Meet the New Feminists in Congress Who Are Fighting Back

The progressive women just sworn into office offer a glimmer of “bright hope” as the country enters a second Trump administration.

The first Latina to represent New Jersey in Congress, Rep. Nellie Pou (D-N.J.) arrives for a group photograph on Nov. 15, 2024. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Ms., which hits newsstands Feb. 12. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.


In a brief, inspirational speech at the August 2024 Democratic National Convention, then-Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester—now newly sworn in as the first Black woman senator from Delaware—campaigned on a message of “bright hope,” a phrase inspired by the name of the church her grandmother attended for 70 years in Philadelphia.

Blunt Rochester urged her fellow Democrats, “If you want to see hope, just look,” gesturing in part toward what she imagined would be former Vice President Kamala Harris’ successful campaign for president. While this didn’t materialize, we can still try to embrace Blunt Rochester’s message as we look toward the next four years. We’ll need as much inspiration, collective power and resilience as we can get.

Then-Vice President Kamala Harris participates in a ceremonial swearing-in with Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.) as her mother Alice Blunt looks on at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 3, 2025. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)

On the front lines of this burgeoning hope are the new progressive women in the U.S. Capitol, including three non-incumbent senators and 16 representatives. All of them know that they’re entering a complicated political landscape, one that’s heavily partisan and disheartening to many of their constituents. They’re also experienced and driven, ready to work across the aisle as necessary while remaining dedicated to important causes, from protecting abortion rights and supporting the LGBTQ+ community to advocating for gun control, judicial reform, affordable healthcare and public education.

These women come from all walks of life, sectors of the workforce and backgrounds. Some worked retail or food service jobs to pay their way through school. Others have been lifelong public servants or dedicated themselves to volunteering. They’ve been working physicians, engineers, attorneys, climate change activists, CIA analysts, mayors, state representatives and senators, education advocates, executive directors of nonprofits and small-business owners.

One, Lateefah Simon of California, was the youngest woman to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Another, Laura Gillen of New York, volunteered as a hospice worker in Kolkata, India, in her 20s under the supervision of Mother Teresa.

They are Black, white, Latina and Middle Eastern. Some are proud members of the LGBTQ+ community. Many are from working-class backgrounds. Some are mothers and even grandmothers. Several are first-generation college graduates or the children of immigrants.

For the first time, there is an openly transgender member of the House of Representatives, Sarah McBride, who won Delaware’s only at-large seat. Also for the very first time, there are two Black women serving in the Senate simultaneously: Blunt Rochester from Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks from Maryland.

For Blunt Rochester, as for many others, her campaign was as personal as it was political. She was there as a representative during the Jan. 6, 2021, siege on the Capitol, and cites the insurrection as a generative moment when she saw firsthand the threat to the promise of American democracy. She has worked in politics since the late 1980s, when she was an intern for Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), later serving as Delaware’s first Black and first female labor secretary. Although she moved to China with her second husband for a number of years, when he died suddenly in 2014, she turned back toward politics, determining, in her words, that she had “nothing to lose and everything to give.” In 2016, she became the first Black woman representative from Delaware and somehow simultaneously managed to cochair the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020 and the Harris-Walz campaign in 2024, the latter alongside her own successful campaign for Senate.

Maryland’s Alsobrooks doesn’t think that being a woman or being Black is the most important thing about her election. A lawyer and former state’s attorney, Alsobrooks spoke of a desire to make a difference rather than make history (though she did just that by becoming the first Black U.S. senator from her state). In one interview, she argued for the necessity of broader diversity across the board: “I think everyone should see themselves in the Senate: of every race, of every gender and every background. And until and unless we do that our country cannot be as strong as it should be.” Another glaring imperative, according to Alsobrooks and many of the other new feminists in Washington, is protecting the rights of women and girls. “The Republican party has now created not just a policy—it’s a platform issue to roll back the rights and freedoms of women,” she said.

This is not the first time that politics has created tension. We’ve always gotten through those periods with two things: engaged citizens and principled leaders.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.)

The third new woman senator, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, while having focused much of her campaign on manufacturing and strengthening the U.S. middle class, also stresses that a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices is “one of the fundamental flashpoint issues of our time.” A former CIA analyst and U.S. representative, Slotkin has a long history of working across the aisle. She noted post-election that some of her constituents must have voted for both her and Donald Trump, a sign of the muddy waters of contemporary U.S. politics and the need for continued bipartisan efforts. “This is not the first time that politics has created tension,” she notes. “We’ve always gotten through those periods with two things: engaged citizens and principled leaders … ready to receive the ball and do something about it.”

This article originally appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Ms.

While no new women won the 2024 races for governor, two progressive women did win contested bids for lieutenant governor, a position that often flies under the radar but which, in some states, functions in a similar way to the role of vice president.

In North Carolina, for instance, where former state Sen. Rachel Hunt has taken the reins, lieutenant governors preside over and break ties in the state Senate, and serve on the state Board of Education, Board of Community Colleges and Capital Planning Commission.

In Delaware, Senate Democratic leaders praised their former colleague Kyle Evans Gay’s ascension to lieutenant governor by emphasizing the greater good she can now do for issues she already championed. Several state Democrats wrote in a statement, “In the years we’ve worked with Sen. Gay in the Senate, we have known her to be a fearless champion for women and families, working to expand abortion access, protect voting rights, make childcare more affordable and codify equal rights for all Delawareans.”

