Keeping Score: Protestors Took to the Streets During the Weinstein Trial

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.


Lest We Forget

“I’ve tried my very best to live a life of my own making, and not just a series of events that happened to me. But one that I could stand back and look at and recognize my handwriting all over. Sometimes messy and scrawling, sometimes careful and precise. But one that I had carved with my own hand. And I wouldn’t have been able to do this without employing a woman’s right to choose—to choose when to have my children and with whom, when I felt supported and able to balance our lives as all mothers know that the scales must and will tip towards our children.” —Michelle Williams, accepting the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Limited Series.

“What keeps me on my feet in this prison, while my body bruised and wounded, is my love for the honorable, but tormented, people of this country, and my ideals of justice and freedom. To honor the innocent people’s blood shed atrociously, I pledge to speak the truth, defy tyranny and defend the oppressed until my last breath.” —Narges Mohammadi, a prominent Iranian feminist, in a letter from Zanjan prison.

Milestones

+ Meet Susan Rizzo: the first female Comptroller for Albany County.

+ Last month, Angela Okafor also made history as Bangor, Maine’s first immigrant and first person of color to be elected City Councillor.

+ The Equal Rights Amendment advanced in the Virginia Senate Friday, when a resolution to ratify passed 10-5.

+ Performer Awkwafina made Golden Globes history on Sunday as the first-ever person of Asian descent to win in the category, and only the sixth Asian woman to be nominated in it.

+ Ruth Bader Ginsburg is cancer-free.

How We’re Doing

+ A new study from researchers at the University of California San Francisco and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in JAMA Internal Medicine posits that as many as 1.4 million girls and women between the ages of 15 and 20 have had unnecessary pelvic exams in the span of just one year. (Read more at The Cut)

About

Carmen Rios is a self-proclaimed feminist superstar and the former digital editor at Ms. Her writing on queerness, gender, race and class has been published in print and online by outlets including BuzzFeed, Bitch, Bust, CityLab, DAME, ElixHER, Feministing, Feminist Formations, GirlBoss, GrokNation, MEL, Mic, the National Women’s History Museum, SIGNS and the Women’s Media Center; and she is a co-founder of Webby-nominated Argot Magazine. @carmenriosss|carmenfuckingrios.com