More Than A Magazine, A Movement
On a long list of issues in the newly released survey, women identified domestic and sexual violence as the third most important one facing U.S. women collectively, behind abortion access and cost of living.
As we mark the 30th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act today, it’s worth remembering one lesson that law teaches: Progress is possible.
The tragic shooting of Sonya Massey underscored profound systemic issues within law enforcement—especially police conduct and excessive force when it comes to Black women.
Massey, a Black woman with a known mental health condition, was shot and killed by a deputy from the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office in Springfield, Ill. This incident has intensified scrutiny of racial bias, inadequate mental health crisis responses and the erosion of trust between marginalized communities and police.
The promotional campaign for It Ends With Us, the film adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling novel, was so off-balance it became harmful. What should have been an opportunity to raise awareness about the complex and painful reality of domestic violence instead turned into a misguided showcase that trivialized survivors.
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: Kamala Harris reaffirmed her candidacy for president at the DNC; Republican-appointed judges strike down Biden’s student loan relief plan; a new law bans women from speaking in public in Afghanistan; working moms earn just 71 cents per dollar earned by dads; understanding the orgasm gap; gold-medalist boxer Imane Khelif fights back against racist and sexist abuse; new reproductive rights bills signed into law in Illinois; and more.
Afghan women’s voices and bodies are deemed ‘intimate’ by the Taliban and banned from public.
While the international community condemns these brutal and oppressive restrictions, it now faces a critical challenge: how to effectively respond to the Taliban’s gender apartheid policies and increasing human rights abuses. The need for the international community to codify gender apartheid as a crime against humanity grows more urgent.
In the 1990s, Promise Keepers were an evangelical group of Christian men who pledged to keep their promises to their wives and children in exchange for female submission and service. Relatively apolitical at the time, Promise Keepers even pledged to work toward “racial reconciliation.”
Filling football stadiums, evangelical men and boys felt safe to cry and hug, while reaffirming each other’s masculinity and entitlement to male dominance. By the end of the 1990s, Promise Keepers had faded from the headlines, but now thirty years later they are staging a revival.
Ms. sat down with Jackson Katz to get his take on the Promise Keepers revival. “Elements on the Trumpist right understand very well that right-wing, white evangelical men are an incredibly important constituency within the larger MAGA coalition. … The ‘crisis in masculinity’ has now become a crisis in democracy.”
If implemented, Project 2025 would be devastating for women, families and feminists everywhere. Voters—particularly women voters—need to understand these threats.
But while Project 2025’s abortion and LGBTQ+ rights plans have rightfully garnered outrage, there’s another, lesser-known threat to women, families and communities buried within these pages: a radical “guns everywhere” agenda.
Anti-gender forces have been using powerful, well-funded strategies to roll back the rights of women, often using ‘gender’ as a smokescreen to divert attention and exploit political divisions. According to CNN, the anti-gender movement is not only present in almost all countries around the world, the number of people supporting it is growing.
(This essay is part of a Women & Democracy package focused on who’s funding the women and LGBTQ people on the frontlines of democracy. We’re manifesting a new era for philanthropy—one that centers feminism. The need is real: Funding for women and girls amounts to less than 2 percent of all philanthropic giving; for women of color, it’s less than 1 percent. Explore the “Feminist Philanthropy Is Essential to Democracy” collection.)
When Louisiana middle school librarian Amanda Jones spoke before the Livingston Parish Public Library board in July 2022, she knew some of her neighbors and friends would disagree with her anti-censorship and anti-book-ban testimony.
Nonetheless, Jones reported that she was blindsided by the well-organized campaign that followed her presentation and was shocked by the barrage of hateful comments that she’s received for more than two years. Among other things, Jones has been called a pedophile, pervert, pornographer and groomer, an experience she details in her newly-released memoir, That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America .
On Sunday, former President Donald Trump shared multiple fake images of mostly young, White blond women clutching iced coffees wearing “Swifties for Trump” T-shirts.
Swift had not endorsed Trump, but he declared “I accept!” in his post, implying that maybe she had. The message couldn’t be further from the truth, as the pop star made her support for the Biden-Harris campaign clear in 2020 and tweeted at Trump “We will vote you out in November.”
