A Feminist’s Guide to Halloween

Halloween is coming to town! 

Along with the celebration, candy and charlie brown re-runs characteristic of the season are shelves chock full with sexist and objectifying costumes. That’s why we’ve made a list of creative and empowering costume alternatives in our Feminist’s Guide to Halloween. 

Read more to see our top 11 feminist-inspired costume picks….

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to recognize women in technology. Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, serves as inspiration for generations of women in technology. In recognition of Ada Lovelace Day, here are just a few women who inspire...
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Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to recognize women in technology. Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, serves as inspiration for generations of women in technology.  In recognition of Ada Lovelace Day, here are just a few women who inspire us:

  • Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born actress was instrumental in developing “frequency hopped spread spectrum” technology. This made radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. It also served as the basis for Wi-Fi and wireless phone technologies that we rely on today.
  • Grace Hopper, who started her military career with World War II-era Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), developed validation software for the programming language COBOL. COBOL was a result of Hopper’s belief that programs can be written in a language that was close to English rather than in machine code or languages close to machine code. Hopper served as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy’s Office of Information Systems Planning. In 1994, the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology established the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference “to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.”
  • Honora Smith, Ada Lovelace’s great-great-great niece, works on practical outworking of math in decision making. She applies technology to plan sustainable community health schemes in rural areas of developing countries.
  • Barbara Liskov was the first women to earn a Ph.D. in computer science. Her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess end games. Liskov was instrumental in the development of computer languages that allowed data abstraction, which is fundamental to many programs that we all use today.
  • Galyn Susman, the visual arts director at Pixar, got her start at Apple Computer, where she showed the power of computer-based animation with the animated short “Pencil Test” which was created on the Macintosh II. More recently, she worked on the Pixar films Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille.