This past week, New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn and Councilwoman Gale Brewer joined several of Ms. magazine’s founding editors, along with Ms. writers and supporters, to observe the magazine’s 40th anniversary in the city of its birth. The Council issued a formal proclamation honoring the magazine’s groundbreaking reporting and activism on behalf of [...]
For a woman, to travel can be a feminist act. Women who set out and proclaim themselves citizens of the world tread a path that is often the prerogative of (privileged) men. Yet women who can and do take physical journeys often experience emotional transformations as well. Singer/songwriter Imani Uzuri’s latest musical release (and second [...]
It’s been 20 years since the L.A. Riots and I can’t put the grainy footage from that video out of my head. A young black girl approaches a checkout counter. An older Asian American woman reaches across the counter to grab the girl’s clothes and backpack. The girl responds with her fists, knocking the woman [...]
Ntozake Shange, feminist author of the critically acclaimed choreopoem for colored girls who’ve considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, as well as numerous poetry collections and novels (most recently the 600-page Some Sing, Some Cry, co-written with her sister Ifa Bayeza), gets personal, political and lyrical in her latest work, Lost in Language and [...]
Almost everyone has an Anita Hill story. Some of us remember exactly where we were when that theater of sex, race and gender called a “hearing” was broadcast in primetime. Others recall water-cooler and sidewalk conversations and debates about guilt and innocence, about sexual harassment as a “white lady’s problem,” about the effect of the [...]
At a time when far too much of the public discourse about black women is either dooming us to eternal spinsterhood or “proving” our unattractiveness through racist pseudoscience, Melissa Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America insists that black women’s feelings and experiences not only matter but also are “inherently political.” Harris-Perry [...]
I picked up a copy of Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling novel The Help at an airport bookstore. I figured the four-hour flight to Texas would be enough time to absorb 544 plot-driven pages, and reading the novel during one of my frequent trips south seemed appropriate. For some readers, The Help calls up memories of being [...]
It took filmmaker and activist Aishah Shahidah Simmons 13 years to fund, produce, direct and release her inspirational and defiant NO! The Rape Documentary. NO! brings together archival footage, testimonies of rape survivors, performances and interviews with activists and scholars to examine rape in African American communities through a black feminist lens. The international acclaim [...]
Last fall, after blogger Gina Ulysse lamented the public silence of acclaimed scholar and feminist icon bell hooks, the Ms. Blog hosted “bell hooks week,” inviting writers to reflect on hooks’ contributions and apply her trenchant theories to current cultural phenomena. Not surprisingly, bell hooks week was a huge success. We featured writing by Janell [...]
On January 28, just two days after the brutal murder of Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato, the United Kingdom’s high court granted another Ugandan, lesbian asylum seeker Brenda Namigadde, a temporary reprieve from deportation. Namigadde’s initial application for asylum was rejected because she is not “lesbian enough.” Her appeal is scheduled for Friday. According [...]
