Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich says that for Mormon women living in 19th century Utah, "plural marriages" were empowering in complicated ways. This is FRESH AIR.

In the century since the 19th Amendment was ratified, women have shattered glass ceilings at every level of American government with the glaring exception of president and vice president.

With that in mind, we decided to explore how legendary women of the 19th century were portrayed, comparing artistic paintings with early photographs to reveal how beauty ideals were preserved ...

During the 19th-century campaign against abortion, advocates for laws banning the practice argued that they were necessary to enforce women’s maternal and marital duties and to protect ethno ...

Though local suffrage slowly opened to women in many states, suffragists continued their fight for national voting rights through the 19th century. Mocked, jailed, beaten, and force-fed ...

While rare today in developed countries, an obstetric vesicovaginal fistula was a major complication of childbirth among 19th century women in America. "You don't have to ask these people whether ...

Though she’s dressed in an opulent, fur-trimmed gown in a palatial French home sometime in the mid-19th century, her silent fury is recognizable to women the world over who’ve contained their ...

Adams’s impression illustrates very well the tendency to dismiss the work of nineteenth-century women travel writers. The gender ideology of the 19th century placed women in the private sphere ...