Politics

Why the ERA Needs Congressional Action—And How We Can Win

Over these past weeks, I’ve read countless emails, sat through heated meetings, and heard the cries for action directed at President Joe Biden urging him to order the archivist to certify and publish the ERA in the Constitution. I understand the yearning for a decisive stroke. But this path, I believe, is a snare, tangled in legal thorns, dangerous and fraught with risk.

After careful study and consultation with leading constitutional experts, I am certain that Congress must pass joint resolutions to recognize the ERA and remove the arbitrary time limit.

His intervention could set off a chain reaction, handing ERA opponents an opportunity to challenge the amendment in court. A judicial gauntlet with Trump-appointed judges risks obliterating decades of progress, forcing us to begin again, clawing our way back through Congress, where a two-thirds vote is needed in the House and Senate, and three-fourths of state legislatures must ratify any new amendment.

Thought-Provoking, Policy-Changing and Narrative-Shifting: Ms. Magazine’s 10 Most Impactful Print Articles of 2024

Ms. spurred thought-provoking, policy-changing, narrative-shifting change in 2024—and created new feminist strategies and solutions for the year ahead. In a word: “impact.” Ms. commissioned high profile analysis and investigative journalism by some of feminism’s best journalists and thinkers, focusing on key issues impacting women and girls at a critical moment across the globe. Here are the Ms. editors’ top 10 impact articles in the past year, as seen in the print magazine.

(Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get the issues delivered straight to your mailbox.)

The Path to Certifying the ERA Lies With Congress—Not the Archivist

In a statement released Dec. 17, the archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Shogan, and the deputy archivist, William J. Bosanko, clarified their position on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the constitutional process for ratifying amendments. The press release highlighted their legal responsibilities and the current limitations preventing the ERA from being certified as part of the U.S. Constitution.

‘Guerilla Storytelling’ and Joyful Resistance: Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández and the DWC’s Plan to Combat Project 2025

The Democratic Women’s Caucus (DWC) this week announced the election of Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) as DWC’s chair for the 119th Congress, which starts in January. Leger Fernández served as the DWC vice chair in the 118th Congress and will now lead the largest ever DWC, which includes a record-breaking 96 members in the new Congress. 

Ms. executive editor, Kathy Spillar, sat down with Rep. Leger Fernández, to discuss priorities for the DWC—both to fight back against what will be repeated attacks by the Trump administration on women’s rights and programs benefiting women and their children, as well as strategies for moving forward toward equality. 

American Maternity Care Is in Crisis. Abortion Bans Are Making It Worse.

Since the Dobbs decision, antiabortion Republicans are putting their resources not into expanding care for the women they’re forcing into motherhood, but into enforcing abortion bans—including those that make women risk their lives and health in pregnancy, drive up maternal injury and mortality, and push healthcare providers out of the workforce or out of state.

State budgets are limited, and how lawmakers spend the money they have tells us a lot.

Keeping Score: More Attacks on Trans Rights; Sexual Assault Should Disqualify Cabinet Nominees, Americans Say; Female Professors Win Lawsuit and Backpay for Pay Disparity

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: The Supreme Court considers a ban on gender-affirming healthcare for trans teens; data shows crimes in public restrooms and changing rooms are extremely rare, and are not decreased by laws preventing trans people from using public bathrooms; analyzing Trump’s cabinet nominees; midwives say climate change is harming their communities; Nevada maintains a majority woman legislature; criminal justice reform for probation, parole and bail is critical; Arizona moves to end 15-week abortion ban; Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal have asked the Biden administration to limit the federal government from deploying troops domestically; and more.

Close the Gender Giving Gap: Women Need More Charitable Support in Wake of the Election

Despite widespread recognition of gender-based violence, U.S. voters elected a president who a jury held accountable for sexual abuse and who openly disparages women—at once sending a chilling message to survivors and emboldening their abusers. Just days after the election, we heard from a survivor who reported that her boyfriend told her he could do […]

Not Your Mother’s Activism: Young Women’s Political Expression on Social Media

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Young women are the avant-garde of political expression online, developing expressive forms of political communication that collapse traditional distinctions between personal and political, aesthetic and substantive, emotional and analytical. Their approaches suggest new possibilities for political discourse that acknowledges rather than suppresses the role of affect, identity, and visual rhetoric in political mobilization. This piece draws from research presented in the authors’ new book, Not Your Parents’ Politics: Understanding Young People’s Political Expression on Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2024).