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)

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, Professor Meredith steps back and lets her sister lead a conversation about a woman who refused to be professionally contained. We talk about celestial navigation, the science of comets, Quaker radicalism, and why Mitchell’s life challenges the idea that women must narrow themselves to a single identity. A story about the stars and the freedom to embody multitudes.

Find Alexandria on SubStack (where you can also find her links to TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram).

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 assigns her.

The conversation fits perfectly with the arc we recently wrapped up on the podcast, which has focused on how women across history are punished for stepping out of line.

Why Bianca Capello?

Berardi’s entry point into the story begins not in an archive, but in Florence itself — with a local legend about an open window that must never be closed, or else a woman’s scream will echo through the piazza. That woman is often said to be Bianca Capello, a 16th-century Venetian noblewoman turned Medici consort.

Historically, Bianca is remembered as a scandal. The record of her inner life, her work, and her intellect is thin. Her death is suspicious. Her remains were never conclusively identified.

Bianca’s Cure asks the obvious question history never bothered to: what if she was more than the story told about her?

Science, Alchemy, and Who Gets Taken Seriously

One of the most interesting parts of the interview is Berardi’s discussion of Renaissance science. Alchemy, chemistry, medicine, and the occult weren’t separate worlds — they overlapped constantly. The difference wasn’t what knowledge was being produced, but who was producing it.

In the novel, Bianca is deeply engaged with experimentation, herbal medicine, and systematic observation. Her work is serious. Her methods are deliberate. And that, more than anything, makes her dangerous.

As Berardi notes, the road women in science travel today isn’t fundamentally different from the one Bianca navigates five centuries earlier.

“She’s Not Nice” — and That’s the Point

One thing that’s already coming up in reader reactions is discomfort with Bianca herself. She’s ambitious. She’s focused. She doesn’t soften herself for the people around her.

Some readers don’t like that.

Berardi is clear about why she leaned into this: “nice” has long been a way to discipline women’s ambition. Bianca’s Cure pushes back on the idea that female characters need to be likable in order to be worthy of attention.

About the Book

Bianca’s Cure

Out February 10

Published by She Writes Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster

The book is available through major retailers and many independent bookstores. If your local shop doesn’t have it in stock, they can usually order it.

Here at Bitchy History we love a good independent bookstore, but we recognize book deserts exist, so the big retailers are fine too if it’s all you’ve got.

Where to Find Gigi Berardi

Gigi Berardi can be found through her professional website, where she’s launching a blog focused on science, history, and storytelling. You can also download the first two chapters of Bianca’s Cure by subscribing there. Links are in the show notes.

Listen to the Episode

In the full episode, we talk about:

* Writing historical fiction with thin archives

* Women’s erased contributions to science

* Alchemy, malaria, and Renaissance medicine

* Why being “nice” is not the same as being good