It’s been quite a week. I’m guessing, like me, you saw a connective thread in the headlines: Accountability rarely arrives on its own. It comes because people refuse to stay silent.
Author: Kathy Spillar
Katherine Spillar is the executive director of Feminist Majority Foundation and executive editor of Ms., where she oversees editorial content and the Ms. in the Classroom program.
Trump Holds Housing Aid Hostage to Force GOP Support for Voting Restrictions
This week, Trump cancelled a planned signing ceremony for the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act—which would help address the worsening housing affordability crisis—and said he won’t sign it unless Republicans in the Senate vote to pass the SAVE America Act. If you recall, the SAVE Act would implement sweeping voting restrictions, including necessitating proof of citizenship to vote, and in doing so, make it much more difficult for millions of women who changed their name at marriage to vote.
His fixation on the SAVE America Act isn’t about safeguarding the elections for Americans—it’s about rigging the elections to ensure a Republican win, by suppressing the votes of those who disagree.
Join Ms. Magazine and Get Our Landmark FEMINIST 250 Print Issue for This Pivotal Moment in American History
As the U.S. prepares to mark its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, questions loom over the celebration: Whose America gets remembered, whose gets erased—and how do we imagine and build a democracy that includes all of us?
In the Summer issue of Ms., we revisit the nation’s founding through a feminist lens, reclaiming the stories too often left out of the official narrative: women who challenged the authors of the Declaration of Independence and later the U.S. Constitution for deliberately writing women out of America’s founding documents, Black women who resisted oppression from the start, Indigenous societies built around women-led governance, queer lives in revolutionary America, Asian women’s struggles for belonging and the long fight to make disability visible in our history.
We also look back at 54 years of feminist reporting from the pages of Ms.—proof that the battles for bodily autonomy, equality and democracy did not begin yesterday—and forward to the bold new ideas that could shape a freer, fairer future for the next 250 years.
Get a year of Ms. for just $20 (a 43 percent discount off our usual price) when you join today!
Judge Stops Trump Administration From Funding Antiabortion Extremists, for Now
On Friday, in response to a lawsuit brought by Democracy Forward, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s “anti-weaponization” fund—which would have directly funded the work of antiabortion extremists. The $1.8 billon fund’s announcement explicitly identified antiabortion extremists convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act as presumptive recipients—the same FACE Act violators Donald Trump pardoned in January 2025.
The restraining order against the fund is intended to make sure that no funds are distributed before the lawsuit brought on behalf of the National Abortion Federation; Andrew Floyd, a former Jan. 6 prosecutor; professor John Caravello of New Haven, Conn.; and Common Cause, a government accountability group, has a chance to play out. It will pause the fund’s establishment until at least June 12.
“President Trump wants to take your hard-earned tax dollars and hand them over to criminals, cronies, and insurrectionists,” said Common Cause president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón in a statement announcing the lawsuit against the fund. “It’s unconscionable, and more importantly, it’s illegal.”
Remembering War’s Impacts on Women and Girls on Memorial Day
As we pause to mark Memorial Day on Monday, I’m thinking about the women affected by war—whether they’re fighting on the front lines, working in the service as nurses, or civilians saddled with the consequences of wars started by men living in far-off lands who barely know they exist.
Research shows that women and girls face unique and acute impacts in armed conflict situations. For women on the ground in Iran, who are already subject to increased policing at the hands of their own government, these impacts are multiplied. Since 165 girls were killed by an American missile in the bombing of an elementary school earlier this year, thousands more women and girls have continued to be displaced and killed in airstrikes. And as the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security points out, women also face increased environmental tolls from the bombing of oil and gas infrastructure—which causes pollution that can lead to health issues and reproductive complications.
This Mother’s Day, Women Are Fighting for Healthcare, Democracy and Survival
This Mother’s Day weekend arrives amid extraordinary legal and political upheaval over reproductive freedom, voting rights and the economic survival of mothers.
Judge Pauses Louisiana’s Mifepristone Restrictions as FDA Review Looms
A district court judge has stayed Louisiana’s ongoing attempt to restrict access to the abortion medication mifepristone, to allow time for the Food and Drug Administration to finish its own review of the medication—which comes directly at the orders of RFK Jr.
Laws like Louisiana’s proposal are directly impacting women across the U.S.—some tragically losing their lives. Public health experts estimate that at least 59 women have died directly because of these bans, and that number is likely an undercount.
As right-wing conservatives work to push our country in increasingly dark directions, here at Ms. we’re turning to the stories of women who resist—a through-line that goes all the way back to before our nation’s founding. I’d encourage you to check out the latest stories in our Feminist 250 series, which reflect on the roles of Indigenous women, feminism’s abolitionist origins and more in our nation’s founding.
In Iran, Iraq and the U.S., Women Speak Out Against State Repression
Internationally acclaimed Iranian human rights attorney and women’s rights advocate Nasrin Sotoudeh has been arrested by the Iranian regime. Her whereabouts are currently unknown. Our hearts are with Sotoudeh and her family, including her husband Reza Khandan, who has been detained in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison since December 2024 for supporting her work for women’s equality.
Meanwhile in Baghdad, an American freelance journalist has been kidnapped. Shelly Kittleson, who had built her freelance career reporting from the Middle East for years, is known among colleagues for her determined, on-the-ground reporting and willingness to go where others would not. On Tuesday, she was taken by two unknown men, after learning of threats to her safety from militias.
Time and time again, it is women who speak out in the face of state repression—whether they are doing so as journalists speaking truth to power, lawyers fighting for the rights of the oppressed, or everyday women taking to the streets in defiance of regimes that seek to strip them of their autonomy and human rights.
Women Make Our Movements Powerful. They Shouldn’t Have to Suffer in Silence.
A New York Times investigation released this week broke news of shocking sexual abuse allegations against labor leader César Chávez—from two women who were young teenagers at the time, and from Dolores Huerta, our long-time Ms. advisor, Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.) board member, friend, and feminist and labor icon who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Chávez.
In fighting the culture that makes these actions not only possible, but permissible—and that encourages women like Huerta to remain silent for over 60 years—we must consider the role of men.
Men, argues Ms. contributor Jackson Katz, are essential to shifting the narrative. In describing the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a woman who had been secretly drugged by her husband and set up to be raped by dozens of men over a 10-year period, Katz mentions the evocative nickname the case acquired in French media reports: Monsieur Tout-le-monde. Mr. Everyman.
If the 50 men who assaulted Pelicot were just “ordinary men” (“many were married and had kids. They were blue- and white-collar workers: a restaurant manager, nurse, computer technician, prison guard, firefighter, journalist, soldier,” Katz writes), then consequently, every man has a role to play in dismantling systemic violence against women.
Cover Reveal and Spring 2026 Issue Sneak Peek: ICE Is ‘the Army of the Patriarchy’
In early February, while the nation was still reeling from the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, Loretta Ross and Jackson Katz—two feminist academics with decidedly different backgrounds and identities—discussed how U.S. federal agents became the enforcement arm of the nation’s racism and misogyny.
You’ll find this, and more, in the Spring 2026 issue of Ms.