Author: Jennifer Weiss-Wolf

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is the executive director of Ms. partnerships and strategy. A lawyer, fierce advocate and frequent writer on issues of gender, feminism and politics in America, Weiss-Wolf has been dubbed the “architect of the U.S. campaign to squash the tampon tax” by Newsweek. She is the author of Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity, which was lauded by Gloria Steinem as “the beginning of liberation for us all,” and A Citizen’s Guide to Menopause Advocacy, together with Dr. Mary Claire Haver (featuring a foreword by Maria Shriver). Her forthcoming book When in Menopause: A User’s Manual and Citizen’s Guide (Hachette US-Sheldon Press) will be published in Fall 2026. She is also the executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU Law. Find her on Twitter: @jweisswolf.

Immigration Detention Is Failing Women and Children—By Design

The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley has been the subject of an onslaught of headlines in recent weeks, but the truth is, it’s been routinely criticized for inhumane conditions for years. But what we are seeing now, as Trudy Taylor Smith put it to me, is horror “on a shocking scale.” Children describe being served worm-infested food and dirty water, getting little or no classroom time and being perpetually sick. A toddler nearly dies because of medical neglect. A teenage boy with symptoms consistent with appendicitis is turned away by a nurse. There is no better way to describe it than state-sponsored child abuse.

If this isn’t stomach-churning enough, consider what is happening a few hours south, where girls’ reproductive healthcare and freedom is also in grave crisis. Pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children are being sent to San Benito, Texas.

Why Texas? Why else? … Because it is a place where abortion is illegal and high-risk pregnancy care is unavailable.

“Putting pregnant kids in San Benito is not a decision you make when you care about children’s safety,” one source said plainly.

This is entirely by design, pulled straight from the Project 2025 playbook. The constant split-screen scene in Texas is representative of the nation MAGA wants us to be, “where the cruelty is the point” and where the anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-freedom banner is flown.

We have to keep these stories—and all the women and girls in this state, willingly or not—front and center in the democracy movement. Their humanity is at the heart of all of ours.

Midlife Women Are a Sleeping Giant Voter Bloc in 2026—Even as the SAVE Act Puts Them at Risk

Since 2024, there has been handwringing among politicos about the rightward shift of young male voters in the United States. And now, a new report from the centrist think tank Third Way predicts many of the “swingy, moderate, low-propensity young men” who support Donald Trump will sit out the midterms this year.

At the same time, it’s crickets when it comes to understanding the political engagement of midlife and older women. Even as “organized gangs of wine moms” dominated headlines in recent weeks, I’ve found vanishingly little interest in analyzing how that demographic energy might translate to electoral clout.

The Pathetic Price of Entry to Epstein’s World

The latest batch of Epstein files—over 3 million documents, only around half of what the Department of Justice reports to have amassed—has unleashed a new cast of characters, a list that includes tech titans, health influencers, litigation rainmakers, university leaders, sports executives, Hollywood moguls and international royalty. None of the those named in the latest tranche of Epstein files strike me as people I ever assumed possessed particularly stellar moral character, and their collective fall from grace doesn’t shock me.

But what does turn my stomach is how pathetically small the price of entry into Epstein’s world appears to have been.

The expressions of regret now surfacing—I am ashamed, this is not who I am!—read less like moral reckonings and more like the lament of those who simply got caught.

The emails reveal a tawdry economy of access: absurd favors, crude jokes, dating advice, shared handwringing about #MeToo, and giddy acceptance of gifts—Apple Watches, Prada bags, monogrammed sweatshirts—that these already powerful figures could easily have bought themselves.

Whether any individual named in the files participated in or witnessed Epstein’s crimes is only part of the story. Just as telling is the desperate desire to remain in his orbit—often long after his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from girls.

That eagerness to maintain proximity, for so little in return, speaks volumes about how power protects itself—and what too many were willing to overlook to stay connected to it.

Misogyny Isn’t Just About Women—and the Killing of Alex Pretti Proves It

The Trump administration has made misogyny a governing principle, deploying it not only to control women but to enforce a rigid hierarchy of power that punishes anyone who disrupts it. The killing of Alex Pretti makes that unmistakably clear.

