‘Lone Star Three’: How Three UT Austin Students Paved the Way for Birth Control Access in 1960s Texas
In 1969 Victoria Foe, Judy Smith and Barbara Hines were students at the University of Texas in Austin when Smith invited Foe and Hines to attend women’s liberation meetings at her house. Their discussions led them to start a campus Birth Control Information Center and eventually evolved into an underground network that helped women access safe abortion at a time when it was illegal in Texas.
Their activism would eventually extend far beyond their university campus, planting the seeds for Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that would legalize abortion in the U.S. Not until 1965 did birth control in the U.S. become legal for married women. Not until 1972 did it become legal for anyone, married or unmarried, to access birth control.
A new documentary, Lone Star Three, directed by Karen Stirgwolt, tells the story of the women who formed the underground networks that allowed young women to access reproductive care in Texas in the days leading up to Roe v. Wade. Ms. recently spoke with Foe and Hines (Smith passed away in 2013), and archivist Alice Embree, about their activism from the 1960s to the present moment.
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Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America
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Aid Held Hostage: How Trump’s Expanded Global Gag Rule Weaponizes Foreign Assistance
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Thursday, March 5, in St. Paul, Minn.: Elaine Welteroth and Janell Hobson on the Power of Feminist Media
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March 2026 Reads for the Rest of Us
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FAQs About the SAVE America Act and Its Impact on Voters
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Founding Feminists: 250 Years of an Unfinished Revolution (With Janell Hobson)
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small group of men declared that “all men are created equal,” casting a vision of liberty that has shaped the American imagination ever since. But even as they debated freedom in Philadelphia, women were writing, organizing, governing, resisting and insisting on their place within the nation taking form.
As Ms. launches a new series on our country’s Founding Feminists this month, Dr. Michele Goodwin is joined by the series’ editor, Professor Janell Hobson, to discuss what America’s 250th anniversary means for women and the feminist agenda.
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Driving the Vote for Equality Launches, Reviving a 1916 Suffrage Tour for the ERA
In 1916, two adventurous, gutsy women—Alice Snitjer Burke, 39, and Nell Richardson, 25, both members of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association—were determined to spread the message about the importance of women’s suffrage. With support from NAWSA, they volunteered to make an epic car trip across the country and back in a small Saxon roadster for “the cause.” At the time, few women drove cars, and automobiles were a big part of a major cultural shift from horses and buggies. Such a trip would be symbolic on many levels.
Their journey often made front-page news due in part to the novelty of seeing a woman drive a car, but Alice and Nell kept the focus on “votes for women.”
The Driving the Vote for Equality tour officially launched on March 1, 2026, at the New York Historical in Manhattan. A restored 1914 Saxon automobile—matching the make and model driven by Burke and Richardson in 1916—has begun retracing their cross-country route to promote congressional recognition of the Equal Rights Amendment. Former Rep. Carolyn Maloney, a longtime ERA champion, is spearheading the campaign.
Ken Florey Suffrage Collection / Gado / Getty Images
America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small group of men declared that “all men are created equal,” casting a vision of liberty that has shaped the American imagination ever since.
Yet even as they debated freedom in Philadelphia, women were writing, organizing, governing, resisting and insisting on their place within the nation taking form. Some, like Mary Katherine Goddard, literally set their names in print; others, like Phillis Wheatley, wrote themselves into intellectual existence against a backdrop of enslavement and doubt. Still others left their mark through acts of refusal and flight, choosing freedom when the republic would not grant it.
A new series, Founding Feminists—launching at the start of Women’s History Month—unfolds over two months, twice a week. On this semiquincentennial of the United States, Ms. turns to these “founding feminists” not as anachronistic heroines, but as architects of an unfinished democratic project. There is no nation without women at its core—no democracy without their labor, intellect, resistance and imagination.
From Haudenosaunee matrilineal governance, to Black women’s freedom-seeking acts, from revolutionary manifestos to quiet domestic rebellions, our Founding Feminists series reexamines the past to illuminate our present moment of backlash and possibility.
If the Declaration of Independence set forth a promise of equality, it was women—across race, class, sexuality and nationality—who pressed the nation to live up to it.
Two hundred and fifty years later, their questions remain ours: What does freedom truly mean, and who gets to claim it?
