A record number of African American women graduated from the prestigious West Point military academy on Saturday: Of the 200 female cadets graduating, 34 were black—and they’re part of making the class of 2019 the most diverse class in the mostly white, mostly male, military academy’s 217-year history.
“I just showed myself and those who thought I could do it initially that yes, I can,” cadet Stephanie Riley told the Associated Press. “And not just, ‘yes, I can.’ I can show other little girls that, yes, you can come to West Point. Yes, you can do something that maybe the rest of your peers aren’t actually doing. And yes, you can be different from the rest of the group.”
The graduating class of African American female cadets posed for a stunning photo together that has since gone viral. In it, the women are seen in uniform as they hold up their ceremonial sabers.
Hallie H Pound/AP/REX/Shutterstock
Two more records for West Point were also set on graduation day: The graduating class’s 200 female cadets is the largest number since the first woman graduated in 1980, and the 2019 class also included greatest amount of Latin-Americans graduating in the school’s history with a total of 88.
Clearly, there’s still a long way to go until there’s representative diversity at West Point—1,000 cadets in total graduated on Saturday. But the grads are already thinking about the next generation.
“I want women to be soldiers,” cadet Welch-Baker told NBC. “I want these little black girls to say ‘Hey, I can do it too. I have the strength to defy the odds.’ Which is what we did. We defied the odds.”
Can you think of anyone you’d rather talk to about friendship than the cast of The Bold Type? Me neither, which is why I spoke with the holy trinity of BFFs themselves—Katie Stevens, Aisha Dee and Meghann Fahy—about just that during a recent visit to the set of the Freeform show, which returns tonight.
The Bold Type has been hailed by fans and critics alike for its nuanced, diverse portrayals of young working women—something that’s unfortunately come few and far between on TV. Each character has a unique storyline, yes, but it still feels as if most women could find a situation or a character they relate to. Whether you connect to Jane (Stevens) and her passionate pursuit of a writing career, Kat (Dee) and her exploration of sexuality, or Sutton (Fahy) and the trials and tribulations of dating, they all have a different take on the world. Those adventures will continue in the third season, and while the trio wouldn’t reveal too much about what’s ahead, they did promise more of the friend porn we’ve come to love and expect.
“What we’re trying our best to do with The Bold Type is to represent [friendships] in the way that we all experience them,” Dee tells Glamour. “We talk about our sex lives. We talk about our periods. We talk about how bloated we feel today. All of that is such a big part of the human experience, and the experience as a woman.”
At the end of season two, each woman’s romantic relationships were pushed to the brink: Jane was forced to choose between the two men in her life, Pinstripe and Ben (and we still don’t know whom she picked); Sutton finally reunited with her ex, Richard; Kat examined the ways in which her relationship to Adena might have negatively affected her girlfriend’s work. But as usual, the northern star of the show was—and remains—Jane, Kat, and Sutton’s friendships with each other.
“I definitely think there’s something special about our show and how we showcase female friendship, navigating your way through your twenties in the workplace, and just living in today’s America,” Stevens says. For her it’s important that The Bold Type highlight each woman’s flaws and downfalls and then examine how those traits inform their relationships with one another. That is, after all, what we experience in real-life friendships with other women.
“The legs that the show stands on are the friendships between the three of us,” Stevens says. “An episode won’t go by without the three of us together hashing through something or being there for each other when something goes wrong.” She promises more of that in season three—in part because her off-screen relationships with Dee and Fahy are eerily similar.
Jane (Katie Stevens), Kat (Aisha Dee), and Sutton (Mehgann Fahy) in the season three premiere of The Bold Type
Philippe Bosse/Freeform
“[The show] reflects our relationship in real life,“ Stevens continues. “If we’re on set and one of us is not having the best day, the other two are like, ’All right, today’s your day. We’re going to lift you up.’”
