PODCAST · history
Bitchy History
by ProfessorMeredith
A history podcast brought to you by a history professor who is fed up. Half American history class, half her bubbling over rage at the state of America today and how we got here. Ron DeSantis would hate this podcast. www.bitchyhistory.com
Episodes
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TDWS: Effed-Up Friday With Professor Meredith!
Thank you everyone for tuning into The Daily Whatever Show for my episode with Lawrence Winnerman and Dana DuBois! The shirt Dana and I are both wearing is in my merch shop and there might just be a sale going on right now! Also my birthday is tomorrow (September 6th, obviously I’m a Virgo...what...
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Working in the Myth Factory - Wham! Bam! Thank You! Slam!
A few years ago, a friend of mine said, “Sometimes I forget Republican Meredith was a person.” I responded that I was less a person and more a stack of delusions in a trench coat. Republican Meredith does sound fake now. Like a cryptid. Grainy footage filed somewhere between Bigfoot and a flying...
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TDWS: Fine Feminist Hour with ProfessorMeredith & Letters From a Feminist
Thank you LeftieProf, Kit Thornton, Karma, Annabelle, Maura, and many others for tuning into my live video with Dana DuBois and Letters from a Feminist! I had so much fun on the show! Get full access to Bitchy History at www.bitchyhistory.com/subscribe
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Calling the Lock Privilege: Phyllis Schlafly and the Scam of Protected Womanhood
In this episode of Bitchy History, we take on Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist career woman who built a very successful career telling other women that feminism would ruin their lives. Using Schlafly’s own books, debates, and the modern afterlife of her arguments, we unpack how she helped…
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Gerda Lerner and the Invention of Women’s History
History didn’t forget women. It decided they didn’t matter. In this episode, we dive into the work of Gerda Lerner—the historian who helped build women’s history as a field and, in the process, exposed how traditional history erased half the population while pretending to be objective. From The...
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You Know You Love Me: A Conversation with Lindsay Denninger
Gossip Girl was never just a teen soap about rich kids in absurd headbands making terrible decisions on the Upper East Side. It was also a glittery little blueprint for influencer culture, public shaming, digital surveillance, aspirational wealth, and the deeply American habit of packaging…
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Seneca Falls and the Limits of “Universal” Womanhood
We love to treat the Seneca Falls Convention as the moment feminism began. A group of women gathered, declared that “all men and women are created equal,” and kicked off the fight for the vote. Simple. Inspiring. Done. Except… not quite. In this episode, we take a closer look at what actually...
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Before Seneca Falls: Black Women Were Already Political
The women’s rights movement didn’t begin in 1848. Long before the Seneca Falls Convention, Black women were already speaking publicly about freedom, citizenship, labor, and political power in a nation that denied them all four. In this episode, we move beyond the tidy origin story and look at the...
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Miss Mitchell’s Comet
Maria Mitchell discovered a comet, but she also calculated data for the U.S. Coast Survey, built one of the first rigorous observatory programs for women in the United States, supported abolition, worked alongside suffragists, and challenged institutional pay inequality. In this episode…
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The Vibe That Binds: Divine Feminine and the Politics of Softness
For the final episode of Arc III: Pretty Cages, we’re ending where containment gets subtle. No laws. No contracts. No sermons about obedience. Just vibes. In recent years, the language of the “divine feminine” has exploded across social media and wellness culture. Women are encouraged to soften,...
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Good Girls Don’t: The Cage of Reputation
This isn’t the story you were told about girlhood in the 1950s. It’s the story about the girls who disappeared. In postwar America, Britain, and Ireland, “good girl” culture wasn’t just a moral vibe. It was infrastructure. If you got pregnant, you vanished. If you reported harm, you risked social...
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Happily Ever After (Terms and Conditions Apply)
Marriage is sold to women as safety. Not just emotional safety. Structural safety. Safety from poverty. Safety from suspicion. Safety from being treated like a free-floating problem in a world that prefers women attached to something male and respectable. But historically? Marriage wasn’t just...
