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The Feminist Institute

Documenting feminist contributions to culture by preserving and digitizing archival materials.

The Feminist Institute (TFI) documents and celebrates feminist contributions to culture by preserving and digitizing archival materials for public access. TFI promotes information activism and gender equity by infilling the cultural record to reflect fuller truths. Through our partnership program, our staff works closely with institutions, feminist creators, and organizations on archival projects

with both physical and digital records. We then provide access to digitized materials from these partnerships through the TFI Digital Archive. Our partnerships fuel our programs, including our digital exhibitions, events, Alive in the Archive video series, and blog. We envision a future where gender-marginalized individuals and organizations’ equal contributions to culture are known and recognized, and their rights are protected.

05/12/2026

What does it mean to make feminist history truly searchable?

The TFI Digital Archive Union Catalog connects repositories, people, and collections so they can be found in relation to one another.

From the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History at Smith College you can trace the papers of Loretta J. Ross, activist, scholar, and co-founder of the reproductive justice movement and move directly to the records that document her work.

Linking these materials makes feminist archives more findable, usable, and connected, ensuring the histories shaping our present remain visible, accessible, and in conversation.

05/05/2026

How do you find feminist history across institutions? The TFI Digital Archive Union Catalog is designed to make that process visible and usable.

Start with a repository: the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
From there, follow the record to the papers it holds, including artist Nancy Spero, whose work was central to feminist art movements of the 20th century.
Then move to her profile, and from there to the finding aid, the entry point into the full archival collection.

This is what the Union Catalog does: it links repositories, people, and collections into a navigable network. By connecting these records, we make feminist archival materials more findable, usable, and legible, mitigating the gaps and biases that often shape how history is searched and accessed.

It also makes archives more approachable. Not just places you have to know how to navigate, but systems you can move through intuitively.

03/10/2026

Happy Women’s History Month.

At The Feminist Institute, we believe feminist history isn’t just something to celebrate, it’s something to safeguard. The TFI Digital Archive Union Catalog, a growing effort to connect feminist archives, research collections, and cultural materials across institutions, does just that.

The Union Catalog links together archival collections, individuals, collectives and organizations, feminist events, repositories, and places, creating a network that makes feminist knowledge easier to discover, research, and preserve.

Throughout March, we’ll be sharing new entries from the Union Catalog: repositories, archival collections, feminist historical events and places, and the people and collectives whose work lives within them. Let's build our feminist future by documenting our feminist past.

02/28/2026

"Wilhemina Jones, Future Star: A Novel" by Dindga McCannon follows a young Black girl growing up in 1960s Harlem who dreams of becoming an artist, mirroring McCannon’s own teenage years and creative awakening. Alongside her visual practice, writing was always central to her artistic life, and this autobiographical novel reflects her commitment to storytelling as a powerful medium in its own right.

As Black History Month comes to a close, TFI remains committed to preserving and amplifying Black feminist history, not just in February, but year-round.

Image Credit
1-3: "Wilhemina Jones, Future Star: A Novel", 1980.
All images courtesy and copyright of Dindga McCannon; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2024.

02/24/2026

Speak to the Winds brings together Ghanaian proverbs collected by Kofi Asare Opoku and intricately illustrated by Dindga McCannon. Exploring themes of wisdom, conduct, and community, this book marked a breakthrough in for McCannon’s pen and ink work. Reimagining traditionally male figures as women, her illustrations reflect an emerging feminist consciousness and diasporic visual research drawn from African dress and cultural memory.

We’re diving deeper into the new additions to Dindga McCannon's Capsule Collection in our latest Substack: https://thefeministinstitute.substack.com/p/black-history-month-new-dindga-mccannon

Image Credit
1-3: "Speak to the Winds", 1975.
All images courtesy and copyright of Dindga McCannon; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2024.

02/21/2026

Before a reader turns the first page, the cover tells a story. Dindga McCannon designed book covers for Audre Lorde that did more than package a text; they shaped the visual entry point into Black feminist thought. At a time when Black women’s writing was fighting for space in the literary landscape, McCannon’s designs helped frame Lorde’s words with power, clarity, and intention. These covers are part of the architecture of Black feminist literature; reminders that design, too, is political work.

