Herstory

2025’s Pink Wave: Election Night Marks Historic Wins for Women’s Representation

PUBLISHED 11/7/2025 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:
—Elections in Virginia and New Jersey make history for women’s representation in the U.S.
—Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces she will not seek reelection, marking the close to one of the most consequential careers in modern American politics.
—New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announces his transition team will be led entirely by women.

… and more.

Two Roommates, Two Governorships—and a Blueprint for Women’s Power

PUBLISHED 11/5/2025 by

From governors’ mansions to city halls, legislative chambers to ballot measures, voters across the country affirmed a simple but powerful truth: When we design systems that work for women, women lead and democracy strengthens. 

This year’s races showcased both the momentum and the mechanics of progress. Record numbers of women ran in state legislative contests. Cities across the country tested reforms like ranked-choice voting to create fairer elections. And two of the most closely watched gubernatorial races in the nation—in Virginia and New Jersey—produced groundbreaking results for women’s representation that will reverberate far beyond their state lines. 

Through Art and Storytelling, Artist Harmonia Rosales’ First Book Brings African-Centered Myths to Life

PUBLISHED 11/3/2025 by

When Harmonia Rosales first unveiled The Creation of God in 2017—a reimagining of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam with a Black woman as the divine—she didn’t just challenge art history; she remade it in her image. With her brush, Rosales flipped the script on Western depictions of power, beauty and divinity, centering Black womanhood and African spiritual traditions long erased from the canon.

Her new book, Chronicles of Ori, continues that reclamation through story. A lushly illustrated volume rooted in Yoruba mythology, the work brings to life the Orishas, divine figures of West African cosmology, and weaves them together with familiar names like Eve—both biblical and mitochondrial—into a mythology that claims space for the African diaspora beyond enslavement.

“I felt that we needed a mythology,” Rosales told Ms. “We needed something to connect to besides enslavement, because that’s what seems to be in the Western canon.”

With Chronicles of Ori, she offers that connection: a world where African gods are unmasked, women embody creation itself, and the sacred is painted in brown skin. Through her art and her words, Rosales restores what history fragmented—melding spirituality, storytelling and imagination into what she calls a new kind of mythology, one that reclaims both memory and power.

The Witch Was Never the Villain. She Was the Beginning of Women’s Power.

PUBLISHED 10/31/2025 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:
—Long before Halloween became a night of costumes and candy, it was Samhain: a Celtic festival marking the end of harvest and the beginning of winter’s half-dark. Communities gathered to honor what had ended, prepare for what was to come, and find renewal in letting go. At the heart of those gatherings were women. When patriarchal religions spread across Europe, that spiritual authority became a threat.
—When my children were young, during the Halloween season, I remember thinking how natural it is for young children, especially young girls, to believe they can transform … to step boldly into whoever they want to be.
—As we approach another Election Week, women once again stand at the threshold between what is and what could be: Women could sweep governor elections in New Jersey and Virginia. And Women are posed for gains in city elections across the country.
—New York Attorney General Tish Janes is targeted by the DOJ.
—Ireland elects Independent Catherine Connolly as its third woman president.

… and more.

‘Liberation’ Opens on Broadway—And Ms. Magazine Is at Its Heart

PUBLISHED 10/30/2025 by

The feminist revolution has taken center stage. Liberation, written by Bess Wohl and directed by Whitney White, officially opened on Broadway on Oct. 28, 2025, at the James Earl Jones Theatre, following a critically acclaimed Off-Broadway run earlier this year.

In an interview with Vogue, Wohl said she was inspired by her mother’s work as an editor at Ms.: “The arc of history is so much longer than we realize. Already in 1970 women were feeling frustrated, like, ‘When is this gonna happen?’ … And I think that that urgency really powers so much of the story of the play.”

Women Made History in the East Wing. It Was Razed for Trump’s Ballroom.

PUBLISHED 10/24/2025 by and

When bulldozers began to tear down the East Wing of the White House this week to clear the way for President Donald Trump’s $250 million ballroom, historians raised alarms that important American history was being buried in the rubble, including chapters about previous first ladies and their roles uplifting women going back nearly a century.

Among the offices housed in the East Wing is the Office of the First Lady, first professionalized by Eleanor Roosevelt during her husband’s administration.

“To me, this demolition suggests that the current White House does not think that the first lady does anything of value,” said Katherine A.S. Sibley, professor of history. “I’m not talking about [Melania Trump] particularly, but the office itself—they’re not cognizant of the history.” 

From Iceland’s ‘Women’s Day Off’ to No Kings, Progress Begins When Women Stand Together

PUBLISHED 10/24/2025 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:
—Fifty years ago, the women of Iceland changed the course of their nation … not through an election or a revolution, but through one simple, collective act: They stopped. On Oct. 24, 1975, 90 percent of Icelandic women refused to work, cook or care for children for a single day. That strike, known as the Women’s Day Off, became a watershed moment for equality, but it didn’t emerge overnight.
—Women hold the majority in the Bolivia legislature.
—Japan confirms Sanae Takaichi as its first woman prime minister.

… and more.

‘Freeing Black Girls’ and ‘Loving Black Boys’: Tamura Lomax on Revolutionary Mothering During Troubled Times

PUBLISHED 10/23/2025 by

Tamura Lomax, a trailblazing Black feminist religious scholar, is on a mission to deliver a “Black feminist Bible on racism and revolutionary mother” with two companion books. The first, Freeing Black Girls, was published this year (2025); the second, Loving Black Boys, comes out next year.

Ms. contributing editor Janell Hobson spoke with Dr. Lomax about her latest works and the radical vision of “revolutionary mothering” that guides them.

“Black feminist mothering becomes this experiment. If people can teach sexism and hatred and racism, can we teach Black feminist politics? Is that possible? If we just do it from birth, and it’s just normal everyday talk it’s not this lesson that happens once at the dinner table but it’s just part of our everyday living. Can we do that the same way that we teach hatred?

“Revolutionary mothering is teaching those Black feminist politics everywhere—in the car, on the couch, during movie night, after the basketball game, in the football stands. It’s teaching a radical politics of our rights, our collective right to bodily autonomy first and foremost.”

Russia Was Once a Revolutionary Feminist Motherland

PUBLISHED 10/22/2025 by

Russia’s hostility to feminism today stems not from its foreignness, but from memory. A century ago, it was Russian women who lit the first sparks of revolution. On International Women’s Day in 1917, factory workers filled the streets of Petrograd demanding bread, peace and equality—an uprising that toppled the Romanovs and pulled the world into modernity. Under the Bolsheviks, women won the right to vote, divorce became accessible and abortion was legalized. For a brief, radical moment, the Soviet experiment made women’s liberation a pillar of the state.

Julia Ioffe’s book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, reminds us that today’s Russia rejects feminism precisely because it once knew what it could do: ignite revolutions, upend hierarchies and reimagine power itself.

‘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.