she didn’t want help herself or nothing seemed to work for her. My town’s mentality became evident; everyone was just so consumed in their lives they didn’t want to genuinely reach out to her. This, of course, represents in many ways the larger perspective of Indian society on mental health — it’s not looked upon like a disease that can be treated with counseling and medicine. The dominant belief remains that people just go mad.

How did the people of Meerut react to your photo series?

Thankfully, I never received any backlash. It was more positive feedback than I ever expected. I became sort of popular in town which made me really happy because that meant that finally people were addressing and talking about mental health, one way or another. So many people from Meerut, including friends, family, acquaintances and complete strangers reached out to me and appreciated my work. Though what was common in all these interactions was a sense of guilt in the locals, of having ignored a story of suffering in their own backyard.

I think why people reacted to my story in this way was also because of its digital reach. Suddenly it was in their newsfeeds and insta stories and as we are on our phones most of the day, people just could not ignore it anymore. For better or for worse at least in this way mental health was addressed and talked about. That was all that was needed.  

Do you continue to photograph Saxena’s writings?

The lady doesn’t write anymore. It’s been a few years since she has recovered and now is completely stable. But if you turn around a corner in Meerut, at times you will still find her writing. It tends to live on.

Feminist comics fans have had quite the year: Wonder Woman broke box office records last year and Captain Marvel is set to premiere the Marvel Universe’s first female lead this spring. Even in bookstores, this year has seen hits like Comics for Choice and Bitch Planet that tackle overtly feminist themes. It’s a far cry from the landscape that feminist comic artists navigated in the ’70s and ’80s, when comics was an insular boy’s club of artists, writers, and publishers, and no one — not even feminists — would publish radical female cartoonists.

In 1972, realizing that no traditional, male-run comic book company would publish them, female comic book artists in San Francisco joined together to publish Wimmen’s Comix. The collective published 17 issues, the last in 1991.

One of the artists that Wimmen’s Comix published was the young Julie Doucet. At the age of 23, Doucet contributed “You know, I’m a very shy girl,” “The First Time I Shaved My Legs,” and “Tampax Again” to Wimmen’s Comix Issue 15.

But Doucet had bigger plans than publishing a few comics; she wanted to write her own strip.

In 1987, Doucet wrote the first comic of her eventual series Dirty Plotte (French Canadian slang for vagina) but due to its unrelentingly raw content — nudity, explicit sex, female carnality, violence, and of course, menstrual blood flooding streets like a rogue river — no one would publish it. She even asked a feminist bookstore to carry a self-published version. But no one would sell it. It was too uncomfortable.

That is until the Canadian comics publishing company Drawn & Quarterly — which describes Dirty Plotte as “quite simply one of the most iconic comic book series to have ever been created” — began printing her work in 1991.

(On October 2 of this year, Drawn & Quarterly published Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet, a hardback, two volume collection of the full Dirty Plotte series.)

In the pages of her comic, Doucet’s self-inspired character “Julie Doucet” draws comics, masturbates with a cookie, dresses as a man, castrates one, cuts off her breasts, and sews a penis onto herself.

Julie skips cleaning her house, but pays special attention to her vaginal hygiene in the bath. She stresses about purchasing the perfect bra in a dream, even though the actual Julie never wore one.

For drawing such loud, provocative and seemingly vulnerable scenes, Doucet herself is rather quiet and measured.

This past November, she spoke on a panel at Comic Arts Brooklyn, an annual comics festival at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

The event—standing room only—was filled with an audience keen to hear Doucet speak with cultural critic Anne Elizabeth Moore, who recently published a book-length analysis of Doucet’s work, life, and contribution to the world of feminist comics called Sweet Little Cunt: The Graphic Work of Julie Doucet.

Several times during the panel, Moore tried to complement Doucet’s work and place her in a canon of influential comic creators — a woman from the audience even stood up to tell Doucet that the comic about Doucet’s first sexual encounter had a profound impact on her own coming of age — but Doucet shyly shrugged off the attention. Moore told Doucet that her art had fundamentally changed the world of comics; Doucet quietly laughed, “I wasn’t aware.”

