The year 2024 had promised an era of women rising to the top. This was spectacularly highlighted by the historic presidential run of Vice President Kamala Harris, who had mounted an unprecedented campaign in just over 100 days. The collective enthusiasm, launched with scores of Zoom calls—kicked off by the energetic efforts of Win With Black Women—and various celebrity endorsements certainly gave the impression that Harris could be the first woman (of any color but also specifically the first Black and South Asian woman) to become president of the United Status.
Sadly, Harris fell short of the necessary votes. However, the enthusiasm was not greatly exaggerated. Harris still received close to 75 million votes, more than either President Barack Obama in his two campaigns or Hillary Clinton in 2016. She was just overwhelmed by an opponent and former president who had spent nine years in the limelight and had run on a wave of cultural backlash against the progressive politics that Harris represented.
2024 nonetheless demonstrated that women still hold powerful sway across our popular culture, even as they struggle for the highest political position (we could even argue their cultural presence ignited the political backlash against women’s power and influence). We continue to hold onto hope for a feminist future with more opportunities for gender and racial breakthroughs, which are still possible because they have been imagined and envisioned in our pop culture. Here are our picks for the year’s top 10 feminist moments.
10. “Mother Is Mothering!”
Kamala Harris may not have won her presidential campaign, but her impersonation by Saturday Night Live veteran and comedic actor Maya Rudolph was a winner across many platforms and audiences. Indeed, Rudolph not only delivered spot-on mannerisms of the vice president, she also impersonated other big personalities, most notably pop star Beyoncé, who was just as influential in 2024.
However, Rudolph’s best and most feminist moment this year may have been her SNL opening Mother’s Day weekend—“I’m Your Mother!”—which was an irreverently reverent sendup to all mothers like herself. Incorporating the Queen Bey’s Renaissance era, which borrowed heavily from Black gay ballroom culture and its invocations of house music and all the “Mothers” of these houses, Rudolph managed to make traditional motherhood equally expansive in its recognition of different types of “mothers” beyond the heteronormative structure. As she proudly exclaimed: “Mother is Mothering!”
9. Musical Eras Ending, Beginning, Continuing
I might get your song played on the radio station.
Beyoncé
Speaking of mothers mothering, pop stars Beyoncé and Taylor Swift continued to dominate culture in 2024, even though both their endorsements of VP Harris were not enough to usher in our first woman president. They nonetheless demonstrated their power in other ways.
Earlier in the year, Swift made history as the artist with the most wins of a Grammy Album of the Year award, winning her fourth for her 10th studio album Midnights. She later released her 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, which topped the music charts. Her mega-successful Eras world tour finally wrapped up in December with a record-breaking 1.6 billion dollars in sales and billions more added to the global economy as each tour stop benefitted from the Taylor Swift effect, which included various charitable donations and generous bonuses for tour workers.
Not to be outdone, Beyoncé rolled out her eighth solo album, Cowboy Carter, conceived as Act II of her three-act project that began with her previous album, Renaissance, in 2022. First, she dropped new music via a showstopping Super Bowl ad, then teased the album with a few provocative album covers, before releasing her provocative country-adjacent album on Good Friday. Her country tune, “Texas Hold’ Em,” was a first for a Black woman topping both country and pop music charts, but the Beyoncé effect really came through for other Black country music artists—from legendary folk artist and banjo player Rhiannon Giddens to up-and-coming Shaboozey—whose careers launched into the stratosphere. As the pop star once bragged (and proved this year): “I might get your song played on the radio station.”
Beyoncé’s cultural impact was also honored this year when Billboard named her “Artist of the 21st Century,” and her daughter Blue Ivy made her acting debut in Disney’s Mufasa, premiering this month. Despite some troubling allegations against her husband and business partner Jay-Z, Beyoncé is not yet ready to cede her positive influence, nor is she finished making an impact this year, as she is set to perform the NFL halftime show in Houston on Christmas Day, to be aired live on Netflix.
