Herstory

‘DILF (Did I Leave Feminism?)’ Is a New Transmasculine Manifesto

PUBLISHED 10/21/2025 by

An excerpt from Jude Ellison S. Doyle’s new book, DILF (Did I Leave Feminism?), out Oct. 21:

Transmasculine people are one of feminism’s biggest blind spots. No one knows quite what to do with us, so it’s easier to pretend we’re not there. Books on “male feminism” or “feminist men” mostly teach men how to be allies to women’s struggle—the idea that there might be men who actually experience pregnancy, or abortion, or being cat-called or sexually harassed or pay-gapped or any of the other things we traditionally call “women’s issues” is not accounted for. Books on trans feminism understandably stress the importance of feminism for trans women—which is important, what with them being women and all—but do tend to reinforce the assumption that feminism is just for girls.

Trey Reed’s Death—and Its Swift Labeling as Suicide—Demands the Scrutiny Ida B. Wells Called For

PUBLISHED 10/21/2025 by

Trey Reed, a young Black student, was found hanging from a tree on his college campus of Delta State University in Mississippi on Sept. 15, 2025. Trey Reed was a computer science major from Grenada, Miss., and a first-generation student, described as ambitious and eager to create a positive future for himself and his family.

Mississippi police and the Bolivar County coroner’s office have labeled the death a suicide. But Reed’s family members and other advocates, including Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, attorneys Ben Crump and Vanessa J. Jones (both of whom are representing the family), are calling for further investigation. 

Cases like Reed’s awaken questions rooted in legacies of racial violence in the South. “While the details of this case are still emerging, we cannot ignore Mississippi’s painful history of lynching and racial violence against African Americans,” said Thompson in the days following Reed’s death. That history is not distant: Mississippi recorded more lynchings than any other state, and the echoes of those crimes persist in how the deaths of Black people are investigated and discussed. The reflex to dismiss possible racial motives—or to declare a death a suicide before all evidence is known—reflects a deeper national unwillingness to confront the full scope of anti-Black violence.

Who Gets to Procreate and Parent? A Black Feminist Critique of the Pronatalist Agenda

PUBLISHED 10/17/2025 by , and

Pronatalism is not simply about encouraging births—it is a political project rooted in racism and control. Its goal is to engineer a future that permits only certain people to bear and raise children while coercing or punishing others for reproducing or parenting.

Adriana Smith’s experience of coerced reproduction is a devastating example: a Black nurse and mother declared brain-dead, yet kept on life support for months to sustain her pregnancy under Georgia’s restrictive abortion laws. This is what pronatalism looks like in practice—the state asserting ownership over a Black woman’s body.

As Black feminists, we understand that reproductive choices are personal, but they are also deeply shaped by structural power. Pronatalist leaders and influencers cloak their agenda in the language of family and morality, but in truth, they seek to restrict autonomy and consolidate control. Reproductive justice, by contrast, insists on every person’s right to decide whether and how to have children, and to parent in safety and dignity.

After the War: Author and Aid Worker Claudia Krich Challenges the Myths of Vietnam

PUBLISHED 10/16/2025 by

American humanitarian worker Claudia Krich—co-director of the American Friends Service Committee medical relief program from 1973 to 1975—was one of only a handful of Americans who stayed in Vietnam past April, 30, 1975, after the war ended. (She and her husband finally left in July 1975.)

Fifty years later, in April, Krich published her full journal from those months in Vietnam. Those Who Stayed: A Vietnam Diary, now available from the University of Virginia Press, combines Krich’s 1975 diary—including sections originally published in Ms.‘ July 1976 print issue—with extra historical content and some first-person accounts by people mentioned in or relevant to the book.

To celebrate the book’s release earlier this year, Claudia Krich communicated with Ms. about her book and her experiences as an American woman living and working in Vietnam during this historic moment.

“People think the war was North versus South, but that’s not true. … I hope my book motivates more people to travel, to take risks, to be outspoken, to record what they experience.”

As Trump Targets Portland, a New Report Shows How the City Became a Model for Women’s Representation

PUBLISHED 10/10/2025 by

Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, sports and entertainment, judicial offices and the private sector—with a little gardening mixed in!

This week:
—How did Portland, Ore., achieve one of the mosdt representative city councils in the country? Through structural reform and community-driven organizing.
—A woman will be Ireland’s next president.
—Japan is posed to make a historic shift in women’s leadership.
—For the first time, a woman will lead one of Christianity’s oldest institutions.
—We celebrate the life of Jane Goodall.
—We mark what would be Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday. She helped craft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—insisting that freedom must include not only political rights, but also the right to food, housing and dignity: “You cannot talk civil rights to people who are hungry.” In the midst of Cold War tension, Roosevelt’s words were a quiet but radical act—a reminder that peace often begins not in policy or power, but in empathy and connection.

