2,229 articles
Bedding ceremony
The bedding ceremony, or bedding ritual, was a European wedding custom in which family and friends put newlyweds to bed together, symbolizing and serving as proof of the marriage's consummation.
Begging
Begging is soliciting alms in public, historically regulated from medieval England's Statutes of Labourers through the 1824 Vagrancy Act to the ECHR's Lăcătuș v. Switzerland ruling and the UK's 2026 repeal.
Begum Rokeya
Begum Rokeya (Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, 1880–1932), Bengali Muslim feminist writer of Pairaband, Rangpur; author of Sultana's Dream (1905), founder of a Calcutta girls' school and the Anjuman-i-Khawatin-i-Islam (1916). Not to be confused with the 1948–2026 Netrakona social worker of the same name.
Belarusian national revival
The Belarusian national revival (Беларускае нацыянальнае адраджэнне) is a cultural and political movement reviving Belarusian language and culture, with waves in the 1900s, the 1920s, and after 2020.
Bell hooks
bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins, 1952–2021) was an American feminist theorist and cultural critic, author of Ain't I a Woman and All About Love, known for interlocking critiques of racism, sexism, and class and for engaged pedagogy at Berea College.
Bella Abzug
Bella Abzug (Bella Savitzky, 1920–1998), "Battling Bella," American labor and civil rights lawyer, antiwar activist, and three-term Democratic congresswoman from New York, 1971–1977; first federal gay rights bill, Child Development Act, NWPC cofounder, 1977 National Women's Conference presiding officer.
Berber Spring
The Berber Spring, or Tafsut Imaziɣen, was a period of protests and state repression in Algeria in 1980, sparked when authorities banned Mouloud Mammeri's lecture at Tizi Ouzou.
Berberism
Berberism, known today as the Amazigh movement, is an ethnocultural and political movement in North Africa seeking official recognition of the Berber (Amazigh) language and identity.
Best friends forever
Best friends forever (BFF) is an informal English acronym for a lifelong best friendship, popular from the 1990s via IM and texting sign-offs; related to bestie, friendship bracelets, adolescent intimacy research, and Hall's 300-hour estimate.
Bestiality
Bestiality, also called zoophilia or animal sexual abuse, is any sexual act between a human and an animal. Criminalized since the Code of Hammurabi; all but four U.S. states ban it, with recent reforms in Canada, the UK, and Australia.
Bestiality with a donkey
Sexual contact between humans and donkeys, a documented form of bestiality; recorded from ancient Egypt and Saharan cave art to rural Crete, Anatolia, Morocco, and Mexico, and criminalized in most jurisdictions today.
Beth Holloway
Beth Holloway, also Beth Holloway Twitty, is the American teacher and advocate, mother of Natalee Holloway, who vanished in Aruba in 2005; she founded the Natalee Holloway Resource Center and International Safe Travels Foundation and faced Joran van der Sloot's 2023 confession.
Betty DeGeneres
Betty DeGeneres, New Orleans-born retired speech pathologist and mother of Ellen DeGeneres, became the Human Rights Campaign's first non-gay National Coming Out Project spokesperson in 1997 and wrote Love, Ellen.
Betty Dodson
Betty Dodson, American feminist sex educator and artist, author of Liberating Masturbation/Sex for One, creator of Bodysex group masturbation workshops, repopularizer of the vibrator, later partner of Carlin Ross and Goop Lab figure.
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), co-founded the National Organization for Women in June 1966 and served as its first president, 1966–1970, leading EEOC lobbying and the 1970 Women's Strike for Equality.
Betty Hemings
Betty (Elizabeth) Hemings, 1735–1807, matriarch of the enslaved Hemings family at Monticello; daughter of an English sea captain, mother of twelve including Sally Hemings, six likely by John Wayles.
Betty Williams
Betty Williams, born Elizabeth Smyth, was a Northern Irish peace activist who co-founded the Peace People in 1976 and shared the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize with Mairead Corrigan.
Beverly Vance
Beverly Vance, also Beverly Aikins (born 1961), American registered nurse and mother of Vice President JD Vance; featured in Hillbilly Elegy, recovered from addiction, now a recovery advocate living in Middletown, Ohio.
Bhanwari Devi (भंवरी देवी)
Bhanwari Devi (भंवरी देवी), Rajasthani saathin social worker gang-raped in 1992 for stopping a child marriage; her case led to the Vishakha guidelines and India's POSH Act 2013.
BharatMatrimony
BharatMatrimony is an Indian online matrimonial service, the flagship brand of NSE/BSE-listed Matrimony.com Limited founded by Murugavel Janakiraman. It runs 15 regional language portals, free registration with paid Gold/Diamond/Platinum/Assisted tiers, mandatory mobile verification, and 9.95 lakh paid profiles as of March 2025.
Bhoodan movement
The Bhoodan movement was a Gandhian land-reform effort in India, starting in 1951. It evolved into the Gramdan movement, where entire villages renounced private land ownership.
Bias against left-handed people
Bias against left-handed people: stigma, forced right-hand conversion, and tool design disadvantaging the roughly 10.6% left-handed minority, rooted in right-good/left-bad symbolism and debunked pathology myths.
Bibi Aisha
Bibi Aisha (Aesha Mohammadzai) is an Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off in 2009 for fleeing a forced child marriage; her 2010 TIME cover photograph by Jodi Bieber won World Press Photo of the Year.
Bicycling and feminism
Bicycling and feminism covers the bicycle's role in women's emancipation from the 1890s safety-bike craze, bloomers and Susan B. Anthony's famous claim, to today's cycling gender gap, safety research, and male-dominated bike industry.
Bidar Kadın
Bidar Kadın (Bidâr Kadınefendi, 1858–1918), Circassian consort of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, mother of Naime Sultan and Şehzade Abdülkadir, second kadınefendi from 1895, died in Erenköy, Istanbul.
Bidhoba Bibaha
Bidhoba Bibaha (বিধবা বিবাহ, "widow marriage") was the nineteenth-century movement in colonial Bengal to legalize Hindu widow remarriage, led by Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar and culminating in the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856.
Big Nose Kate
Big Nose Kate (Mary Katherine Horony, Mária Katalin Horony, 1850–1940) was a Hungarian-born frontier dance hall woman and common-law wife of Doc Holliday; she implicated him in the 1881 Tombstone stage robbery, later married George Cummings, and died at the Arizona Pioneers' Home in Prescott.
Big Pharma conspiracy theories
Big Pharma conspiracy theories allege pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and politicians secretly conceal cures or falsify safety data for profit. Common claims include hidden cancer cures, microchipped vaccines, and preplanned pandemics; surveys and models document their prevalence and implausibility.
Bigamy
Bigamy: contracting a marriage while still legally married to another person; a crime in monogamy-recognizing countries, made felony by England's 1604 Act, a ground of annulment, and treated variously where personal law permits polygamy.
Bimbo
Bimbo: English slang from Italian bambino ("little child"); originally a 1919 contemptuous term for a man, shifted by the 1920s to an offensive word for an attractive but unintelligent woman, revived in 1980s scandals, reclaimed on TikTok.