More Than A Magazine, A Movement
One of the founders of the women’s health movement, Carol Downer died on Jan. 13, 2025 at 91. Before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, she sparked the feminist self-help movement and helped to develop and popularize menstrual extraction.
(This article originally appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.)
Cecile Richards, who transformed Planned Parenthood as its longtime president, died early in the morning on Jan. 20 at the implausibly young age of 67. America lost one of its most audacious and charismatic defenders of women’s health and rights just when we needed her most— hours before the inauguration of Donald Trump, whose first-term appointees to the Supreme Court gutted the constitutional protection of abortion rights and whose second term imperils the rights of women in additional myriad ways.
(This article originally appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.)
A single mother on the verge of becoming a doctor confronts an inflexible loan cap that punishes low-income parenting students and threatens to derail years of sacrifice.
As Trump moves to dismantle the Department of Education, echoes of Jim Crow remind us what happens when states are left to decide who deserves an education—and who doesn’t.
Programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and the GI Bill exist because certain rights are too fundamental to be left to the whims of individual states or marketplaces. Education is one of them.
For over a century, women athletes have battled double standards that question their toughness, competitiveness and right to take up space. From early fears that competition would ruin their femininity to modern-day outrage over trash talk and physical play, the message has remained: Be strong, but not too strong. While stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese have shattered records and stereotypes, lingering biases continue to limit how women—especially women of color—are allowed to perform, both on and off the court.
The fight for full inclusion in sports isn’t over; it’s simply entered a new chapter.
An excerpt from Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores by Katie Mitchell, out April 8:
“Meeting Desiree Sanders made me wish I had a time machine so I could travel back to the 1990s and 2000s and just once, experience Chicago’s first Black woman-owned bookstore, Afrocentric Bookstore. …
Before the store closed permanently in 2008, Afrocentric Bookstore served the Black community for 18 years. Thousands sat at book signings, partied at book festivals, browsed curated inventory, and soaked in the artful aesthetics that Afrocentric became known for—no time machine required.”
Long before the current political divide over climate change, and even before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), an American scientist named Eunice Foote documented the underlying cause of today’s climate change crisis.
The year was 1856. Foote’s brief scientific paper was the first to describe the extraordinary power of carbon dioxide gas to absorb heat—the driving force of global warming.
In her work, Taylor Swift has taken inspiration from women of the past, including actress Clara Bow, socialite Rebekah Harkness and her grandmother Marjorie Finlay, who was an opera singer.
But sometimes I wonder what the 34-year-old pop star would think of the life and work of Italian-born French writer Christine de Pizan.
Back in the 15th century, Christine—who scholars customarily refer to using her first name, because “de Pizan” simply reflects her place of birth, and she may not have had a last name—dealt with her share of “dads, Brads and Chads,” just as Swift has in the 21st century.
I recently spoke with students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School Women’s Association at their annual Carrie B. Kilgore dinner—a gathering of budding lawyers and their professors united in honoring the first woman to attend the Penn Carey Law School and be admitted to the bar in the Commonwealth.
Giving this speech was a pleasure, not only for the opportunity to encourage and support some of the great lawyers and judges of tomorrow, but because it brought me into contact with the life of Carrie Kilgore, a name, I have to admit, I had never heard before.
In the research for my remarks, I discovered that Kilgore was a doctor, lawyer and early suffragist, and while known to an extent in the Pennsylvania legal community, her papers have largely been unpublished, her achievements largely unknown to the public. This is a shame—because not only did she live a fascinating, meaningful life, but I think there are lessons that we can take from it as we confront the urgent challenges of the present moment.
This Women’s History Month, we remember President Jimmy Carter’s role in establishing this official observance of women’s achievements, his related support for the Equal Rights Amendment, and some unsung heroes in the Senate Wives Club who were instrumental in gaining Carter’s support for an ERA milestone that advanced, but ultimately failed to achieve, ERA ratification.
The contributions of Senate wives in the 1970s, particularly their efforts to help delay the ERA’s ratification deadline, often go unrecognized even today.