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 cruelty as glamour.

In this episode of Bitchy History, I’m joined by Lindsay Denninger to talk about her book You Know You Love Me: How Gossip Girl Changed Pop Culture as We Know It, why female-centered pop culture is so often dismissed as unserious, and why that dismissal is complete nonsense. We get into the show’s feminism, its failures, its cultural afterlife, and the reason it still feels weirdly relevant in an era of curated identities, toxic men, and lives lived half for the camera.

Because popular media matters. “Trashy” media matters. The things girls and women are told not to take seriously usually turn out to be doing a whole lot of cultural work behind the scenes.

So yes, we’re talking about Gossip Girl. But we’re also talking about power, gender, performance, and the fact that this show walked so the modern internet could run headfirst into a wall.

XOXO

Buy: You Know You Love Me: How Gossip Girl Changed Pop Culture as We Know It

(Buy local if you can, but Amazon is fine if it’s all you have at home.)

Find Lindsay on social media!

https://www.instagram.com/lindsaydenninger

lindsaydenninger.substack.com

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 happened in 1848—and what didn’t get included in that story. Because while the Declaration of Sentiments used universal language, the reality of the movement was much more specific.

We’ll break down:

* how abolition and reform movements made Seneca Falls possible

* why the demand for the vote was controversial—even in the room

* how Frederick Douglass helped push suffrage forward

* and how Sojourner Truth exposed the limits of who counted as a “woman”

Along the way, we’ll bring in historians like Gerda Lerner, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis to keep us grounded in what was actually happening—not the polished version we like to tell later.

RECOMMENDED READING

Primary Sources

* Declaration of Sentiments

* Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention

* Ain’t I a Woman?

Key Background

* Gerda Lerner — The Creation of Feminist Consciousness; The Meaning of Seneca Falls

* Angela Davis — Women, Race, & Class

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 women who came first—Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—and how their work reshapes what we think we know about the fight for women’s rights.

Because the question was never just whether women should vote.

It was who counted as a full political person in the first place.

Core Primary Sources

* Maria W. Stewart, Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1835)

* Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850)

* Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Speeches, Poems, and Essays

* Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892)

Secondary Sources

* Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920

* Martha S. Jones, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All

* bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” (1989)