More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Each month, Ms. provides readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.
Whether or not you pick up the science books on our lists, or you try some poetry, or a new-to-you genre of fiction, I hope you find something here that’s both exciting and educational.
The Emmy award-winning medical drama The Pitt closed its second season with a storyline about a patient with preeclampsia, a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy most identified through high blood pressure and protein in urine.
As the patient’s condition worsens, including a horrible seizure leaving her nonverbal and her baby at risk, she is diagnosed with eclampsia and hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes and low platelets (HELLP) syndrome. The patient is ultimately (unbelievably) spared as her baby is surgically removed, and both are cleared to head to obstetrics and the neonatal unit, respectively.
As a two-time preeclampsia survivor and CEO of the Preeclampsia Foundation, I want to wholeheartedly thank The Pitt producers for featuring preeclampsia, HELLP syndrome and eclampsia in their season finale. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, which include all three disorders plus gestational hypertension, are not rare: They affect 15 percent of all pregnancies. We need greater awareness of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, the signs and symptoms, and the importance of fast, reliable intervention by medical professionals to save the lives of mothers and their babies.
That said, I have thoughts—as does the broader community of preeclampsia survivors.
Happy April, and Happy National Poetry Month. Since my dormant love of poetry was reignited, I’ve found it so refreshing and inspiring to read beautiful collections each year and share them with you.
In 2021, I tried something a bit different with the poetry list: Instead of the usual blurb, I focused my thoughts about each collection into three words. Readers responded so well to it that I decided to keep doing it. Sometimes the words are nouns, sometimes verbs, sometimes adjectives—and I may have just made up some words too. The words I choose are always inspired by the collection and often taken directly from it. Sometimes I try to be clever, other times straightforward and you can tell I love my alliteration. Since I find it challenging to be succinct, this is a valuable exercise in imagination, reflection and, well, restraint.
I hope you find some collections that will have you reflecting on how poetry moves you, challenges you and represents you.
With a global market worth of over $56 billion, handbags are one of the main drivers of the fashion industry.
However, as Kathleen B. Casey shows in her latest book, The Things She Carried: The Social History of the Purse in America, they are more than just a fashionable accessory: Women’s purses are an important marker of identity and social status. They are a statement of power, of resilience, of defiance and even protection. Indeed, you can tell a lot about a person from their handbag and what’s in it.
While both women and men have carried bags in the past, it was the evolution of pockets (and lack thereof in women’s clothes) that led to the purse being specifically marked as a feminine accessory, often associated with the female body and particularly the womb.
With pockets becoming a symbol of functionality and masculinity, it is not a coincidence that utilitarian pockets became a feminist demand. Feminists have long argued for their right to free hands and movement, while keeping their possessions secure and concealed. Pockets were often equated to votes during the suffrage campaign, as activists criticized the lack of both in hindering women’s independence.
Despite being a conspicuous item, one that could be snatched or stolen, Casey is careful to show the power of the purse (pun intended) in offering women the ability to gain visibility in public as equal to men. Women could not only carry with them money, sanitary pads and birth control pills that allowed them freedom of movement and independence, but their bags enabled them to do it while maintaining their respectability and status. At times when women had little control over their bodies, the privacy of their purse offered them an autonomy they could not otherwise gain.
In 2024, comedian Nora Fried started the Rosebuds Reading Collective, a monthly book club for women incarcerated at Rikers Island, New York City’s island jail.
“I was looking forward to this all month,” Fried recalls multiple women telling her. “This is the only thing I had to look forward to.”
The women read Down the Drain, a memoir by actor Julia Fox. After the discussion, Fried tagged Fox on Instagram. Fox, whose brother was incarcerated at Rikers at the time, agreed to visit the group.
Fox learned that her book was a particularly hot commodity and that one woman’s copy had been stolen. Still, all were curious about how a girl like them had become a published author. The room resonated with laughter, from both the incarcerated women and the guards.
“It made me think to myself, I would do this every weekend. I want to come back. I love these girls,” Fox says. “They are amazing, remarkable, intelligent young women [who] made mistakes. We’ve all made mistakes. Some of us are lucky enough not to get caught.”
Even as a child, Aparna Rajawat could see how boys in India were more respected, safer and freer than girls.
Wanting a way to defend herself, Rajawat cut her hair short and disguised herself as a boy, attending karate lessons behind her father’s back with the help of her mother and sister. By the time he discovered her secret, she was so good her coach was able to convince her father to let her continue. She went on to become a national champion and compete internationally, all while she was a teenager.
But that’s only the beginning of Rajawat’s story—a story in which her own achievements are only a backdrop to a life-long quest to inspire other Indian women and girls to achieve their dreams and protect themselves in a country where, despite its many advancements, incidents of sexual assault are still rampant and survivors struggle to get justice.
Enter Pink Belt Mission, Rajawat’s nonprofit, through which she works as a motivational speaker as well as training thousands of girls and women in self-defense.
It’s also the subject of a new documentary directed by John McCrite. A remarkable film, Pink Belt starts with Aparna Rajawat’s story, but goes much further, illuminating a path for anyone who cares about human rights to take that first step towards making a difference in their own communities and beyond.
How on-brand for the federal government to announce that U.S. birth rates are falling—just as The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, dropped on Hulu.
In the fictional nation of Gilead, first envisioned by Margaret Atwood in her 1985 dystopian novel and expanded on screen for nearly a decade now, declining fertility catalyzed a Christian nationalist revolution in modern-day America, spawning a society rooted in patriarchal dominance and state-sanctioned violence. The Testaments, now three episodes in, is making a deliberate appeal to Gen Z and young viewers, featuring the spectacularly savvy Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday among Gilead’s tradwife-in-training rebels.
Doubly fascinating then, that it is the real-life status of teen birth rates in particular now driving the news. In a drop considered “extraordinary” by statisticians, the number of babies born to mothers between the ages of 15 and 19 fell by 7 percent in 2025.
Nevertheless, many on the right jumped directly into the fray to publicly lament that teens are having fewer babies.
A leading voice in Black feminist scholarship will take center stage in Beverly Hills later this month, as Beverly Guy-Sheftall joins professor and dean emerita Bonnie Thornton Dill for a public conversation on her new book, Black! Feminist! Free!
The event, hosted at Ms. magazine headquarters in Los Angeles on Thursday, April 23, from 6 to 8 p.m., is free and open to the public. Attendees can expect an evening of reflection, dialogue and community, with light refreshments provided. Copies of Guy-Sheftall’s book will be available for purchase on site, followed by a signing hosted by Reparations Club. RSVP today!
When I told coworkers and friends I was going to see a documentary about the right-wing takeover of a small public Florida college, the reaction was immediate and unanimous: Why would you do that to yourself? Too depressing. I’d be too angry.
They weren’t wrong. Premiering at SXSW last month and directed by Patrick Bresnan, First They Came for My College is, at times, almost unbearable to watch—a slow, procedural dismantling of a public institution, carried out in meeting rooms and press conferences and budget lines.
But what stayed with me wasn’t only the anger—it was the stubborn, surprising insistence on community, joy and showing up anyway.
The Dads, a new feature-length documentary, follows the fathers of trans, nonbinary and gender-expansive children as they weather the rapid escalation of anti-trans legislation in the United States over the past two years. Directed and produced by Luchina Fisher, the film debuted last month at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.
The film bears witness to parents’ struggle with whether to stay in the United States or move abroad in face of bans on restrooms, sports and gender-affirming care for trans youth.
In the end, The Dads is about faith—faith in the experiment of the United States, faith in dads to know who their children are and how best to protect them, and faith in all dads to grow and learn who they are.