Fahy tells me that—just like her, Stevens, and Dee—other women often tell the cast that they see themselves in these characters. These fans relate to the good, the bad, and the ugly. “So many people come up to us and say, ‘Oh, I’m a Jane!‘ Or, ‘I’m a Kat, and my best friend’s a Sutton. We watch the show together!’” Fahy agrees with costar Dee’s outlook on the ways in which female friendships are portrayed on this show versus how they’ve been historically depicted in film and TV (which is, uh, poorly).
“There are so many negative portrayals of female relationships in the media, and I think what’s more true than those are the ones on our show,“ Fahy says. “We are girls who communicate with each other, girls who fight but who listen to each other, girls who apologize when they’ve hurt somebody. That to me is more of an honest representation of female friendship than a lot of the other things out there right now.”
The female hero is evolving rapidly, or maybe she just can’t be pigeonholed anymore. Whatever the case, it took long enough. Action movies with female leads, especially in the superhero subgenre, have certainly been few and far between compared with the slew of male-fronted films. Despite that, movies like Kill Bill, Foxy Brown, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider paved the way for major female-fronted action franchises to take over the box office in the last decade, including The Hunger Games, Divergent, Star Wars, and, of course, Wonder Woman.
This weekend Marvel finally debuted its first solo female superhero movie, Captain Marvel—and with that came countless comparisons to DC’s Wonder Woman. But other than their genre and box office successes, the films—and their heroes—are nothing alike. In fact, as far as heroes go, Captain Marvel is the first of her kind.
Brie Larson as Captain Marvel
Marvel
Their differences are most notable in, where else, their superpowers. Wonder Woman’s defining message is that there’s strength in being feminine, and hers is tangible. We see it radiating off her glowing skin. We see the way her strapless breastplate and short skirt accentuate her curves and muscles. She’s an Amazon, a towering marvel of a woman. Wonder Woman’s calling card is that she’s unlike any male hero. She was literally created in the 1940s to be the antithesis of a male hero, an answer to masculinity—something that was not only revolutionary in its era but controversial.
Captain Marvel, as we’ve come to know her in the MCU, is not that. To start, her backstory is more modern: The character in her current iteration was created by Kelly Sue DeConnick in 2012. Carol Danvers is an Earth-born fighter pilot in the U.S. military. She’s one of us, she’s achievable. She shares our stories, our struggles in the real world. She’s bogged down by the chains of patriarchy, forced to find her own internal feminine strength to get back up each time she’s knocked down. She’s tomboyish—her off-duty wardrobe consists of Nine Inch Nails T-shirts, leather jackets, flannels, and baseball caps—and unlike Wonder Woman, her super-suit neither hugs her hips nor exposes her skin. But it’s not traditionally masculine, either. In some ways, Captain Marvel eludes gender, from her function-first suit to her nearly gender-neutral character development.
From left: Gal Godot as Wonder Woman, Daisy Ridley as Rey in Star Wars
Warner Bros/Disney
Both Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel are monumental characters, and their differences are what make each of them so special and lovable. But while feminine power exudes from Wonder Woman in every action scene, her idyllic form dancing through war-torn fields and obliterating men, Captain Marvel’s is in the subtext. Take the famed No Man’s Land scene in Wonder Woman; Diana stands out in lurid color against a sea of gray male soldiers, towering over them, her long locks twirling with her sword. Captain Marvel’s strength is in her story rather than the visual aids. There’s a subtle nod to girl power in a fight scene set to No Doubt’s “I’m Just a Girl.” In another scene, a montage of misogynists tell Carol she’s too emotional to be a pilot, not strong enough to be an athlete. We watch a pilot prod, “It’s called a cockpit for a reason.”
The most feminine part of Captain Marvel is her ability to overcome in the face of misogyny. It’s endurance—a feminine strength that may not be inherent but is certainly learned, or forced upon women in the real world. I love this about Captain Marvel, along with her inability to be pinned as any type of female hero that came before her. Because while Wonder Woman is powerfully female, many action franchises’ leading women are almost conventionally male. Rey in The Last Jedi and The Force Awakens is reminiscent of the golden boys of saviors past, a Harry Potter reboot. Ellen Ripley of Alien also contains conventionally masculine power, a morally sound badass with brawny muscles.
