Keeping Score: Renee Good Fatally Shot by ICE; Women Work Longer and Are Paid Less Worldwide; N.Y. Fights Back Against Federal Childcare Freeze

PUBLISHED 1/15/2026 by

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—”We had whistles. They had guns,” said Becca Good, wife of Renee Good, who was killed in Minneapolis by ICE agent Jonathan Ross.
—In central Texas, five months after the Sandy Creek flooding, “many are still homeless, and only 36 percent of FEMA claims in our area have been approved,” said survivor Brandy Gerstner. “FEMA must be independent, fully funded and strengthened—because when it fails to function, real families pay the price.”
—Anti-Muslim and anti-South Asian hate increased around the election of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
—The Department of Veterans Affairs announced new abortion bans.
—Meta has removed the social media accounts of dozens of reproductive health and LGBTQ groups.
—Women worldwide earn just a third of what men do when unpaid domestic labor is taken into account.

… and more.

Hockey’s Cultural Renaissance Can’t Ignore Domestic Violence

PUBLISHED 1/13/2026 by and

HBO’s recent juggernaut, Heated Rivalry, has blasted to the front of seemingly everyone’s consciousness over the last few months. While the press tour of the two lead actors promoting the show is, in a word, delightful, the attention being paid to fictional hockey players’ relationships off-the-ice is, unfortunately, a stark reminder of the reality of the state of gender-based violence in the sport.

Countless players for the National Hockey League (NHL), as well as the junior and minor leagues, have been accused of domestic and sexual violence. Yet many of those same players are retained on lucrative professional and semiprofessional contracts, and some have been able to keep playing even while under investigation for criminal sexual and domestic assault.

The NHL remains the only of the four major professional sports leagues (which also includes the NFL, NBA and MLB) that lacks a formal and specific domestic violence policy when players are accused of sexual or domestic violence.

Reads for the Rest of Us: The Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2026

PUBLISHED 1/12/2026 by and

Happy new year, feminist readers! I hope you’ll make it a goal to carve out time to read, and I’m here to share the top books we are excited about this year. 

We’ve scoured catalogs and websites, searched our favorite authors, kept up with socials and tried to get through as much email as we can to find the gems that we know Ms. readers will love and learn from. We look for feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-colonial, original, radical and reflective books. Subversive books. Books that’ll make you think and feel.

It’s a lot of work, but as a librarian and Ms. Feminist Know-It-All, it’s what I do! And it’s labor I love. 

Here are the top 94 books we’re looking forward to in 2026. 

Misogynoir à la Française

PUBLISHED 1/6/2026 by

A few days before Christmas, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo featured an abhorrent caricature of esteemed journalist, author, filmmaker, and activist Rokhaya Diallo. The grotesque image, which we will not reproduce here, shows a half-naked Diallo dancing on stage dressed in a banana skirt. Her features were exaggerated in the manner of time worn racist propaganda—contorting her nose, mouth, and eyes for a minstrel-like effect. Next to the image was an audience pointing and jeering underneath a sign that read “The Rokhaya Diallo Show: she ridicules the separation of church and state all over the world.” There is no question that Diallo was targeted for her widespread international success and renown as an antiracist activist, as well as her prominence as a Black feminist voice decrying racial injustice, sexism, and misogynoir in France and abroad. The timing felt insidiously intentional— the magazine chose to end the year with a decidedly harmful message to Black French women as a holiday send off.

The Best Feminist Fiction Films and TV Shows of 2025

PUBLISHED 12/22/2025 by

From devastating dramas to sharp satires and genre-bending thrillers, this year’s feminist fiction on screen refused easy answers—and demanded our attention. These films and series center women’s agency, ambition and survival, offering stories that linger long after the credits roll. Here are some of the standout feminist fiction watches of the year.

Aviva Dove-Viebahn reviews the top fiction feminist watches from the past year including The Substance, Ironheart and The Better Sister.

What the ‘Wicked’ Weight-Loss Discourse Gets Wrong

PUBLISHED 12/17/2025 by

We can’t afford to look away from changing beauty norms in our society, and how they are fueling eating disorders. 

Jennifer Rollin, an eating disorder therapist based in Maryland, says, “What I hear from a lot of clients is that when they are trying to recover from their eating disorder in this society, it almost feels wrong, because ‘everyone around me is talking about Ozempic,’ and ‘all the celebrities are talking about their big amount of weight loss.’”

But while it can feel cathartic to criticize or distance ourselves from prominent women who seem to be conforming to dangerous beauty standards, that criticism is harmful and does not bring us any closer to addressing the problem.