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Bianca's Cure and Dr. Gigi Berardi
This week on the podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Gigi Berardi — professor, journalist, and now historical novelist — to talk about her forthcoming book Bianca’s Cure, a Renaissance-set novel about women’s knowledge, early science, and what happens when a woman refuses to stay in the role history…
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How to Be a Woman (Victorian Edition)
The Victorian “Angel in the House” was supposed to be gentle, pure, domestic, and self-sacrificing. She was praised endlessly for her virtue, placed on a pedestal, and told she was the moral center of the family and the nation. She was also legally erased by marriage, economically dependent,...
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From Knights to Nice Guys: The Afterlife of Chivalry
People love to say “chivalry is dead.” In this episode, we pull apart what “chivalry” actually is—and why it keeps coming back every time gender roles get uncomfortable. Because chivalry was never just about manners. It was a system. A story that turned hierarchy into romance, control into care,...
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Matilda Joslyn Gage and the Politics of Being Unrespectable
Matilda Joslyn Gage should be one of the most recognizable names in the history of American women’s rights. Instead, she’s often treated like an optional footnote. In this arc finale, we take Gage seriously on her own terms: not just as a suffrage leader, but as a political thinker and historian...
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No One Is Coming to Save Us: The Combahee River Collective
When pundits complain that “identity politics is ruining everything,” they’re accidentally name-dropping a group of Black lesbian feminists in 1970s Boston. This episode tells the history behind the buzzword: the Combahee River Collective. We follow their journey from the National Black Feminist...
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Heresy, Sedition, and Other Names for Women Talking
In this episode, I start with a guy in my YouTube comments insisting I “teach feminism, not history” and then take him on a little field trip to 17th-century Boston. Quaker women like Margaret Fell and Mary Dyer weren’t marching under a “feminist” banner, but they were doing something genuinely...
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Cookies, Community, and Conspiracy Theories: The Culture Wars over Girl Scouts
Every few years, the Girl Scouts accidentally start a culture war. You’d think an organization best known for cookies and camping would be safely boring. Instead, they keep ending up at the center of national freakouts: heavy metal lawsuits over Thin Mints, boycotts over “woke” cookies, outrage...
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A Brief History of Setting Women on Fire
Buy Me A Coffee This episode is about witch hunts, but not the Halloween kind. We’re talking about how early modern Europe went from relying on women healers and midwives for everything to torturing and killing them as witches, and how that panic helped clear the way for male-dominated,...
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Joan of Arc: The Original Girlboss (Who Got Burned for It)
Joan of Arc has been everything to everyone: saint, witch, nationalist mascot, feminist icon, medieval teenager who simply refused to stay in her lane. In this episode, we cut through six centuries of myth to get to the girl in the armor — the one who heard divine voices, out-strategized grown…
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The Real First Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is right around the corner for my American listeners, so let’s revisit an early episode of Bitchy History today, because it’s seasonal. Remember that Thanksgiving is a propaganda holiday and the Puritans sucked. But while it may be a sham, as Buffy reminds us, it’s a sham with yams....
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Women and the Black Plague: Death, Dowries, and Doing Men’s Jobs
The Black Death (1347–1351) killed ~40% of Europe and blew a hole in the labor market. Women stepped in, running farms, shops, and guild work; inheriting property; training apprentices; and powering textiles, silk, and brewing. Then, as populations recovered, elites used laws, guild charters,...
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Exporting the Binary: How the Empire Made “Man” and “Woman” the Only Options
Episode Summary Empires didn’t just conquer continents—they colonized identity. This episode unpacks how European colonialism exported a rigid gender binary across the globe, dismantling Indigenous systems of gender and sexuality while dressing patriarchy up as “civilization.” From the witch…
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Gender Is a Scam, Part II – Science, Panic, and Policing the Binary
Welcome back to Bitchy History, where we cheerfully dismantle the greatest hits of misogyny—and this week, we’re putting science itself on the stand. In Part I, we met the philosophers and theologians who invented “woman” as a cosmic afterthought. Now, in Part II, we enter the age of lab coats,...