The trailer for Olivia Wilde‘s directorial debut is here, and it will give you major Superbad vibes. Don’t get it twisted, though. It’s a hilarious, wildly original movie all its own. Titled Booksmart, the flick centers on two high school seniors, Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein, who played Julie in Lady Bird), who played it safe all four years but want to experience one crazy night before college.
“Nobody knows that we are fun,” Molly tells Amy in the trailer. “We didn’t party because we wanted to focus on school and get into good colleges—but the irresponsible people who partied also got into those colleges.”
What transpires is a night of adolescent debauchery straight out of Superbad. (It’s a fitting comparison, given that Jonah Hill is Feldstein’s older brother.) They spray some mace, rob a pizza delivery guy, do lots of joyriding, and…get arrested? “This seems excessive,” Amy says while in handcuffs. “Shotgun!”
Watch the trailer for yourself, below.
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The movie debuted at the South by Southwest Festival this week to rave reviews. Everyone on Twitter is talking about how it’s the new and improved Superbad—which is a high honor, given that movie’s place in pop culture. “This movie looks awesome. It looks like a female-lead Superbad. Which is not only the highest compliment I could give, but also what I would have LOVED as a teenager (and prob still will). @BeanieFeldstein should be in everything! @oliviawilde, direct all the things,” tweeted one person.
“Booksmart: wow. You’re going to hear ‘Superbad for girls.’ And yeah in premise. But Olivia Wilde has made a blazingly original coming-of-age buddy comedy that’s fresh and phenomenally funny,” tweeted someone else who appears to have attended the festival.
Check out some more reactions to the movie and trailer for yourself, below:
Serena Williams—and the U.S. women’s soccer team—isn’t here for the pay gap. On Friday, the tennis icon called the pay gap in sports “ludicrous” while sharing her support for the team and its lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation.
“The pay discrepancy is ludicrous,” Williams, a 23-time grand slam singles champion, told reporters during a press briefing at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California. “It’s a battle; it’s a fight,” she added. “I think at some point in every sport, you have to have those pioneers, and maybe it’s time for soccer.”
Twenty-eight players on the U.S. women’s soccer team announced the lawsuit on Friday, International Women’s Day, alleging what it called “institutionalized gender discrimination.”
The lawsuit goes far beyond pay, which still remains a major issue across the sports industry, and calls out how often female athletes get to train compared to their male counterparts, medical treatment, and more, The New York Times reported.
“I think to be on this team is to understand these issues,” Megan Rapinoe, one of the team’s midfielders, told The New York Times. “And I think we’ve always—dating back to forever—been a team that stood up for itself and fought hard for what it felt it deserved and tried to leave the game in a better place.”
Another female athlete who can relate to fighting hard against gender discrimination is tennis great Billie Jean King. On Friday, she too came out to support the soccer team: “Sports are a microcosm of society. What is happening with the USWNT [United States women’s national soccer team] is happening in the workplace,” she tweeted. “The time has come to give these athletes what they deserve: equality.”
Williams reiterated the importance of this fight not just for the women in sports now, but for all future generations of female athletes. I’m playing because someone else stood up,” she said, “and so what they are doing right now is hopefully for the future of women’s soccer.”
Virginia Woolf. Toni Morrison. Judy Blume. Maya Angelou. Harper Lee. The influence women writers have had on our culture is immeasurable. They’ve brought us The Handmaid’s Tale, Big Little Lies, even Harry Potter. So to whittle down to just one all-time favorite book written by a female author is nearly an impossible task. But in honor of International Women’s Day, we put some of our favorite writers and creators to the test: We asked women like Gillian Jacobs, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Paula McLain to share their most beloved titles, and the results are a mix of classics, new discoveries, and more.
Read on for their favorite books by women, for women.