It’s difficult to know whether Doucet is genuinely modest, or is keen not to take up too much space as a female artist exhausted by the dominance of men in the comic world. But it seems more likely to me that she was being honest: in the middle of the ‘90s, trying to draw comics about gender and sexuality as a woman, Doucet was just trying to get by. She didn’t and couldn’t know her comics would have such a profound effect on comics culture, and it seems, she might still not believe it.

Following the panel, the energy was palpable. I approached artists selling copies of Comics for Choice, prints of feminist figures, or zines about their or their female family members’ own experiences, and asked them who they looked to for inspiration. Many named Doucet.

When I interviewed Doucet over email however, she wasn’t sure if people like her comics more than in the ‘90s, but she was sure that the resurgence of feminism had an influence: “People seem interested in the gender theme comics in a whole different way, that’s for sure.”

Despite her celebrated success and rippling influence, Doucet stopped producing comics in the mid-2000s. She credits the comics “boys club” and the unreliable income with pushing her away from the medium.

And although Doucet recognizes the landscape has shifted for feminist creators, she doesn’t see herself reentering the comics world anytime soon:  “It feels like I don’t have any stories to tell,” she wrote me. It’s a strange phrase to hear coming from Doucet. After all, if her work was about almost everything—it was predicated on exploration. Her comics explored gender identity, sexuality, womanhood, power, and violence—what stories didn’t she have to tell?

Doucet hasn’t quit creating however. Instead, she turned away from text and towards images. She returned to printing—linocuts, woodcuts, and silkscreen printing—which she has originally studied at university. She published a book of collage and poetry called Elle Humor in 2006 and another titled A l’Ecole De L’Amour in 2007.  She even designed a cover for the Penguin Classics Little Women that looks like it could be a page from one of her comics. 

Doucet has shirked off the weight of the comic world, but her work continues to draw attention and glean recognition.  In 2006, she had a solo exhibition of her print work at the Galerie B-312 in Montreal; in 2007, she participated in the Biennale de Montreál; and in 2008, she appeared at the Triennale québécoise at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Most recently, in 2017, her comic work was featured in a retrospective exhibit at the Fumetto Comic Festival in Luzern, Switzerland.

“It was the first time I got to see the extent of all my comic and non-comic production,” said Doucet. “It was huge, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I hadn’t realized how much work I’d done in my life. That was very overwhelming.”

Julie Doucet's comics explored gender identity, sexuality, womanhood, power, and violence—what stories didn't she have to tell?
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Doucet remains a force in the comic’s world, especially now that Dirty Plotte has been republished. And she’s proving that female artists can be more than one thing. Just as her comics depicted Julie-the-lover, Julie-the-man, Julie-the-artist, Julie-the-woman; so her life is revealing Julie-the-cartoonist, Julie-the-print-maker, Julie-the-poet.

She wrote me that she’s started drawing again this year and has been working on a series of geometric cardboard structures, although she admits, “I’m not sure where I’m going with that.”

Doucet’s work continues to explore the infinite permutations of womanhood and artistry, but her role as Julie-the-publisher is perhaps the most radical to date. She started her own publishing house in 2013, Le pantalitaire, to publish her own work and has found herself full circle: from unpublished to publisher—from powerless to powerful.

Fashion has always been used to send messages, or to exhibit social status or wealth. In many cultures, black at a funeral shows you’re mourning, just as a bride in white at her wedding represents purity. Victorian women wore corsets to exemplify their high societal stature. During the Vietnam war, military uniforms were worn first by veterans, and then by non-veterans, as a form of protest. And recently, during Melania Trump’s notorious visit to detention camps, where she donned an Army-inspired jacket with the phrase “I Really Don’t Care Do U?” scrawled across the back, the same item spread a completely different message.

