Politics

A Feminist Historian’s Year-End Reading and Viewing Guide

PUBLISHED 12/7/2025 by

As the year winds down, I find myself returning—as I always do—to the stories, performances and ideas that have shaped my teaching and thinking. Feminism’s past is never really past; it’s a living archive we carry with us, full of unresolved questions, missteps, breakthroughs and beautiful, complicated people. This year’s reading and viewing list reflects that sensibility.

Liberation forces its contemporary narrator—and its audience—to reckon with the impossible expectations we’ve placed on small groups of women in church basements.

Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir presses on the tender, maddening ties between feminist foremothers and the daughters who grew up in their shadow.

Sarah Weinman’s study of spousal rape laws exposes just how recently the law stopped treating wives’ bodies as open territory—while showing how fiercely survivors and advocates have had to push for change that should never have been controversial.

The Ms. Q&A With Democracy Defenders Norm Eisen, Skye Perryman and Jennifer Rubin

PUBLISHED 12/6/2025 by

In the middle of an accelerating democratic crisis, and a year defined by sweeping attacks on women’s rights, the Feminist Majority Foundation, publisher of Ms. magazine, gathered in Los Angeles to honor some of the most formidable leaders on the front lines of resistance. At the Nov. 18 Global Women’s Rights Awards, journalists, lawyers, artists, organizers, litigators, community activists and movement strategists came together to celebrate what I call the “essential trifecta” for defeating authoritarianism: the law, the press and culture.

We recognized The Contrarian’s Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen for building an independent media platform willing to call out authoritarianism plainly; Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman for her organization’s record-breaking wave of legal challenges against the Trump administration; and the creative team behind the Broadway hit Liberation—playwright Bess Wohl, director Whitney White, and former Ms. writer and editor Lisa Cronin Wohl—for reminding audiences that storytelling is itself a democratic act.

“The number one tool that autocratic actors use to try to consolidate power and take away power from the people, is to convince people that they have no power,” said Perryman. “Their toolbox is one of isolation. They want you to feel alone.”

“I grew up miles from here, family hamburger stand,” said Eisen, “and now to be here, to have this opportunity with my colleagues to fight for this democracy that took my country, and my parents. … When my mother was living, she loved to say the Nazis took us out of Czechoslovakia on cattle cars, and my son flew back on Air Force One. So, how can I not be hopeful?”

Seventy Years After Rosa Parks’ Arrest: How We Commit to Carrying the Work Forward

PUBLISHED 12/5/2025 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:
—The 2025 elections prove that voters across the country want women as their leaders.
—Democratic leaders are exploring ranked-choice voting for the 2028 presidential primaries.
—In a Tennesee special election, Democratic nominee Aftyn Behn surpassed electoral expectations for her congressional district.
—Fort Collins, Colo., elected Emily Francis as mayor in its first use of ranked-choice voting.
—College student Any Lucía López Belloza was deported in Massachusetts on her way home to Texas for Thanksgiving.

… and more.

Where ACA Premiums Could Spike Most in 2026 if Congress Lets Enhanced Tax Credits Expire

PUBLISHED 12/4/2025 by , , , , and

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) offers premium tax credits to help make health insurance more affordable. Under original Affordable Care Act provisions, an income cap for premium tax credits was set at 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Above that threshold, federal financial assistance was not available, creating a “subsidy cliff.”

Enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of this year. Enrollees currently receiving premium tax credits at any level of income will see their federal assistance decrease or disappear if enhanced premium tax credits expire, with an average increase of 114 percent to what enrollees pay in premiums net of tax credits.

The impact will be greatest for those whose unsubsidized premiums are highest: older Marketplace enrollees and those living in higher-premium locales.

Making the Invisible Visible: How Misogyny Is Driving Rising Political Violence

PUBLISHED 12/4/2025 by

We have seen a rise in political assassinations and assassination attempts, along with violent extremist attacks that have ticked upward for years. Mass casualty plots in the U.S. have increased by over 2,000 percent since the 1990s, leading to the deaths or grievous injury of thousands of people in shootings at schools, grocery stores, theaters, parades, concerts, houses of worship and more.

In the search for explanations, the public and policy discourse is most often swept up in heated debates about far-left or far-right ideologies.

But the data shows that the biggest and clearest predictor of mass shootings, across ideologies, sits somewhere else: in rising gendered grievances, patriarchal backlash, and the perpetrators’ histories of gender-based violence and misogyny.

Trump’s Silence on World AIDS Day Revives a New Lavender Scare

PUBLISHED 12/3/2025 by

Last month, the State Department warned employees not to commemorate World AIDS Day through official work accounts, including social media, nor should they use government funds to mark Tuesday, Dec. 2, as World AIDS Day. The day came and went in a quiet, cold Washington, D.C., without the president marking what it represented—the more than 700,000 Americans who died from HIV/AIDS-related causes in the United States since 1981. 

