Hey,
October has barely begun, and already the world feels louder. Soon there’ll be holiday spending, sales, travel, year-end deadlines and a thousand other things.
But before that we really need to ask: Why have women always needed ways to tell one another what was happening?
Long before newsletters landed in inboxes, women passed information through newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, meetings and movements. Sometimes because the mainstream conversation wasn’t talking about their lives. Sometimes because knowing what was changing – in law, health, work, money or culture – changed what they could do next.
The medium keeps changing. The need to know never really has.
So, #Edition97 is about information — and why knowing what deserves your attention has always been a form of agency.
Inside this Edition:
👉 Why Knowing What’s Going On Has Always Mattered for Women
🥗 What she’s watching, reading, doing
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her
Information isn't only protection. It is also participation. 🤔
👉 Why Knowing What’s Going On Has Always Mattered for Women
Before there were long girl-coded DMs, there were pages passed from woman to woman. In 1849, Amelia Bloomer began editing The Lily. It started as a temperance newspaper, but its pages soon widened into questions of women’s rights – partly because writing offered women a way into public debate at a time when speaking publicly could itself be considered improper.
Nearly half a century later, Black women who were often excluded even from white women’s political spaces built channels of their own. In 1894, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Florida Ruffin Ridley published The Woman’s Era, the first newspaper founded and edited by Black women. It carried politics, social issues, club news and arguments about suffrage and helped connect Black women’s organizations across the country.
The same pattern kept repeating. When the existing conversation did not make enough room for women’s experiences, women made another conversation. 💚
By 1972, Ms. magazine was putting subjects including economic inequality, reproductive rights, domestic violence and sexual harassment into a national women’s publication. Its first regular issue sold out rapidly becoming evidence that the appetite for that information was already there.
For generations, the fight was often about getting access to information.
Now information is fighting for access to us.
In 2026, social and video platforms became the most widely used route to online news globally across the 48 markets surveyed by the Reuters Institute. In the U.S., 31% of adults under 30 say social media is the first place they turn when breaking news happens.
More information is not necessarily more clarity. Knowing what is happening doesn't mean you need to know everything. It means to know when healthcare shortage could affect your body. When workplace changes could affect your income. When new tech could reshape your job. When a law, financial decision or cultural shift might alter the choices available to you in the background.
And it also means knowing about the good things: new opportunities, new researches, women building companies, breaking records, gaining ground and changing industries.
Being informed is not an instruction to spend your life refreshing breaking-news alerts until the world becomes unbearable. It is simply refusing to live entirely downstream of decisions you never saw coming.
Women once built newspapers because they needed somewhere their lives could appear on the page. Today, we don't need another place to put more information. We need better ways to decide which information matters.
🔍 Currently, Her
💬 Ideas to tune into when the world’s too loud.
🎬 WATCH: Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print
Through some of Ms. magazine’s most memorable covers and stories, this HBO documentary looks at how the publication put abortion, work, race, sex, harassment and women’s private lives into public conversation when much of mainstream media wouldn’t. What changes when women get to decide what deserves coverage?
📖 READ: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
Historical fiction built around the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Esme grows up beneath the sorting table and begins collecting words that are discarded or ignored, eventually noticing how often language connected to women’s lives and experiences goes unrecorded.
🎧 LISTEN: The News by Paramore
A song about the strange exhaustion of living inside a nonstop information cycle, caring about what is happening, feeling guilty for looking away, and still knowing your nervous system cannot absorb everything at once.
✨ For the version of you who wants context, not just more content.
🗞 Her World, This Week
Yesterday, we began with HWD’s young sister-brand.
Her Daily Download is where the world is downloaded for her before all the things take up her mental and emotional space.
💡 Her Spotlight
Found her. Loved her. Needed you to see her.
Years ago, Safiya Umoja Noble (@safiya.noble.phd) searched “Black girls” on Google while looking for activities for her young stepdaughter. What came back was overwhelmingly sexualized and pornographic content. That search changed the direction of her work.
Noble began asking a question: What if the information we find first is not simply the most relevant but the result of systems carrying somebody else’s biases?
Her research became Algorithms of Oppression, the landmark book showing how commercial search engines can reproduce racism and sexism, especially against women of color. Today, the UCLA professor studies how algorithms, AI and digital platforms shape what societies get to see, know and believe.
Noble adds the uncomfortable question to our lives: Who decides what you are shown?
✨ Know more about Safiya Umoja Noble here.
🤍 Note to Her
Her Weekly Download has two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – plus a Sunday news special for the women-first stories worth knowing.
✨P.S. Send this to her who needs to know this because the best kind of wisdom goes from women to women 💚