But perhaps no item of clothing has gone through as many semiotic changes as the bell bottom jean. The pants have been worn for their practicality, to make a political statement, simply for the sake of fashion, and, when they were shamefully out of style, not worn at all. These days, the humble flared pant seems to be enjoying something of a moment: Forever 21, the Mecca of all things trendy and popular, currently has a laundry list of bellbottom options on their site. The comeback of bellbottoms coincides with an intense political climate, and a particularly involved generation of youths. This year, bell bottoms were especially popular at Coachella—a festival where the main demographic is millennials, people roughly aged between 21 and 35.

For lack of a better word, bell bottom pants are loud. When you wear bell bottoms you can’t help but take up space, and people can’t help but notice you. In a time when young people feel unheard and underrepresented, it’s important for them to be seen.

Bell bottoms are so aggressively associated with the sixties and seventies, it’s nearly impossible to imagine their origins have un-hippie roots. According to Encyclopedia.com, bell bottom pants have actually been traced back to the 17th century, when wide-legged pants were intended to be practical uniforms for boat workers. The pants were then introduced to sailors in the U.S. Navy in 1817, and they still rock wide leg pants to this day. The extra loose fabric offered by bell-shaped legs serves as a safety measure—in the instance that a man fell overboard, he could easily take his pants off and allow the wide bottoms to inflate with air and used as a life preserver.

Messy jobs on board a ship, like washing the decks, also meant there was a need for a pant that could easily be rolled up and kept out of the way of water (a problem you know all too well if you’ve ever tried getting a pedicure in skinny jeans). Of course, sailors think of wide-legged pants in terms of practicality, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that bell bottoms started being rocked as socio-political symbols. 

While the fifties were (and still are, for some reason) remembered fondly as being a time of good old American wholesomeness, sixties’ fashion defied those virtues completely. Youth countered the buttoned up, conservative look of the decade before and opted for clothing that made a statement. 

The bell bottom pant worked as a symbol for two reasons. Politically, a lot was happening in the late sixties and early seventies that warranted the younger generation to sharply retract from the mainstream. The biggest offender was, of course, the Vietnam War—a war that left the country incredibly split in terms of opinion on whether or not the US should even be involved and, to make matters worse, this young generation was still being drafted and forced into the war they so despised. Naturally, this left people angered and upset, and if the fifties represented post-World War II, buttoned-up patriotism, then the decades that followed turned completely against it. Instead of opting for the fitted pencil skirts of the more conservative generation prior, young people chose to literally wear their distaste for the current social climate on their sleeves. Thus, bold pieces like wide-leg jeans were adopted—defying the mainstream as a statement against the very unpopular involvements of the government.

Of course, sailors think of wide-legged pants in terms of practicality, and it wasn’t until the 1960s that bell bottoms started being rocked as socio-political symbols.
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Fashion historian and educator Sarah Byrd hesitates to impart too much power on singular fashion choices, such as choosing to wear a bell bottom pant. Even though clothing has a very physical effect (like I said, they take up space), Byrd explains that “many factors go into the things we wear at any given time as a consumer: what’s available, your cultural lens, how you feel that day. Like the people wearing the clothing, it’s a nuanced and complicated statement.”  

But what is often forgotten about bell bottoms is their role in popularizing unisex (or simply, gender nonspecific) styles. Brands like Levi’s made flared jeans for both men and women (marketed separately, though they may as well have been the exact same pant) and they became a part of typical wardrobes for men and women alike.

Perhaps the greatest example of this gender non-conformity is Sonny and Cher. The duo didn’t have traditionally gender-specific personas on stage: Cher’s contralto vocal range often hummed below Sonny Bono’s softer singing voice (and the fact that Bono was four inches shorter than his wife played into their almost “gender-swapped” stage presence). And at the time, they both were known to wear bell bottom pants during performances. Increasing access to color TV allowed people like Sonny and Cher to wear brightly colored, eye-catching outfits, showing their fans that one style could be fit for them both.  

The previously harsh contrast between male and female threads began to blur, which also coincided with a boom in other social movements. The Stonewall Riots had just happened in 1969, launching the LGBT Movement into action full-force. The adoption of bell bottoms into the contemporary style of the flamboyant sixties and seventies paralleled this movement. Not only were they marketed toward both women and men, but they were also regularly in the style lineup of pop icons. David Bowie, Elton John, Liberace, and their contemporaries were redefining how (specifically men) dressed and represented themselves.

Even Elvis Presley, whose style adhered to traditional gender roles through the 1950s, found himself in bell bottoms. Previously, he was an all-American man who was drafted to war, donned suits when he dressed up, and despite his somewhat eclectic taste, managed to maintain his rugged, womanizing demeanor. But he adapted the newfound fluid style in the sixties and seventies, often wearing his iconic wide-legged, bedazzled jumpsuits. For many, seeing pop stars in gender-fluid clothing meant feeling comfortable with their own sexuality.

It meant that maybe men don’t have to dress traditionally masculine if they don’t want to, and women aren’t bound to skirts and dresses. It forced the general public to come to terms (or at least, more so than before) with the fluidity of it all. Instead of adhering to strict, specifically gendered clothes (ladies in skirts and men in suits) bell bottoms jeans were made for everyone. Even the straightest, greased up American man was now sharing pants with Liberace. 

Sarah Byrd agrees that the exposure of trends by means of the celebrity has always had an impact on fashion. She points out that in the early twentieth century, the fan culture around celebrities gave birth; theatrical actors and performers were followed and documented in magazines, just as celebrities and influencers are on social media today. Byrd explains: “In many cases [the celebrity] serve to ‘normalize’ more avant-garde styles to the public.”

Even the straightest, greased up American man was now sharing pants with Liberace.
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In a 1969 New York Times article, writer Judy Klemesrud discusses a conversation she overheard between two teenage girls on the New York City subway, regarding what they planned to wear to an upcoming Janis Joplin concert. From their conversation, she learned about the role bell bottoms played in teenage fashion:

There are the ‘safe’ fashions that can be worn without scorn anywhere. For the girls: bell-bottom blue jeans topped with an antique fur coat (never a new fur coat!). For boys: bell-bottom blue jeans worn with a suede fringed jacket.

Klemesrud notes the irony that the “rock crowd,” which shouts about individuality, tends to “march to the same drummer” when it comes to fashion.

But one could argue quite the contrary. Young people do tend to dress like each other or, in the case of the Joplin-loving girls, dress like one of their idols. The music one enjoys and the people one idolizes are clear reflections of their own ideologies. When someone mirrors a celebrity trend, it can also be an association with what the celebrity stands for.

A lot of current trends continue to ignore gender-made style, again seen in the ever-popular “boyfriend jean” and even the male romper. But more importantly: bell bottoms are back, and their resurgence in the midst of an unsettled generation is similar to that of the sixties and seventies.

On one hand, one could question whether the resurgence of the bell bottom is actually a conscious link to the seventies. Perhaps the revival of styles is the natural ebb and flow of the fashion world; in a May 1980 article for the New York Times titled “How Pants Shape Up: Something for Everyone; Question of Acceptance” Bernadine Morris writes:

…Any fashion loses its punch after a bit of exposure, and women who had felt like pathfinders when they first donned a pair of pants to go to lunch or to work were to discover the same sense of adventure when they returned to a skirt or dress. To stimulate the interest, trousers changed their shape over the decade, passing from straight-legged to low-flared or bell-bottomed.

But on the other hand, the popularity of bell bottoms once again could have a connection to the seventies, whether it’s a completely conscious connection or not. Byrd points out that millennials are not old enough to have “originally” worn the style and therefore have enough distance to romanticize the references into a narrative that suits their current culture.

While not everyone who dons bell bottoms in 2018 is trying to boldly demonstrate a political opinion, it makes sense that the trend would return in such politically radical times. Though unquestionably stylish, sporting a pair of bell bottoms echoes  an interest in the social climate and acceptance of an evolving revolution. After all, clothing is never just clothing.