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Gender is a Scam - Part I: The Invention of Woman
Welcome back to Bitchy History — the show where we cheerfully dismantle everything you thought was “just natural” and replace it with the ugly truth: it was made up. Usually by men. Often badly. We’re kicking off a brand-new arc: Inventing Womanhood. Because here’s the deal — “woman” isn’t a...
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Speaking Ill of the Dead — Charlie Kirk Edition
Edit: There was some sound editing issues on this episode which have now been fixed. Apologies! Well, I’m back. After packing up my entire life, moving across the Atlantic, and preparing to dive headfirst into a Master’s in Gender Studies (yes, I am now an even more insufferable feminist — send...
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Warp Speed Woke: Lecture 5 – Star Trek: Enterprise & The Post-9/11 Era
Welcome back, Trekkies, historians, and lovers of media analysis! After a short delay (turns out getting a starship up to warp speed takes time), Warp Speed Woke: Lecture 5 is here, and this time, we’re taking a hard look at Star Trek: Enterprise, the series that marked the franchise’s first real...
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"Warp Speed Woke" Lecture 4: Voyager and Third Wave Feminism
When Star Trek: Voyager premiered in 1995, it carried the weight of expectations from both the studio and the fans. On the surface, it was a major leap forward for representation—the first female Starfleet captain leading a Trek series! But beneath the surface, Voyager became a battleground…
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"Warp Speed Woke" Lecture 3: Deep Space Nine and The Clash of Civilizations
The wait is over, Trek fans! 🚀 My lecture on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—the most complex and morally gray entry in the Star Trek franchise—is now available to watch. If you’ve ever wondered how a science fiction show could tackle the cultural clashes and anxieties of the 1990s with such…
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Lecture 2: The End of History and Humanity’s Evolution
This lecture explores Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) as Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a utopian future shaped by the optimism of the late Cold War and its conclusion. Drawing from Francis Fukuyama’s concept of “The End of History,” we examine how TNG portrays a society that has achieved...
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Bitchy History: The History of Domestic Violence in America
Welcome back, listeners! This week, we’re tackling a tough but crucial topic: the history of domestic violence in America. This episode explores how domestic violence has been ignored, normalized, and fought against throughout history. We start in colonial America, where men had the legal right…
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Warp Speed Woke: How Star Trek Took on Society
Welcome to the first lecture in the series Warp Speed Woke: How Star Trek Took on Society! 🚀 In this episode, we’re diving into the groundbreaking origins of Star Trek and its fearless exploration of social issues. From its debut in the 1960s, Gene Roddenberry’s iconic series was more than just...
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Why the Hell Can’t the United States Elect a Woman as President?
In this episode of Bitchy History, we dive into a topic that’s as frustrating as it is timely. While countries around the globe are electing women to lead and thrive, the United States still struggles to cross that critical threshold. Why? Because of systemic barriers, cultural biases, and a...
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Access Denied: How Project 2025 Threatens Reproductive Healthcare and Equity
In this week’s episode of Bitchy History, I’m diving into the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for reshaping the federal government, gutting Title X, and rolling back civil liberties. Title X has been a lifeline for millions, providing access to contraception, STI testing, and cancer screenings…
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Why Gender Equality is Still a Debate: The ERA Story
Thanks for reading Bitchy History! This post is public so feel free to share it. When Alice Paul penned the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) back in 1923, she probably didn’t imagine we’d still be debating it 100 years later. And yet, here we are. The ERA—a simple 24-word promise of gender…
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The War on Birth Control
Let’s talk about something that should be a settled issue by now but, spoiler alert, isn’t: birth control. From Anthony Comstock’s 19th-century moral crusades to the fallout from Dobbs, America’s relationship with contraception is a case study in how rights, once won, are never truly secure. This...
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The History of Child Labor in America
In this episode of “Bitchy History,” we’re diving into the grim and often overlooked history of child labor in America. From the colonial era’s indentured servitude to today’s shocking headlines about minors working in hazardous conditions, we’ll trace the evolution of child exploitation in the...
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Father's Day Special
Tune in for the Bitchy History Father’s Day Special! My dad joins the show to talk about getting drafted, waking Richard Nixon up at 3 am (more than once), the time he nearly got sent to an early grave by a case of Coca-Cola, and many other things from his life. My dad has never met a random...