If his intentions were unclear, Trump’s budget proposed ending all CDC HIV prevention programs this past June, and Congress continues to negotiate next year’s budget, proposing massive cuts to HIV programs. 

For many young people who never lost friends or family, there may be the misconception that the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s was localized and small, but nearly 300,000 men who have sex with men have died from AIDS-related complications, with over 6,000 deaths in 2019 alone. To put this in perspective, this would be as if over half of Wyoming’s population disappeared, or if everyone in Pittsburgh, Penn., vanished overnight. 

Even Madonna criticized Trump’s move, posting on Instagram, “It’s one thing to order federal agents to refrain from commemorating this day, but to ask the general public to pretend it never happened is ridiculous, it’s absurd, it’s unthinkable. I bet he’s never watched his best friend die of AIDS, held their hand, and watched the blood drain from their face as they took their last breath at the age of 23.” 

Sex, Power and Impunity: Epstein’s Legacy in Historical Perspective

PUBLISHED 12/3/2025 by

The scandal that has preoccupied much of mainstream U.S. politics has, been, at one level, delightful: We have seen extremist Republicans—Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Thomas Massie and Nancy Mace—break with their party and its president in an effort to force into light the U.S. Department of Justice files on convicted sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. 

The story is almost irresistible for critics of the current national administration, feminists among them: Will we finally get to items from Epstein like the CD labeled “girl pics nude book 4”? What might these materials reveal? And whose misbehavior might they reveal?  

Fire the starting gun on analyses from every liberal, left, critical corner. Claims abound of shifting coalitions, changing tides, pages turned, a president’s authority shredded. 

But there are still as many questions stirring in the Epstein pot as there are answers. Why did these particular Republicans break from the pack? Is this a contemporary Republican version of feminism? 

And beneath them all: What good does it actually do us—or Epstein’s particular victims, or the scads of other victims of sexual coercion, trafficking and other mistreatment—to raise the heat so high on this particular scandal?

‘We Take Care of Each Other’: Building Community in a Brutal Political Moment

PUBLISHED 12/1/2025 by

The Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) has never had it easy. Founded in 2004 by Alexander L. Lee, TGIJP’s mission was simple enough on paper: Provide legal services to incarcerated transgender, gender-variant and intersex Californians. 

How are formerly incarcerated Black and brown transgender, gender-variant and intersex people managing to do this work in the nightmare that is 2025? 

The answer is simple: We take care of ourselves, and we take care of each other, just like we always have. 

(This essay is part of a collection presented by Ms. and the Groundswell Fund highlighting the work of Groundswell partners advancing inclusive democracy.)

War on Women Report: Antiabortion Extremist Charged in S.C. Shooting; Army OB-GYN Accused of Abusing Over 85 Women Patients

PUBLISHED 12/1/2025 by and | UPDATED 12/4/2025 at 9:06 A.M. PT

MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide—the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.” We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.

Since our last report:
—North Dakota’s Supreme Court reinstated a total abortion ban, making it the 13th state with a near-total ban on abortion.
—Trump ordered Catherine Lucey, a woman reporter for Bloomberg, to be “quiet, piggy.”
—The U.S. moved to categorize countries with state-sponsored abortion and DEI policies as violators of human rights.
—Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has sued Planned Parenthood over allegedly “misrepresenting the safety” of abortion pills.
—On Thursday, Dec. 4, an unprecedented law banning doctors from shipping abortion pills takes effect in Texas.
—”The country’s most respected newspaper hosted a conversation about whether women’s equality and freedom was a mistake.”
—Doctor Maj. Blaine McGraw, an OB-GYN at Fort Hood military base in Texas, the third-largest base in the country, is under investigation for sexual abuse against patients. As of Monday, 85 victims have come forward.
—With Jeffrey Epstein survivors watching from the gallery above, the House agreed in a near-unanimous vote to force the release of all files related to the investigation of the convicted sex offender.

… and more.

We Can No Longer Tinker With the Machinery of Death: New ACLU Report Exposes Fatal Flaws in Capital Punishment

PUBLISHED 11/26/2025 by

On the first day of his second term President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order entitled Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety. In doing so he chose to ignore the mounting and irrefutable evidence, recently highlighted in a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that the death penalty is riddled with human error and poses the undeniable risk of executing innocent people.

At least 150 countries have abolished the death penalty, by law or by practice. Resisting the humanitarian trend around the world, the United States remains part of a gruesome club, along with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.