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About my Substack
I’m Rachel Hewitt, an award-winning, best-selling feminist historian. I write feminist life lessons, informed by history.
I focus on the psychology of patriarchy: how and why men abuse women, how men’s abuse shapes women’s beliefs and possibilities, and how women can be freed from male power.
I draw on historical case studies to illuminate these patterns, and to show how feminist change can be brought about, both for individual women and for whole societies.
I investigate types of change ranging from era-defining revolutions to new year’s resolutions, from political protest to acts of self-care such as running. As the Icelandic writer Kristin Helga Gunnarsdottir puts it, ‘If one creates small revolutions every day…then the world shifts, taking one along with it.’
For my Substack community, I create 2 posts per week. Many are feminist essays, usually with historical and psychological angles, and others are related to my Sustaining Physical Activity community, where I seek to encourage readers (especially women) to access the freedom offered by long-term physical activity.
Many of my posts are initially free to read but freelance writing is my full-time job and only professional income, and I believe that women’s work, training, qualifications and time should be valued. So some posts will be offered to paid subscribers and the free posts will go behind a paywall a fortnight after publication.
If you do not have the means to pay for a subscription but would find it helpful to read the paywalled posts in the archive, then I offer free-of-charge ‘Sisterhood Subscriptions’ to women who feel they would benefit from my writing, through which you can access all my articles, paid and free. I don’t need to see any proof of income: please just message me here, with “Sisterhood Subscription” as the only words in your message.
If you do have the means, and would like to support my work (and also my ability to offer free Sisterhood Subscriptions to other readers), then please consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’re a man, and have benefitted from the financial and social power that patriarchy confers on men, then please consider becoming a paid subscriber, with extra enthusiasm!
About me
I am the author of four books. Most recently, I published In Her Nature: How Women Break Boundaries in the Great Outdoors (2023), a feminist history and memoir of women’s outdoor sport, with a particular focus on trail-running and climbing. I have also recently published The Last Bastion: A History of Women in Sport, 1984-2024 (2025), which was a private commission to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the charity Women in Sport. My other books are A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (2017): a history of revolutionary shifts in our attitudes towards emotions; and the best-selling Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (2010), a history of the UK’s national mapping agency and the ways in which people have interacted with landscape. I’m a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, if you’d like to read more about me and my work, you can visit my author’s website.
