Author: Carmen Rios

Carmen Rios is a feminist superstar. She's a consulting editor and the former managing digital editor at Ms. and the host of Looking Back, Moving Forward, a five-part series from Ms. Studios. Carmen's writing on queerness, gender, race and class has been published by outlets including BuzzFeed, Bitch, Bust, CityLab, DAME, Feminist Formations, GirlBoss, MEL, Mic, the National Women’s History Museum, SIGNS and the Women’s Media Center, and she was a co-founder of Webby-nominated Argot Magazine. @carmenriosss|carmenfuckingrios.com

What Feminist Scholar Jane Caputi Believes History Can Teach Us About Taking on Male Supremacy—and Building a Future Without Femicide

Carmen Rios

The professor and The Age of Sex Crime author explained in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward why the backlash we’re facing is proof that we’re winning—and urged feminists not to abandon their utopic visions for a world without misogyny.

Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “How Feminists are Breaking the Cycle of Gender-Based Violence and Harassment (with Ellen Sweet, Jane Caputi, Vanessa Tyson, Victoria Nourse, and Debra Katz)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

‘A Patriarchal, Male-Dominated, Use-of-Violence Society Is Not Good for Anybody’: Ellen Sweet on the Historic Ms. Study of Campus Rape, 40 Years Later

Carmen Rios

The former senior editor and writer for Ms. coordinated what became the first-ever national survey of campus sexual violence. In the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, Sweet assesses what she learned from the study about rape, activism, and backlash—and what has and hasn’t changed since it was published.

“When and Where Do We Get to This Place Called ‘Fair?’” What Political Scientist and Survivor Vanessa Tyson Wants the Feminist Future to Look Like

Carmen Rios

The professor, advocate and veteran of multiple political campaigns reflected in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward on her journeys to both survivor advocacy and politics—and the ways in which our political structures reinforce the injustices survivors face writ large across the country.

Victoria Nourse Helped Write the Violence Against Women Act. She Knows Policy Change Matters in the Struggle to End Gender-Based Violence.

Carmen Rios

On the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, the Georgetown Law professor and vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reflected on how VAWA has shifted culture when it comes to gender-based violence—and what tools activists can use now to continue the work.

“No one would’ve thought someone like me would’ve been able to do the kinds of things I’ve done. My older sisters didn’t have the opportunities I have … but the world opened up. Things can change quite quickly in politics.”

“There’s just many, many reasons why ERA is something not to let go of. … They never really say women are unequal. They believe women are equal, but they say, ‘Oh, but transgender,’ ‘Oh, but something else,’ and so, they divide us. It’s really important for all of us to be united because Congress can change the deadline [in the preamble of the ERA].”

‘We Have to Be Relentless’: #MeToo Champion Debra Katz Is Confident ‘There Will Be Wins’ for Survivors in the Days Ahead

Carmen Rios

In the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “the feared attorney of the #MeToo movement” assesses the legal landscape facing survivors—and how activists can continue to hold people in power accountable.

Gender-Based Violence Is Everywhere. What Will It Take to Break the Cycle?

Carmen Rios

In the fourth episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, advocates and experts name the sociopolitical factors that fuel gender-based violence, and outline what it will take—in the courts, legislatures and our communities—to finally break the cycle.

“What does it mean that so many women, in particular, have to shoulder the burdens of violence and abuse in our day-to-day lives?”

“We’re in the middle of this terrible backlash because patriarchy does feel so threatened … It’s terrible, and it’s getting worse, but it’s because we have been so successful so far.”

‘Care Is Baked Into a Healthy, Functioning Economy’: Economists Lenore Palladino and Rakeen Mabud on How to Advance Economic Justice

Carmen Rios

The experts and Ms. contributors assessed the state of the U.S. care crisis and women’s economic inequality in the latest episode of the Ms. podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward—and broke down why investing in women and care workers is good policy.

Rakeen Mabud: “We’re at a really pivotal moment and a really complicated moment. We have conservative, pronatalist voices, with more institutional power than they have ever had, at least in modern times. They are advancing an agenda of deep progressive patriarchy, whiteness—and wealth, frankly, is the third prong of that. And they are co-opting progressive policy ideas to do it.”

Lenore Palladino: “There are schools, and there are childcare centers, and there are hospitals being shut down right now. Investing in those would be a really important way to move this whole conversation forward. … Within economic policy, there’s such bifurcation. There’s tax policy over here. There’s care over here. It’s still a women’s issue.”

“Economics is still seen as a man’s game. Women actually make most financial decisions in households, but men are the ones who are seen as the experts, and our financial system is shaped around their life cycles.”

Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “Women Can’t Afford to Wait for a Feminist Economic Future (with Premilla Nadasen, Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino, Aisha Nyandoro, Gaylynn Burroughs, and Dolores Huerta)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

‘In Whose Interests Are We Fighting?’ What Historian Premilla Nadasen Learned About Economic Justice from the Domestic Workers’ Rights Movement

Carmen Rios

Nadasen, who teaches history at Barnard College, offered lessons from the domestic workers’ movement for the current moment in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward. “We, as feminists today, like domestic workers in the 1970s and in the early 2000s,” she told me, “need to think outside the box.”

‘If You’re Not Centering the People Who Are Most Impacted, Your Policy Solution Will Fall Apart’: Gaylynn Burroughs Is Fighting for Economic Justice at the Intersections

Carmen Rios

Burroughs, the vice president of education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center, connected the dots between poverty, policy and culture change in the latest episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward. “Once you start seeing these problems as being problems that policy can solve,” she told me, “a whole world opens up.”

‘Poverty Is a Systemic Failing, Not an Individual Failing’: Aisha Nyandoro Is Seeding a Movement to Liberate Financial Capital and Support Black Moms’ Economic Freedom

Carmen Rios

The founding CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, home to the Magnolia Mother’s Trust guaranteed income program, called out how our economy has left the women she serves behind in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward—and how our narratives around poverty and deservedness shape what’s possible in the fight for economic justice.

“What would it look like if we gave Black mamas living in affordable housing the financial resources that they needed to be the author of their own lives—trusting that they know better than anyone else what it is that they need for themselves and their families to be successful?”

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