Kristiana Colón, Charlene Carruthers, Rachel Williams, Janaé Bonsu, and Veronica Morris-Moore: the queer women shaping Chicago's Black Lives Matter movement Credit: danielle A. scruggs

Last year, to celebrate International Women’s Day, we published a list of some of the best stories about women kicking ass from our decades of archives. The inspiring things we learned on that deep dive into the strong femmes of the past—not to mention the disgusting misogynistic flailings of a certain infantile new president—made it a given that we’d do it again this year. In the intervening 365 days, the Reader featured so many stories by or about amazing women (if not both!) that this list could’ve been way too long for any normal human’s attention span. Blast “Rebel Girl” and topple the patriarchy with this collection of the Reader‘s recent female-centric work.