We live in a time where women’s rights, representation, and agency are under renewed pressure. We may not like it, we may be outraged, but we are here…still.
In an age of social media virality and short attention spans, people who have never paused to listen, now feel comfortable silencing others.
When men dominate pundit panels, editorial desks, corporate boardrooms, and decision making tables, what stories go untold? What perspectives go unheard?
Historically and systemically, women, particularly women of color, queer women, trans women, have been marginalized.
It is not enough to incrementally include them at the edges. Many only look at how far we’ve come, and not enough look at how much farther we need to go. Sure, women have it better than they used to, but do they? Does anyone care what we have to say? Are we listened to when we do indeed wish to speak? Amplification demands centering women at the core.
This issue of Beaver’s Digest aims to do just that.
Behind the cover, you will find articles challenging the very idea that women should not be in power, from past to present, from feminist theory to lived experience.
There’s a famous saying originally said by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: “Well behaved women seldom make history”.
Here, you will read stories of women who speak up, who disrupt, who mentor, who embody voice. You’ll see what a “modern feminist” looks like, what it even means to be a feminist in the digital era, and what this group of talented twenty-something year olds feel about the gender divide.
We also want to acknowledge something subtle, but crucial: amplification is not speaking for women. It is making space for women to speak for themselves.
It is building publishing structures, editorial practices, and community networks that actively dismantle gatekeeping. It is partnering with voices historically pushed aside.
One such voice is Jennifer Moody, who was a journalist for 27 years and is now the Journalism Adviser for Orange Media Network’s print programs. Moody’s reflections remind us of just how subtle and embedded gender inequity still is in the newsroom.
“So I find the idea that a woman being in journalism would ever be puzzling to anybody, or that they would see that as non-traditional, or that they would wonder about it. I mean we go back to Nellie Bly and Ida B Wells, it doesn’t occur to me that there’s any difference in the world nor should there be.”
Moody entered the field at a time when the remnants the so-called “women’s page” still lingered in journalism.
“Before my time at the Democrat Herald we had a news clerk whose job it was to do the women’s page. There used to be a women’s page where you had things like wedding announcements, and people who went traveling, and I don’t know even what was part of the women’s page, by the time I got there it wasn’t there anymore.”
Even as those outdated structures faded, inequity remained. “… I can say proportionately speaking I have always, in the few newsrooms that I’ve worked with, there have always been women. We have never outnumbered the men,” she says. “ There were women editors, but there were more men. They were women publishers. There were more men. They were women cop reporters, there were more men.”
Moody speaks on how representation is essential to truthful storytelling. “I will say, it’s very important for women to be a part of journalism like it is for them to be a part of any professional organization, because you cannot adequately cover a population with representation from only half of it.”
These are the layers of truth this issue wrestles with, the visible and invisible, the systemic and the personal.
Seen from the corner of your eye, this cover might look nostalgic… a nod to an era of cinched waists, prominent lipstick, gloves, and coiffed hairstyles – a reference to an “ideal America” where women supposedly were meek, mild, and perfect. But look closer.
This visual is central to our mission. It begs questions: Can you wear pearls and demand your seat at the table? Can you don a fitted dress and lead a boardroom meeting? Can you adopt the visual language of the 1950s, of this supposed “proper woman”, and reject its prescriptions?
We merged these elements deliberately. The front steps of the Women’s Building at Oregon State University evoke stability, foundation, and history. The vintage dresses and petticoats signal legacy and memory, but also give us a reference point as to how far we’ve come
The college students wearing them, modern and varied in posture, hair, and gaze, declare that the battle for voice and agency did not stay in the past. They carry it forward. They stand on the steps not to be ornamental but to reclaim their right to speak, to lead, to challenge.
Flip through these pages. Listen, read, feel. This magazine is not a polished showcase of ideas you are already comfortable with. It is a push and a break in the volume that will confront your assumptions of womanhood and challenge your ideas. We intend for it to be messy, complicated, layered, demanding, and so much more. Just as we know women themselves to be.
Amplifying women’s voices matters because stories change hearts, frameworks, culture. When women speak, institutions bend. Narratives shift. Futures open.
And when women refuse to whisper, when they lean into discomfort, when they occupy space with boldness, then that glass ceiling starts to crack. We wish to shatter that glass ceiling.
This is why “Ain’t No 1950s Shit” happened. This is why this issue exists. This is why your attention matters.
Welcome.
