Remembering our dear friend Dolores Huerta, the fearless labor organizer and feminist who spent her life fighting for workers, women and justice, and taught us that change begins when we act.
We lost Dolores Huerta on Wednesday, Oct. 28. She died at home in Bakersfield, Calif., surrounded by family. She was 96.
You know the words she left us: “Sí, se puede”—“Yes, it can be done.” People print them on T-shirts now. Dolores never meant them as a slogan; she meant them as an instruction.
Before the strikes, before the boycotts, before the contracts and the awards, she taught school in Stockton, Calif. The children came to her hungry, and some came in clothes too thin for the season. Their parents worked long days in the fields for wages that covered neither.
After watching this for a while, she reached a conclusion most people would have kept to themselves: She could do more for those children by organizing their parents than by teaching them. So she left the classroom. That was the first time she declined to stay where she had been put—but it was not the last.
With Cesar Chavez and Larry Itliong, she helped build what became the United Farm Workers. Often, she was the only woman at the bargaining table. When she was not, she was one of the very few women there with real power.
When she negotiated, growers signed contracts that covered healthcare, retirement and safer working conditions. When she organized the grape boycott, 17 million Americans stopped buying grapes. (Seventeen million!)
We first heard her speak at a convention of the National Organization for Women in the late 1980s. By then, Dolores had spent three decades as the woman nobody had planned for. We asked her to join us in a new venture: a national effort to put more women in elected office. Dolores said yes. She stayed nearly 40 years, becoming an adviser to Ms. magazine after the Feminist Majority Foundation took over publishing it in 2001.
She traveled the country with us. She went looking for women who had never pictured themselves in government, especially Latinas and other women of color, and she told them, more or less, that they could.
We would gather women active in their communities in living rooms and talk about the need for more women to run for office. Then Dolores would say to them, “If you can’t recruit someone to run, then one of you has to step forward as the candidate.”
That work fed the “Year of the Woman” in 1992, when record numbers of women ran for office—and record numbers won.
Hilda Solis, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Lee, Maria Elena Durazo and many more have called her a model, a mentor, an ally. Dolores did not wait for women to be invited into power. She went and got them, and then held together things that other people insisted on keeping apart.
She was a mother of 14 and a practicing Catholic, and she defended reproductive freedom fiercely. She loved the labor movement and fought the sexism she found inside it. She never seemed to think she owed anyone an explanation. She never gave one.
A life like that sends a bill. She was arrested. She was threatened. In 1988, at a demonstration in San Francisco, a police officer nearly beat her to death.
And in March of this year, at 95, Dolores told the public something she had carried for some 60 years: In the 1960s, Cesar Chavez had sexually assaulted her. She had kept silent, she said, because she feared the truth would damage the farmworker movement. She spoke when other survivors came forward.
Consider what that means. Every rally. Every negotiation. Every photograph. She carried it through all of them, and set it down only when setting it down might help someone else.
We do not count that as a footnote to her feminism. We think it tells you most of what you need to know.
Dolores did not retreat. She always went further. She never accepted that a woman’s fight could be separated from the fight for fair wages, for immigrants, for racial justice, for LGBTQ+ equality, for clean water, for the vote.
We have lost a dear friend and a beloved member of our board. The country has lost a great leader for workers, for women, for the earth and for ordinary human decency.
She leaves 13 surviving children, 24 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren, seven great-great-grandchildren and a very large family of organizers who learned from her what “Sí, se puede” actually means.
Even in her 90s, you could find her at a rally, walking a precinct or sitting with a young organizer who had not yet worked out what she was capable of.
You could also find her dancing. That is the part fewer people saw. She loved jazz. She loved music in general. She went out dancing as often as she could.
We will remember her at the microphone, of course. We will also remember her the other way: out late, somewhere with a band, not done yet.
The election is six days away. For 70 years, Dolores knocked on doors to tell people one thing: Democracy works only when you show up. If you want to honor her this week, do what she would have asked. Vote. Then bring someone with you. She would have preferred that to flowers.
Dolores’ instruction still stands. It is addressed to all of us now.
“Sí, se puede.”
The Feminist Awakening of Dolores Huerta
Editor’s note: In June 2026, just four months before her death, Dolores Huerta—a member of the Feminist Majority board—gathered at a private home in Los Angeles with other feminist leaders, writers and thinkers. In her remarks, she reflected on how Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Smeal, Peg Yorkin and Katherine Spillar helped deepen her understanding of feminism, reproductive freedom and women’s right to bodily autonomy. She credited the Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.) with changing her life and giving her the courage to continue fighting for women’s rights around the world.
We share the video and transcript of her remarks below in remembrance of our dear friend and longtime board member—and as a reminder of her enduring belief that we can make change happen. ¡Sí, se puede!
When I was asked to be a part of this organization, I never anticipated how it would change my own life, because I thought I was a feminist. I thought I was a feminist!
And meeting Gloria Steinem and working with Gloria Steinem, she got me to the place of choice. And then I met Ellie and Peg [Yorkin]. And they said, “Hell no. This is not about choice. This is about a woman’s right to her own body.”
So that was a whole different sphere of thinking. And as a Catholic, you can imagine, believing that birth control is a sin and abortion is an even bigger sin. This is the world that I grew up in. This is the world that I believed in.
But I found out that there was another world for women. And the world for women is the world of feminism.
And it took the Feminist Majority Foundation, it took the courage of Ellie Smeal and Kathy Spillar and Peg [Yorkin] to say, “You’ve got to think about yourself, because women have to come first.”
It took a lot to get me to that point. And I think we still have a lot of work to do out there, because a lot of women are not there yet. They’re kind of between where I was at then, in the middle, and where I’m at now.
And I just want to thank the Feminist Majority Foundation for changing my life, for making me strong and giving me the courage I needed then—and still need—as we continue to deal with this world where we know so many women are trapped and caught. And not only here in our country, but all over the world.
And so we have a lot of work still to do. But we know with this organization, and with the leadership that we have with Kathy, Ellie and the rest of the staff here, our board members, that we can make it happen.
¡Sí, se puede!
Thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciate it so much.
*
A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need.
Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. What’s your reproductive freedom story? Add your voice. Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible.
