March Editorial Picks
Women’s History Month is often reduced to celebration. At The Parlor, we approach it as a moment of political clarity — an opportunity to examine power, memory, identity, labor, and the structures that shape women’s lives across generations.
The pieces gathered here reflect the range of our editorial commitments: intergenerational activism, feminist political analysis, cultural critique, and reporting that refuses simplification. We publish work that interrogates systems, centers lived experience, and insists that feminist thought remains intellectually rigorous and materially grounded.
The Parlor is small, independent, and reader-funded. We are not backed by corporate advertisers or institutional benefactors. Our ability to publish this work — and to pay contributors fairly — depends on readers who believe that feminist journalism deserves to exist without compromise.
If these stories resonate with you, we invite you to join us in sustaining independent feminist media this March.
On Resistance, Identity and Intersectionality
From Daughters of Liberty to “Wine Mom Mobs”
On ICE raids, “wine moms,” and why women-led dissent terrifies the modern American state
What unfolded on Speedwell Avenue is not an isolated incident, but a case study in how dissent is being reframed—and disciplined—in the United States. As immigration enforcement becomes more militarized, the state increasingly relies not just on force, but on narrative: pathologizing resistance as hysteria, criminalizing documentation as violence, and recasting non-compliance as moral failure.
Although Our Ideals Didn't Align
My Grandmother's legacy and the fragility of progress
This essay traces the life and political legacy of the writer's grandmother, Neva Courrier Taylor—a feminist organizer, abortion rights advocate, and quiet radical in a conservative West Virginia town—and reflects on what her generation’s work reveals about the present moment. Through memory, archival research, and contemporary political context, it examines how gains once thought secure—from reproductive autonomy to gender equality—have proven vulnerable to reversal, and what it means to inherit a struggle that remains unresolved.
Conditional Solidarity in the Age of Anti-Trans Legislation
How the rollback of trans rights reveals feminism’s fault lines—and why intersectional solidarity is the only way forward
This article examines the escalating violence, discrimination, and political backlash facing transgender and gender-expansive people in the United States — and the moral failure of mainstream feminism to meet that crisis with true solidarity. It argues that the fight for bodily autonomy must include gender-affirming care, as the same lawmakers and organizations driving the assault on transgender rights are also behind efforts to outlaw abortion nationwide.
The Gravitational Pull of Male Approval
On Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation and the Painful Intimacy of Decentering Men
In our February Book Club Pick, Acts of Desperation, Megan Nolan is not simply chronicling a toxic romance; she is dissecting the interior life of a woman who knows the language of feminism but cannot untangle herself from the need for male validation. The novel becomes less a story about abuse and more an autopsy of desire shaped by patriarchy—exposing the uncomfortable truth that cultural progress does not automatically dissolve emotional dependency.
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