The decade opened amid a pandemic, economic upheaval and a reckoning over democracy itself.
In early 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, seemingly bringing a nearly 50-year constitutional struggle to a historic milestone.
Yet within months, COVID-19 exposed the deep inequalities that feminists had long warned about. Millions of women—especially women of color—lost jobs, left the workforce to shoulder caregiving responsibilities or found themselves on the front lines of a public health crisis. As the country debated recovery, feminists argued that the economy itself was built on the underpaid and often invisible labor of women.
At the same time, Kamala Harris became the first woman and first woman of color elected vice president, while President Joe Biden assembled the first gender-balanced Cabinet and later appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman justice on the Supreme Court.
Then came Dobbs. In June 2022, nearly 50 years after Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, triggering bans and severe restrictions across much of the country. Clinics closed, patients traveled hundreds of miles for care, and pregnancy criminalization accelerated.
The decision was not an isolated event but part of a broader wave of attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and democratic institutions themselves. As Ms. observed throughout the decade, the same forces seeking to control women’s bodies were also working to restrict participation in a multiracial democracy.
Yet even as rights were rolled back, women continued to build political power. The number of women serving in Congress and state legislatures reached record highs, the gender gap remained a decisive force in elections, and support for feminist priorities—including abortion rights and the ERA—continued to grow.
The lesson of the 2020s is both sobering and hopeful: Progress is never permanent, but neither is backlash. Every generation inherits unfinished struggles, and the future of democracy depends on whether people are willing to organize, participate and fight for the freedoms they refuse to lose.
This essay is part of Feminist Lessons—part 2 of Ms.’ our three-part FEMINIST 250 project—which explores what each decade of modern feminist history can teach us about power, democracy, backlash and social change.
