One overlooked woman, one storyteller, one live room.
Nevertheless She Existed is a live feminist history show recorded at Caveat on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where each episode hands the stage to a guest who tells the story of one overlooked woman. The tellers include comedians, activists and academics, and the history comes with crowd banter, bawdy jokes and strong language.
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Nevertheless She Existed is a feminist history show recorded in front of a live crowd at Caveat, a basement comedy club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Every story has one job: to celebrate a woman whom history underappreciated, overlooked or forgot altogether. The interesting part is who gets the microphone. Hosts Kylie Holloway and Molly open with context and some history, then give the stage to a guest, and the guests are a mix of comedians, activists, academics and performers. Each one handles the material differently. Moiya McTier, telling the story of Willie Hobbs Moore, stops to ask the room for a show of hands on redlining. She then explains how 1940s federal housing maps marked neighborhoods with many Black residents as dangerous, which kept Black families in Atlantic City boxed into those areas. Junior Mintt plays Mary Ellen Pleasant for momentum, following a white-passing businesswoman in the 1800s through laundromats, flower shops, boarding homes and men-only restaurants, where the gossip of businessmen doubled as her education. Catherine Clune-Taylor takes a more reflective line on Audre Lorde, talking about Lorde's difficult relationship with her mother and her insistence on being taken as a whole person, Black and lesbian at once. Solange Azor presents Marsha P. Johnson's demand for gay rights as a demand for liberation for everyone, bound up with fights against racism, classism, sexism and the police. Azor also mentions that the first trans statue in the United States is coming to the city. Two episode titles share the banner 'Boss of Her Body'. In one, Brittany Brave and Onika McLean arrive dressed as Flo Kennedy and list her roles: lawyer, activist, feminist, civil rights advocate, actress and defender of abortion rights. In the other, the storyteller mentions that the piece began as a master's thesis performance, and tells how Joycelyn Elders became the first Black woman surgeon general of the United States and was later fired. The comedy is bawdy and unembarrassed, from kegel jokes about the green room to a sign-off urging kindness to other women and queer people. It gets emotional too, and one teller admits to crying at the back for the whole show. A run of episodes was released to platform Black storytellers from the show's community, drawn from live sets that had not yet reached the feed, as a gesture of solidarity with Black Lives Matter. That run is a good place to start, because each piece pairs one woman with one voice. The Willie Hobbs Moore story comes from one of the show's first live shows. The show is a production of Caveat Media, produced by Kylie Holloway and edited by Paula Pickering. What a listener gets is women's history told by people with a stake in their subject, to a room that is invited to answer back.
Made for: Suits a listener who likes women's history best with jokes, a live crowd and a strong point of view, and who is comfortable with frank, profane comedy alongside serious material about race, queerness and civil rights.
What sets it apart: There is no single narrator. Each story goes to a different guest on a live club stage, so the same feminist history premise can come out as stand-up, scholarship, drag or a double act in costume, depending on who holds the mic.
This is the radical feminist history party you've been waiting for. Recorded at Caveat in NYC, each episode of Nevertheless She Existed brings the story of an erased woman from history from our LES speakeasy right to your earbuds. You'll hear tales of gay nuns burned as witches, queens of NYC thieves, mothers, warriors, and poets. The fabulous, funny, and fierce comedians Molly Gaebe and Kylie Holloway serve as our hosts and voices as we travel down the rabbit hole of women's history. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll definitely say "f*ck yeah" because Nevertheless, She Existed.
A vulva costume at a protest is your cue that Molly and Kylie won't whisper history to you.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Audre Lorde's life and work are framed through family, breast cancer, and women of color publishing.
Audre Lorde comes through as a writer who would not split lesbian identity from Black identity, and the episode grounds that stance in the pressures of family, illness, and publication.
A candid live portrait of Jocelyn Elders and the political backlash around her public-health candor.
Jocelyn Elders' brief tenure as the first Black woman surgeon general gives the episode its charge: a public-health leader pulled into political backlash over sex, education, and who gets to speak plainly.
A live, irreverent portrait of Flo Kennedy's politics, performance, and unmistakable public style.
Florence "Flo" Kennedy comes through as a lawyer, activist, feminist, civil rights advocate, actress, and defender of abortion rights, but the episode is most alert to how her public style became part of the politics.
A live, profane feminist-history conversation about reproductive rights, political comedy, and people pushed out of the story.
Reproductive rights land as feminist history with a live-wire edge, framed through overlooked women and recorded at Caveat in New York City. The conversation treats advocacy as both political memory and present-tense pressure, with comedy doing more than softening the subject.
Messy women, sharp history, Regency receipts.
Feminist history with wine-night velocity.
Women’s history with drinks, jokes, and bite.
Earth stories, science lives, human impact.
Difficult women, messy histories, sharp company.
Gold Rush California, told through its women
Moiya McTier tells Willie Hobbs Moore's story through the claim that "it takes excellence to be the first," connecting academic achievement with opening paths for others.
Catherine Kloon-Taylor presents Audre Lorde as a Black lesbian mother warrior poet whose writing turned difference into political force.
Nevertheless She Existed closes its Boss of Her Body series with a live episode that links masturbation history to Jocelyn Elders's defense of abortion access and sex education.
Flo Kennedy's line that abortion would be "a sacrament" if men could get pregnant frames Nevertheless She Existed's "Boss of Her Body: Flo Kennedy" episode.
["Liz Winstead says anti-abortion lawmakers have an 'incredibly ill-conceived' idea of sex and pregnancy, and the episode opens with burial and cremation rules for aborted or miscarried tissue.", "Kylie and Molly interview Winstead, the co-creator and former head writer of The Daily Show and co-founder of Abortion Access Front, in a live Caveat recording from New York City.", "The episode asks how satire, profanity, and direct clinic defense can answer anti-abortion legislation without smoothing over the conflict.", "The second half turns to Susan Wicklund, whose path runs from rural Wisconsin and a bad abortion to midwifery, medical school, and years of provider harassment."]
Nevertheless She Existed profiles Dr.
A live feminist history podcast that tells the stories of overlooked women from history, starting with a series on witches.
A live comedy podcast that tells the stories of overlooked women in history, with this episode focusing on Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans.
This episode explores the story of Benedetta Carlini, a Catholic mystic and lesbian nun, as part of a series on witches in women's history.