Pretti—a 37-year-old ICU nurse—was not threatening law enforcement. He was doing what the administration endlessly romanticizes and selectively rewards: stepping in to protect a woman who was being shoved and pepper-sprayed by federal agents. For that, he was tackled, disarmed and shot 10 times. The violence that ended his life did not contradict the administration’s worldview—it followed it to its logical conclusion.

Misogyny functions as a system, not a personality trait. It relies on domination masquerading as protection, and it turns lethal when its myths are exposed. Pretti shattered two of them at once: the fantasy of the “good guy with a gun” and the claim that this administration acts as a protector of women. His calm, visible effort to shield someone else left no room for reinterpretation, only denial. When authoritarian power cannot reconcile what we have seen with what it insists we believe, it chooses force. We know what happened in Minneapolis. We know who tried to protect whom. And we should be clear about what kind of politics requires us to look away.

Move Over, Childless Cat Ladies—The Right Has a New Woman to Hate

The right-wing manosphere has quickly absorbed the lexicon of AWFUL: “Affluent White Female Urban Liberals.” Move over childless cat ladies, there is a new broad in town.

The movement hell-bent on extolling the virtues of tradwife life has now set its sights on “organized gangs of wine moms us[ing] Antifa tactics to harass and impede” ICE, according to the talking heads at Fox News.

Sigh, MAGA. There you go again, mangling the plotline. Don’t you know? Motherhood has always been political, embedded in acts of resistance, from Reconstruction to women’s suffrage through the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Trump Administration’s Full-Throated Misogyny

“Disrespectful. “Fucking bitch.” “AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal).”

These are just a few of the insults hurled publicly at Minneapolis mother and wife Renee Nicole Good after immigration agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed her in broad daylight last week. In an effort to deflect and redirect blame, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are among the administration officials who took to the airwaves to degrade and ridicule Good, their claims ricocheting across the MAGA echo chamber.

The only civilized political response should have been a call for an independent investigation, but it seems like every MAGA with a mic is hellbent on making this a cautionary tale: Women who respond to and resist the authority of a man with a gun will get exactly what they deserve. “Fucking bitch,” possibly muttered by Ross as he let bullets fly (caught on air thanks to real-time video footage), is perhaps the most grotesque case in point.

What’s Next for Menopause Legislation in Your State?

An unprecedented 19 states have introduced three dozen bills to improve menopause care and treatment; eight of those bills are now law.

At the federal level, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration finally removed the “black box warning” on estrogen products, ushering in a new era for menopause care whereby women and their doctors can make decisions without the unnecessary fear the prior label engendered.

And so, we kick off the new year with a mighty impressive track record. Can we expect more of the same in 2026? My prediction is a resounding yes. This is only the beginning of a long overdue and much deeper series of demands. Here’s my forecast for what to expect in the weeks and months ahead.

A Very Bad Year for Women’s Health

When I started writing for The Contrarian, a funny-not-funny inside joke was whether there would be enough fodder for a weekly democracy column that overtly centers gender. I think you already know the punchline. Suffice it to say, I did not miss a single Wednesday in all of 2025.

For my final entry of the year, we thought it worthwhile to offer a snapshot—a year’s worth of reporting on the depth of damage this administration has wreaked on women’s health, with real-time Contrarian reporting noted.

Trump’s Anti-Diversity Crusade Claims Two Campus Magazines

I recently discovered two glossy magazines published by and for young people: Alice, which focuses on fashion, beauty, personal health, wellness and lifestyle; and Nineteen Fifty-Six, which brings a Black cultural lens to coverage of news, style and the arts.

Both are student-run publications housed at the University of Alabama. And on any other day, they would make one think the future of journalism look very bright indeed. Except that the sole reason I found these magazines at all is because they are now officially suspended. Last week, campus officials announced their permanent shuttering. Yet another casualty of the Trump administration’s attacks on free speech and public higher education—all in the name of stamping out supposed diversity, equity and inclusion.