Author: Bonnie Stabile

Bonnie Stabile, Ph.D. is the author of Women, Power and Rape Culture: The Politics and Policy of Underrepresentation (Praeger, 2022; paperback edition, Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2024). Her research has been published in peer reviewed academic journals including Public Integrity; the Journal of Public Affairs Education; Sexuality, Gender and Policy; Rhetoric Review; and Politics and the Life Sciences and in book chapters published by Routledge, CQ Press/Sage Books, Springer, ABC-CLIO and McFarland Press. She is associate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, where she founded and directs the Gender and Policy Center and teaches courses on policy analysis, program evaluation, ethics and gender, and was the 2019 recipient of the Schar School's Teaching Award.

Who Gets Remembered? The Fight to Put Women’s History on the National Mall

America’s monuments tell us who matters. Yet on the National Mall, where presidents, generals and founding fathers dominate the landscape, women’s contributions remain strikingly absent.

The battle over a permanent Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum exposes how contested women’s place in our national story still is.

The museum’s new exhibit, Unhidden Heroines, uses augmented reality to offer a glimpse of what that story could look like—one in which women are no longer relegated to footnotes but recognized as central figures in shaping the nation.

The exhibit profiles five exceptional women whose substantial contributions to American history have been largely unrecognized or obscured in the historical record: Mary Katharine Goddard, the printer who published the first signed copy of the Declaration of Independence; Dr. Dorothy Height, a civil and women’s rights activist known as the “Godmother of the Civil Rights Movement”; Julia Ward Howe, creator of a rallying cry, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” for the Union cause during the Civil War; Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a cryptanalyst central to cracking Nazi code during World War II; and Polly Cooper, an Oneida woman pivotal to the success of Washington’s Continental Army.

Despite strong bipartisan support for the brick-and-mortar women’s museum project—and having raised tens of millions of dollars for its establishment—momentum for the public-private partnership suffered a setback on the Hill: The bill that would have finalized the museum’s location on the Mall was scuttled after Republicans added anti-trans language barring the depiction of “any biological male as a female” in its exhibits and giving President Trump control over selection of its location.  

It’s not the first time the administration has claimed to protect women’s rights while actually setting back their interests or causing them harm.

Activating Art for Women’s Rights and Democracy: Tiffany Shlain’s Feminist Monument Makes it to the Midwest in Advance of Pivotal Elections

For three years running, artist and activist Tiffany Shlain has created calls to action around her feminist history tree ring sculpture in advance of U.S. elections where women’s voting rights, reproductive rights and long held democratic principles face historic setbacks. The milestones and tribulations of women’s history seared onto its surface are particularly resonant now, as many records of women’s presence and accomplishments are disappearing from public view.  

Pregnant in Power: U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen Confronts a System Built for Men

In the fight for better policies for mothers and families, Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-Colo.) has also had to fight to have her own voice heard on Capitol Hill.

Last October, five months pregnant with her second child, Pettersen proposed a change to the House Rules Committee for “a narrow exception to the prohibition on proxy voting” that would allow members of Congress to vote by proxy while on parental leave, a push begun by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) after giving birth to her first child in 2023. This would have ensured, Petterson said in a recent interview with Ms., that as a member of Congress, “you’re able to have your voice, your constituents’ voices represented” during a critical time for your family and health.

The Senate Wives Club and Carter’s ERA Extension: Four Decades Later, ‘Equality of Rights Under the Law’ Has Yet to Be Guaranteed

This Women’s History Month, we remember President Jimmy Carter’s role in establishing this official observance of women’s achievements, his related support for the Equal Rights Amendment, and some unsung heroes in the Senate Wives Club who were instrumental in gaining Carter’s support for an ERA milestone that advanced, but ultimately failed to achieve, ERA ratification.

The contributions of Senate wives in the 1970s, particularly their efforts to help delay the ERA’s ratification deadline, often go unrecognized even today.

‘Daddy’s Home’: Republican Paternalism Towards Women Exemplifies Punishment, Not Protection

On the first day of his second term in office, Trump signed the “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism” executive order, which claims to defend and protect women by asserting that, as a matter of U.S. policy, the existence of transgender people will not be recognized. Trump followed up on Feb. 5 with his “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order. These EOs join a long history of laws in the U.S. based on professed protection for women, which actually do the opposite.

While posturing as women’s protectors, Republican lawmakers ignore or inadequately address very real, substantiated and systemic threats to women, including in the intimate space of their own homes, where as many as one in four women experience domestic violence and more than three women are killed by husbands or boyfriends every day.

Women’s intelligence is insulted—and their autonomy further threatened—when the state asserts the intent to protect them from trumped-up threats that are overstated and insignificant in comparison to a spate of other much more common material, even mortal, threats to their lives and well-being.

Women’s Independence, Credit Cards and Economic Power: Celebrating 50 Years of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) of 1974 enabled women to get credit cards or a mortgage without a co-signer, making it a pivotal milestone for women’s financial independence. The 50th anniversary of ECOA being signed into law by President Gerald Ford fell just a week ahead of the recent presidential election, considered by many to be a referendum on women’s rights in a political climate still reeling from the revocation of Roe. That critical landmark for women’s autonomy was overturned by the Dobbs decision in 2022, one year short of reaching its own half-century observance. 

By focusing on women’s independence through the lens of economic power over the last 50 years, a new Smithsonian exhibit—”We Do Declare Women’s Voices on Independence,” commemorating ECOA’s passage—hones in on another essential factor in women’s ability to achieve freedom, security and power: financial independence.

Tiffany Shlain’s Feminist Art Answers the ‘Urgent’ Call to Fight for Democracy and Women’s Place in History

Artist Tiffany Shlain’s Dendrofemonology: Feminist History Tree Ring is on the move, soon to take up temporary residence in New York City’s Madison Square Park as a focal point for her “Mobilization for Women’s Rights and the Planet” on Sept. 21. Coinciding with the start of climate week and anticipating a historic election, Shlain’s daylong, public activation and rally address a convergence of critical concerns in this “age of urgency.” 

“I’m hoping that the next tree ring moment will be having the Equal Rights Amendment added into our Constitution and sex equality guaranteed across this country,” said Shlain. “And who knows? Maybe there’ll be something else new to burn” into the timeline “in January.”

Celebrating Women Who Aren’t Afraid to Take the Lead

Just days after Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic party’s official nomination, Gloria Feldt—former Planned Parenthood president and longtime women’s rights activist—convened the 10th annual Take the Lead Conference in Washington, D.C., on Women’s Equality Day.

Hopes are high and determination steeled that 2025 will see the first woman president and the ratification of the ERA. For the hundreds of women and dozens of presenters and organizers who took part in the Take the Lead conference, promoting women’s power at every level and in every field has always been essential to the formula for that success.