Whether ending, beginning or continuing in their projects, both Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have shaped their eras meticulously.
8. Women Music Artists Continue Their Reign
Beyond Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, other women proved their world dominance via music. Indie folk artist Tracy Chapman delighted fans and greeted new ones when she opened the Grammy Awards show in a duet performance with country singer Luke Combs on her ever-popular “Fast Car,” while another legend, 80-year-old Joni Mitchell, made her Grammy show debut with a performance of her classic “From Both Sides.”
The same audience was blessed with an appearance of another legend, Celine Dion, who presented the award for Album of the Year. And that was just the beginning, as Dion gave a showstopping and awe-inspiring performance of French icon Edith Piaf’s “Hymne a l’amour” at Paris’ Eiffel Tower, which closed out the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics.
Music legends weren’t the only standouts this year. The pop music world is nothing without its women, and 2024 proved this fact. Rolling Stone’s 100 Best Albums List of 2024 featured eight women artists in the top 10—including Charlie XCX’s Brat (which defined “Brat Girl Summer”) at number 1, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter at number 2, and varied artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Tyla, Ariana Grande, Doechii and Kathryn Crutchfield rounding out the list. And while Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal (which soundtracked an impressive women-centered Tiny Desk Concert and ranked number 8) was the lone hip-hop act in the top 10, other women rappers made an indelible impression in 2024: from Glorilla’s fast-selling Glorious debut album, to Rapsody’s critically acclaimed Please Don’t Cry, which garnered a Grammy nomination for best rap album.
And who could forget Megan Thee Stallion, Billboard’s “Artist of the Year,” who started the year with the banger diss track, “Hiss,” went on to release her self-titled album and her “Hot Girl Summer” world tour while also giving us some of the best layered visual storytelling with such music videos as “Hiss,” “Boa” and “Mamushi.” She also has the distinction of being the first celebrity to open for VP Harris’s first campaign stop. Her story, about her rise to fame and surviving being shot by rapper Tory Lanez, is featured in the documentary Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Own Words.
Pop music, hip-hop, country, indie … whatever the genre, the women are everywhere.
7. Women Subverting Horror
While Meg Thee Stallion’s “Mamushi,” about the legendary snake woman of Japanese lore preying on unsuspecting men, could easily qualify as horror, the genre became a huge standout at the movie box office, and this is thanks to much of its storytelling centered on women.
2024 standouts include Ti West’s blood-soaked homage to B-movie revenge flicks and X-rated features of yesteryear with Maxxxine (starring Mia Goth), and the franchise A Quiet Place, with the prequel Day One (starring Lupita Nyong’o) showcasing a cancer survivor daring to find the will to live in a post-apocalyptic world (including shoutouts to Black women artists like sci-fi author Octavia Butler and music legend Nina Simone).
From the Smile franchise, to unsettling smaller films like Never Let Go (starring Halle Berry), to reproductive rights as allegory in movies like The Girl with the Needle (starring Vic Carmen Sonne) and Immaculate (starring Sydney Sweeney), women highlighted the dangers of the world, as victims, survivors, even villains.
Kudos also to the women directing features in the genre and bringing to the fore feminist themes: from Zoe Kravitz’s directorial debut with Blink Twice (a rape revenge feature starring Naomi Ackie) to Coralie Feaget’s body-horror aging drama The Substance (starring Demi Moore, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her role).
6. Recognizing Women Filmmakers
Beyond the fictional horror genre are real-life struggles (and horrors) that shape women’s experiences, and the documentary genre featured some impressive work by women filmmakers this year: notably, Sahra Mani’s Bread & Roses, about Afghan women filming their resistance to the Taliban with their own cameras, executive produced by Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and actor Jennifer Lawrence.
Other nuanced documentary films by women include Daughters by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, about young Black girls reuniting with their imprisoned fathers through a special dance event, and Dahomey, by French filmmaker Mati Diop, which imaginatively follows the repatriation of African art objects from Paris back to Benin (once the ancient kingdom of Dahomey).
