Related post: Last-minute Demeter (sheets, some leaves, and grocery store produce) Demeter is the Greek goddess of agriculture and the bountiful earth. It is she who makes the crops grow—except for those months when her daughter Persephone is in the Underworld, for then Demeter weeps and leaves the earth bare. Together Demeter and Persephone represent […]
In the final run-up to Halloween, we’re offering tips on how to do last-minute, stripped-down versions of some of our popular costumes. Do you have a sheet? Do you have food? Can you get some leaves (the kind that grow on trees)? If at least two of those things are true, then you can be […]
Long ago, before Venus or Aphrodite, before Artemis or Athena, before Demeter or Persephone, there was Inanna. She was the great Mesopotamian Queen of Heaven and Earth, the goddess of love, fertility, and war. Inanna was what the Sumerians called her; their Semitic neighbors, the Akkadians, called her Ishtar. As time went on the Sumerian […]
Persephone was a pre-Greek goddess who got drafted into the Olympic pantheon along with her mother Demeter. It’s a fair bet that she was the Queen of the Underworld long before the Greeks, with their usual penchant for male supremacy, added Hades to the mix and changed the story around. The Greek version is of […]
Our 2020 Costume Contest was interrupted for three months by COVID and my work, so only now, three months later, are we posting the winners. I am so grateful for everyone’s patience and good humor through this long, bizarre situation. What a year. I will be emailing the winners their Amazon gift certificates over the […]
We had over 200 entries to our costume contest this year, which was way more than we expected. That’s the kind of response big newspapers and magazines get when they run contests, though I daresay the level of quality of our entries was higher. But that just made the judging harder. To make it manageable, […]
Thanks to our Kickstarter campaign for 2013, we’re adding 19 new costumes this season, 7 of which our backers and supporters will get to vote on. This series of posts is designed to briefly introduce the many notable women and legendary figures we’ll be considering. Voting will take place spring/summer of 2013. Before Freyja or […]
We were thinking about doing this closer to Halloween, but the awesome shout-out today from The Mary Sue (thank you!) prompted us to go ahead and post it now: bedsheet costumes. That’s right, costumes you can make with a bedsheet. The reason you can get away with using a bedsheet for ancient costumes is because […]
Tomorrow is Halloween, and if you don’t already have your costume together, you’re probably freaking. Relax! We’re here with some de-freaking advice on how you can pull together a last-minute outfit: If you have a sheet: Come on, everybody has a sheet. As long as you have a sheet that doesn’t have Hello Kitty or […]
Here’s the press release we sent out earlier this week: Feminists Take On Halloween October 4, 2011 — You won’t find costumes for Ada Lovelace or Hatshepsut in the Halloween stores this fall. But you will find them—or at least instructions for them—at a website called “Take Back Halloween.” Launched in 2010, the site is […]
PRESS RELEASE Feminists Take On Halloween FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 4, 2011 — You won’t find costumes for Ada Lovelace or Hatshepsut in the Halloween stores this fall. But you will find them—or at least instructions for them—at a website called “Take Back Halloween.” Launched in 2010, the site is now in its second year […]
Halloween Season 2011 is upon us. It’s the week after Labor Day, and the stores are starting to stock up on costumes. For us, it’s Year Two of our project to Take Back Halloween! The response to our website last year was incredible, and this year we’re working overtime to make it even bigger and […]