… and more.

This International Day of the Girl, ‘Doing Nothing Is Not an Acceptable Choice’

PUBLISHED 10/10/2025 by

On Oct. 11, we celebrate International Day of the Girl, a global call to recognize girls’ rights and confront persistent inequality.

When hope wavers and progress stalls, I look for words that steady me. Recently, I found them in writer Roxane Gay’s powerful essay in The New York Times, “Civility Is a Fantasy,” where she writes: ““As a writer, as a person, I do not know how to live and write and thrive in a world where working for decency and fairness and equality can be seen as incivility … I worry and I worry and I worry, and I feel helpless and angry and tired, but also recognize that doing nothing is not an acceptable choice.”

After reading Gay’s words, I reminded myself of the girl I am and the change I lead, and thought about the many girls who might be feeling that same helplessness right now—those watching rights roll back, hearing their worth debated or wondering if their voices still matter. So, on International Day of the Girl, this letter is for them. It’s a call for action.

‘We Need Equal Rights in the Constitution’: NOW’s New Leaders Kim Villanueva and Rose Brunache See ‘a Lot of Energy for Advocacy’

PUBLISHED 9/30/2025 by

Almost 60 years ago, in 1966, Pauli Murray, a queer Episcopal priest and legal scholar, approached noted feminist Betty Friedan about the need for an organization to push the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce the Civil Rights Act. Although the Act had passed in 1964 and banned discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, and religion, Murray understood that the law’s promise would remain unfulfilled without vigilance and pressure from activists. Friedan agreed, and later that year, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was created.

Newly-installed president Kim Villanueva—the former president of NOW’s Illinois chapter, cofounder of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Caucus and chair of the National Election Committee—and vice president Rose Brunache, former president of the DC chapter, spoke to Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader one month after taking office.

Mary Beth Tinker Is Still Teaching the World How Kids Can Change It

PUBLISHED 9/29/2025 by

Five students, including Mary Beth Tinker, were suspended from school in 1965 for wearing black armbands to support a Christmas truce in the Vietnam War and mourn the deaths of Vietnamese people and U.S. soldiers. Tinker was an eighth grader at the time. Represented by the ACLU, the students sued for freedom of speech after their suspension.

On Feb. 24, 1969, the Supreme Court reached a landmark ruling on student speech in Tinker v. Des Moines, cementing the precedent that students and teachers retain their First Amendment rights in public K-12 classrooms so long as they do not substantially disrupt education.

More than 50 years later, Mary Beth Tinker is still an activist for demilitarization, children’s rights, free speech, LGBTQ+ rights, environmental protection and transnational feminism.

The War on Drugs Was a War on Black Mothers

PUBLISHED 9/29/2025 by

In the late 20th century, the so-called “crack baby epidemic” became a media obsession. Politicians, prosecutors and even physicians bought into a false narrative: that poor Black women who used cocaine during pregnancy were dooming their children to lives of permanent brain damage, misery and crime. The stories were sensational—and wrong. What these accounts ignored were the actual conditions of women’s lives: poverty, lack of healthcare, untreated trauma and mental illness. Instead of compassion, women like Regina McKnight—raped, grieving, depressed and self-medicating—were met with prosecution, prison sentences and public shaming.

The truth is, there was no epidemic of “biologically inferior” babies. Rigorous scientific research—largely disregarded by mainstream media—showed that cocaine exposure did not cause the catastrophic outcomes predicted by pundits. Yet the racialized panic over “crack babies” justified criminalizing pregnancy, targeting Black mothers, and fueling the broader war on drugs. These myths, and the policies they spawned, continue to shape how our legal and healthcare systems treat women—especially women of color—today.

[An excerpt from Michele Goodwin’s book Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.]

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The road to recovery—and the right to recovery—is essential to a free and fair democracy. This essay is part of a new multimedia collection exploring the intersections of addiction, recovery and gender justice. The Right to Recovery Is Essential to Democracy is a collaboration between Ms. and the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health at Georgetown Law, in honor of National Recovery Month.

From Veterans to Caregivers—The Importance of Expanding Remote Education for Women Worldwide

PUBLISHED 9/27/2025 by

We need to continue normalizing and destigmatizing nontraditional remote learning opportunities as valid, accessible pathways toward women’s realization of their right to an education. 

This means expanding the number of hybrid and remote learning options available through well-established colleges and universities.

It means rethinking the types of technological adaptations deemed as “undue hardships” in the context of student disability.

It means investing in longitudinal research regarding best pedagogical practices—the impacts of evidence-based instructional interventions in the remote learning milieu—and in the professional development of online instructors in synchronous and asynchronous online programs to ensure impact. 

To do so is to ensure that those who fight to pursue their education in nontraditional ways are not shortchanged, but rather equipped with the social and intellectual capital needed to work against the existential threats of our time.