Outside of documentary are beautifully rendered features about women’s lives, from Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine is Light, set in Mumbai, India, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year and garnered for Kapadia the first Golden Globes Best Director nomination for an Indian woman, to Ellen Kuras’s Lee (starring Golden-Globe-nominated Kate Winslet) about photographer Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, who journeyed from Vogue fashion to World War II photojournalism.
And of course, Megan Park’s My Old Ass sardonically presents a self-reflexive mirror for women confronting both their teenaged and middle-aged self.
Later this year, Rachel Morrison’s The Fire Inside (starring Ryan Destiny) about a young Black woman boxer struggling with poverty and the rise to fame, will round out the year of strong women-centered films beyond the male gaze.
5. Women-Centered Animation
Despite mixed reviews, Moana 2, the sequel about the continued adventures of a formidable young Polynesian woman emerging as her tribe’s leader and sea farer in sync with nature, has dominated the box office with its impressive haul of $600 million in just two weeks.
But while animation is having a breakout year in 2024 (from impressive artistic works like Flow, to creative biopics like Piece by Piece, which narrates music producer Pharrell Williams’s life in lego stop motion), less discussed is the significance of the genre centering women and girls. This is quite the feat, given how Disney and Pixar had threatened to abandon so-called identity politics, which presumably dampened the box office of Pixar fare like Turning Red (about an Asian girl going through puberty) and Soul (about a middle-aged Black man fighting to stay alive after his near-death experience).
However, the success of Moana 2, and before that, the highest grossing animation sequel this year, Inside Out 2, about the emotions Joy and Anxiety (both voiced by women) battling for supremacy inside the mind of a young girl going through puberty, might indicate that animation stories driven by its female characters have a proven audience that cuts across different demographics.
Other animation stories have found imaginative ways to center women, such as Dreamworks’ Wild Robot, featuring a robot called Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) grappling with a complex gendered role like motherhood in the wild, and Adam Elliot’s more adult-themed Memoir of a Snail about a reclusive woman, Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook) who has faced hardships throughout her life. From big box office to smaller films, animation is proving to be yet another movie genre moving women and girls from the margins to the center.
4. Wicked Defiance
Speaking of shifting to the center, what a successful year John Chu’s movie musical Wicked is having! Adapted from the Broadway play and based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, this phenomenon is now one of the highest grossing movie musicals of all time. Co-starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba (based on the iconic Wicked Witch of the West) and pop singer Ariana Grande (portraying Glinda the Good), Wicked not only shines a spotlight on the complexities of female friendships and rivalry, it also boldly tackles such political subjects as the rise of fascism and tyranny, as well as the courage to stand in one’s own uniqueness while voicing dissent.
In a political year like 2024, this message rang clearly and certainly resonated for a diverse audience. Erivo’s triumphant showstopper, “Defying Gravity,” poignantly brought home the point. And just as the film has a Part 2 waiting in the wings, we too must wait to see just how we dare to not let anyone “bring [us] down!” [Cue the battle cry.]
3. Nonbinary Gender Representation in Cinema
When it comes to defying gravity (and other “rules of nature”), who better to challenge our traditional gender roles than the transgender community, who unfortunately became a target in right-wing political attack ads and state laws this year?
Such attacks make their visibility in popular culture all the more triumphant and needed, as we saw this year with documentary fare like Josh Greenbaum’s Will & Harper, about comedian Will Ferrell exploring his friendship with Harper Steele, who comes out as a trans woman, while embarking on a cross-country road trip; and imaginative movie musicals like Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, about a Mexican lawyer (played by Zoe Saldana) aiding a cartel crime boss (played by Spanish trans actor Karla Sofía Gascón) in transitioning into her new life as a woman without leaving behind her wife (played by Selena Gomez) and their two children. Gascón, who already made history at the Cannes film festival winning Best Actress for this role, became the first transgender actress nominated for a Golden Globe Best Actress in Musical or Comedy.