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Mother's Day Special
Tune in this week for Bitchy History’s Mother’s Day special. My mom joins the show to share her experiences with sexism in optometry school, pregnancy employment discrimination, marrying a man she lightly stalked, and how she felt about Watergate after she voted for Nixon in her first election as...
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Bitchy History: The Comstock Act
Watch the video version here: Also, check out my TikTok page for the blooper reel! Welcome to this episode of Bitchy History, where we dive into the notorious Comstock Act of 1873. This legislation, named after moral crusader Anthony Comstock, marked a significant moment in U.S. legal and…
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The History of the Pro-Life Movement
Today is a super special episode! We have guest Gwen Levey from the musical group Gwen Levey and the Breakdown on the show to talk about the pro-life movement and her fantastic song, Barefoot and Pregnant. From its roots in activism to its influence in modern politics, we explore the pro-life...
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General Harriet Tubman and the Civil War
Join us on our history podcast as we delve into the remarkable story of General Harriet Tubman, uncovering her lesser-known role as a spy and soldier during the Civil War. From her courageous acts of espionage to her pivotal contributions on the battlefield, we shed light on Tubman's…
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Boston Marriages and Women’s Right to Self-Determination
You can find Amanda on TikTok Resources: Boston Marriages and the Language of Lesbian Relationships Boston Marriages BOSTON MARRIAGES AND THE QUEER HISTORY OF WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement Professor Meredith's Bitchy History is a...
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The Problem with the Puritans
Join me with special guest Elena Bowman, a researcher at Columbia University, as we talk about the history of the Puritans and the longstanding impact puritanical beliefs have had on our social and political culture in America...spoiler alert, it's not what we'd call a GOOD impact. — There are no...
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Barbie and Modern Womanhood
Did Barbie really set the feminist movement back 50 years? Well...that depends on your perspective, but at least Barbie wasn't a girl's toy that required bottle feeding and diaper changes to stop her from crying...that's a win. New Merch store: https://www.teepublic.com/user/bitchyhistory 2024...
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Season 2, Episode 9: Women and the Homesteading Act of 1862
In this episode, we shatter the myth of the Old West dominated solely by cowboys and outlaws. While Miss Kitty might embody one side of the era, there's a lesser-known narrative of pioneering women who defied norms and seized opportunities presented by the Homesteading Act of 1862. Substack for...
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Season 2, Episode 8: The Satanic Panic
What do Dungeons & Dragons, Phyllis Schlafly, and Baby Sacrifices have to do with each other? Listen along to find out! The substack for today's episode: https://open.substack.com/pub/bitchyhistory/p/season-2-episode-8-the-satanic-panic Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
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Thanksgiving: "It’s a sham, but it’s a sham with yams. It’s a yam sham!"
Revisit an early episode of Bitchy History with me today, because it's seasonal. Remember that Thanksgiving is a propaganda holiday and the Puritans sucked. But while it may be a sham, as Buffy reminds us, it's a sham with yams. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Get…
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2.6 - Will the Real Rosie Please Stand Up?
Listen in for a walk through the history of Rosie the Riveter, which includes Canadian machine guns, B-movie musicals, and PBS. Substack for today's episode: https://bitchyhistory.substack.com/p/season-2-episode-6-will-the-real Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Get full...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
A history podcast brought to you by a history professor who is fed up. Half American history class, half her bubbling over rage at the state of America today and how we got here. Ron DeSantis would hate this podcast.
www.bitchyhistory.com
HOSTED BY
ProfessorMeredith
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Bitchy History have?
Bitchy History currently has 50 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Bitchy History about?
A history podcast brought to you by a history professor who is fed up. Half American history class, half her bubbling over rage at the state of America today and how we got here. Ron DeSantis would hate this podcast. www.bitchyhistory.com
How often does Bitchy History release new episodes?
Bitchy History has 50 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Bitchy History?
You can listen to Bitchy History on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Bitchy History?
Bitchy History is created and hosted by ProfessorMeredith.
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