For the new U.S. House members, being able to work both within and across party lines will also be crucial—and it’s a task for which they’re amply prepared. In the House, 16 new feminist women have joined the 78 Democratic incumbent women. Almost every state in the U.S. has sent at least one woman to serve as a U.S. representative (Mississippi being the lone exception).

Rep. Luz Rivas (D-Calif.) on the steps of the House of Representatives at the U.S. Capitol on Nov 15, 2024, during orientation for new members. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

From California, new Reps. Laura Friedman, Luz Rivas and Lateefah Simon represent very different backgrounds and constituencies.

  • A former state assemblymember and Glendale mayor, Friedman considers herself a community activist; she’s previously worked on gun control, affordable housing, healthcare, climate change legislation and ending the California fur trade.
  • Rivas, whose parents were Mexican immigrants, has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s of education from Harvard University. She also founded the nonprofit DIY Girls to encourage girls’ participation in science, technology, engineering and math.
  • Born legally blind, Simon was a single mother at 18, only a year before she became the executive director of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, an organization where she’d previously worked as an outreach coordinator supporting marginalized women and girls in the sex and drug trades.

Sarah McBride, stepping into Delaware’s only U.S. House seat, faced pushback from her Republican colleagues before she’d even been sworn in. South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace introduced a measure to ban transgender women from the women’s bathrooms at the U.S. Capitol, openly stating that she did so in response to McBride’s imminent arrival in D.C.

Nevertheless, McBride remains focused on the important work. “I’m used to working with people who not only disagree with me, but who disagree with me on some pretty fundamental issues to my own life,” she said shortly after her win. But she also urged the continued need for empathy no matter someone’s politics, writing on X, “Every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully[.] I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness.”

Reps. Sarah Elfreth (D-Md.), Sarah McBride (D-Del.), Emily Randall (D-Wash.) and other congressional freshmen of the 119th Congress gather for a group photo on the steps of the House of Representatives on Nov. 15, 2024. (Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

McBride is joined by two other openly LGBTQ+ representatives, Julie Johnson of Texas and Emily Randall of Washington state.

  • An out lesbian, Johnson helped start the LGBTQ+ Caucus in the Texas House of Representatives while serving there.
  • A queer Latina who’s also a first-generation college graduate, Randall paid her way through school with a combination of retail and food service jobs and financial aid. Later she worked for various nonprofits, including Planned Parenthood. Galvanized by Trump’s first election, she narrowly won her 2018 race for the Washington state Senate.

In another first, Arizona’s Yassamin Ansari, the youngest woman ever elected to the Phoenix City Council and former vice mayor of Phoenix, has become the first Iranian American to represent Arizona in Congress.

In Oregon, Janelle Bynum flipped her district’s seat from red to blue, making her the first Black woman from Oregon in the U.S. House. “It’s not lost on me that I am one generation removed from segregation. It’s not lost on me that we’re making history,” Bynum, a small-business owner and restaurateur, said at a post-election press conference.

Also from Oregon, Maxine Dexter, a physician and former state representative, said she ran in part because she wanted to show how “physicians have a powerful role to play in public policymaking.”

Kelly Morrison of Minnesota, an OB-GYN, would agree. She first ran for office in 2018 and worked in both the Minnesota House and Senate before becoming a U.S. representative.

Last year in Maryland, the state’s 10-person delegation included no women. This year, with the election of Alsobrooks to the Senate, as well as Sarah Elfreth and April McClain Delaney to the House, there are three.

  • Elfreth was the youngest woman elected to the state Senate.
  • McClain Delaney, a daughter of Idaho potato farmers who worked for the Biden-Harris administration, ran her platform on the slogan “Common Sense, Common Ground,” emphasizing the need to push back against what she calls “hyperpartisanship.”

Several of the other new feminist representatives have long careers in public service or government.

  • Michigan’s Kristen McDonald Rivet was a state senator, the executive director of Michigan Head Start, chief of staff for the state’s Department of Education and vice president of the Skillman Foundation.
  • Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire has been embedded in the state government since birth; she was born on Election Day, and her mother served in the New Hampshire state House. Goodlander was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve before becoming an instructor of constitutional law. She also served as counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment trial.
  • Nellie Pou, the first Latina to represent New Jersey in Congress, is a lifelong public servant and former state senator.
  • New York’s Laura Gillen, who defeated an incumbent to win her seat, volunteered in her teen years to assist people living with HIV/AIDS during the height of the epidemic. She eventually went to law school. When she became town supervisor of Hempstead, N.Y., in 2017, she was the first Democrat in that position in more than a century.

While we can be glad for this new crop of progressive women in Congress who are remaining steadfast in their convictions, women still have a long way to go. Only slightly more than a quarter of the seats in the U.S. House are held by women, and women make up just 25 percent of the Senate.

The landmark 2018 U.S. midterms brought with them a blue wave, setting the record for the highest number of non-incumbent Democratic women voted into the House of Representatives in a single election. In that fateful season, 35 new Democratic women representatives were elected alongside three new Democratic women senators.

Certainly, we should be strategizing and working to elect another wave of progressive women in 2028. Hopefully these women will set a few new records and turn the balance of power in the process. But we shouldn’t wait two years to celebrate the new feminist women voted into office this past November—women who will champion a host of crucial causes for their states and for us all.

About

Aviva Dove-Viebahn is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Arizona State University and a contributing editor for Ms.' Scholar Writing Program.