Beyond these trans stories are more conventional narratives like Edward Berger’s Conclave, an all-star cast with Ralph Fiennes at the helm, about the ancient fraternal ritual of the Catholic conclave in which cardinals gather to elect their next pope. To say that the plot twist upends notions of gender and its binary categories is an understatement and a welcome narrative that continues to chip away at the social constructions of gender from which individuals attempt to derive their power.
2. WNBA Rising
When it comes to upending gender roles, no one does that better than women athletes, and this year, the WNBA suddenly became popular with viewership up by 155 percent from the previous year, including a 165 percent increase among women viewers. Not only that, but NCAA women’s basketball outperformed men’s basketball in viewership for the first time (including the NBA!).
All this is thanks to phenomenal players like Caitlin Clark (named Time’s Athlete of the Year) and Angel Reese. Both players joined the WNBA after dominating the NCAA championships and have been receiving various endorsement deals while Reese continues to headline her own podcast. It’s easy to highlight their rivalry (especially in racialized terms), and Clark herself admits that she benefits from white privilege—which does not take away from her athletic accomplishments. But as they drive interest in the sport, here’s hoping other talented athletes—from A’ja Wilson to Jonquel Jones—can also get some shine as ticket demand for the sport is already up for the 2025 season.
1. Women Dominate the Summer Olympics
WNBA players did their part in the 2024 Summer Olympics to bring home gold, along with their male NBA counterparts, and this was emotionally demonstrated with a grateful Brittney Griner—who had been released the previous year from a Russian nine-year prison sentence for cannabis oil possession in a prison swap—whose tears would not stop flowing during the playing of the U.S. national anthem for the gold-winning champions. This was one of a series of powerful moments during the Summer Olympics—the first athletic event to achieve gender parity and in which the women of the USA team brought home the most gold medals for the nation.
From the indomitable gymnast Simone Biles, who added three gold medals to her record-breaking 11, to swimmer Katie Ledecky who holds the record as the most decorated female athlete with 14 medals (nine of them gold), to the fabulous moment when Biles and fellow gymnast Jordan Chiles bowed down to reigning floor exercise champion Rebeca Andrade from Brazil, in a first for an all-Black podium in the world of gymnastics (notwithstanding how Chiles had been challenged for her third-place position).
And of course, there were the stars of track—from Sha’Carri Richardson (who brought home the gold in the women’s 4 x 100 relay race after coming in second in the 100-meter dash, bested by Julien Alfred who made history as a gold medal winner from the small Caribbean island of St. Lucia), to 200-meter champion Gabby Thomas and hurdle-race G.O.A.T. Sydney McLaughlin.
Sparking debates about gender were the vicious attacks against Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who overcame this bigotry by becoming her country’s first female gold medalist and gracing the cover of Vogue Arabia in her most masculine-of-center appearance, expanding representations of what womanhood looks like on the world stage.
Outside the sports arenas of the Olympics were the unmatched performances of women musicians at the respective opening and closing ceremonies: from the aforementioned Celine Dion and Lady Gaga to French Afrobeats star Aya Nakamura and opera singer Axelle Saint-Cirel, the latter appearing as France’s lady liberty, Marianne, replete with a natural afro as she belted out the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” And showstopper Yseult closed the Olympics by singing “I Did It My Way,” encapsulating the theme of 2024: “The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.”
Given the controversies among the French in selecting Nakamura to perform for Paris’ ceremony (and doing so with a national marching band), these performances of racial inclusivity demonstrate that nation-building and the body politic can make room for multiracial democracies, especially when filled with diverse athletes who are ready to display their grace, discipline, elegance, and perseverance for country and glory. That so many women contributed to this narrative is proof that we are more than ready and willing to rise to the top.
Here is hoping that we will one day trust in women’s leadership as much as we trust our women athletes to deliver us gold.
