Joan Martines and Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images
‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America
Centuries before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women crossed oceans and deserts to build communities whose legacies still shape the United States.
As anti-Latino sentiment coincides with the 250th anniversary of the United States, we must remember that long before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women inhabited territory that would become the United States.
Like their English Protestant counterparts in New England, Spanish-speaking women were founding mothers of our nation. Their legacies live on through their descendants and the many other Latinas who immigrated to the U.S. over the past 250 years. Faced with the widespread detention of Spanish-speaking women, it is crucial to remember that it has long been their country too.
(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)
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From ‘Every Man’ to the ‘Epstein Class’: Misogyny in Male Peer Culture Cuts Across Class Lines
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Women’s History Month: Looking Back on How Far We’ve Come and the Hill That Lies Ahead
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Sundance 2026: In Documentary ‘One in a Million,’ a Syrian Girl’s Life in Exile Reveals the Long Road After War
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Ms. Global: Iranian Girls’ School Hit in U.S.-Israeli Strikes, Taliban Legalize Domestic Violence, The Netherlands’ First Gay Prime Minister, and More
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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
A State of the State for Women: Taking Stock of the Fight for Democracy at Home and Abroad
March’s Women’s History Month arrives at a moment when our rights, and democracy itself, feel newly precarious.
From feminist perspectives on the war in Iran, where women and girls remain at the forefront of resistance, to the troubling parallels between authoritarian crackdowns abroad and the rollback of reproductive rights here in the United States, the throughline is hard to ignore: Democracy rises and falls with women’s movements and mobilization.
Taking stock of the moment, I’m highlighting reporting and analysis that help make sense of where we are now—from the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes in places like El Salvador, to new data revealing stark disparities in women’s well-being across U.S. states.
At the same time, as the country approaches its 250th anniversary, initiatives like Ms.’ FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists remind us that women’s ideas, resistance and organizing have always been central to the project of democracy—and remain essential to its future.