Image Credit
1: "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, A Biomythography", 2018.
2: "Sister Outsider", 2019.
All images courtesy and copyright of Dindga McCannon; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2024.

02/20/2026

"Peaches" (1974), written and illustrated by Dindga McCannon.

An autobiographical story told through the voice of a young Black girl growing up in Harlem, Peaches follows a child who dreams of becoming an artist. Revisiting her own childhood at age twelve or thirteen, McCannon draws from lived experience: family dynamics, neighborhood life, and formative memories of community.

The illustrations reveal McCannon’s early fascination with radiant sun motifs and collage, layering light and texture throughout the compositions. The book is dedicated to Nina Simone, particularly the song “Four Women,” whose final figure transforms into a revolutionary warrior, foreshadowing McCannon’s recurring theme of the warrior woman. Dedication lines also honor family, friends, and members of Where We At, the Black women artists’ collective she co-founded.

Explore the collection: https://www.thefeministinstitute.org/digital-archive/images?genre=books

Image Credit
1-3: "Peaches", 1974.
All images courtesy and copyright of Dindga McCannon; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2024.

02/17/2026

This Black History Month, we are proud to announce the addition of eight works by Dindga McCannon to the TFI Digital Archive, spanning book design, illustration, and authorship.

A canonical Black feminist artist, McCannon has shaped the visual and literary landscape of Black American life for decades. From designing covers for Audre Lorde to illustrating and writing children’s books centered on Black experience, her work expanded representation at a time when it was urgently needed.

Among these additions are four rare children’s books and two autobiographical novels that center Black girlhood, creativity, and everyday life — works that offered vital representation in a literary landscape where it was scarce.

These additions reflect the breadth of her cultural impact — not only as an artist, but as a builder of Black feminist visual and literary worlds.

Explore the collection now in the TFI Digital Archive: https://www.thefeministinstitute.org/collections?id=21

Image Credit
1: "Sister Outsider", 2019.
2: "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, A Biomythography", 2018.
3: "Peaches", 1974.
4: "Wilhemina Jones, Future Star: A Novel", 1980.
5: "Children of Night", 1974.
6: "Speak to the Winds", 1975.
7: "Omar at Christmas", 1973.
8: "Sati the Rastifarian", 1973.
All images courtesy and copyright of Dindga McCannon; digitized through a partnership with The Feminist Institute, 2024.

02/12/2026

For Black History Month, we’re revisiting supersisters™ No. 27: Rosa Parks.

Released in 1979, the supersisters cards series celebrated women shaping history across fields. Rosa Parks was honored not as a supporting character, but as a strategist, organizer, and movement builder.

Her refusal to give up her seat in 1955 was a deliberate act of resistance rooted in years of civil rights work — a catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott and a defining moment in the fight against segregation.

By placing Parks in a collectible series alongside athletes, artists, and political leaders, supersisters™ insisted that Black women’s resistance belongs in our shared cultural canon.

Image credit: Rosa Parks, supersisters™ No. 27, 1979. Courtesy and copyright of supersisters™. Digitized as part of a partnership between The Feminist Institute and supersisters™.

01/01/2026

Happy first day of 2026 ✨

We’re entering the year with Mary Beth Edelson and her performance "CYCLE 2: Thinking Things Into Being / Ritual on Earth" (1981), conceived during her residency at the University of Cincinnati.

Edelson understood ritual as a feminist technology: a way to imagine, invoke, and collectively bring new worlds into being. Her work reminds us that feminism is not only an idea, but a practice enacted in public, through bodies, symbols, and shared intention.

As we carry the spirit of 30 Days of Feminist History forward, we’re recommitting to what this work has always been about: creating feminist publics, preserving our movements, and bringing activism [messy, collective, embodied] into the future.

Here’s to memory as resistance, care as strategy, and feminist history as a living force in 2026.

🔗 Support the work. Stay in the archive. Build the future with us.

Image Credit: Courtesy + copyright of the Estate of Mary Beth Edelson and Accola Griefen Fine Art; preserved through a partnership with The Feminist Institute.

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