More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The U.S. ranks as the 31st most dangerous country for women, 55th in maternal mortality, 43rd in closing the gender pay gap, 85th in women’s political representation, and painfully lacks paid family leave and equal access to healthcare. But Ms. has always understood: Feminist movements around the world hold answers to some of the U.S.’ most intractable problems. Ms. Global is taking note of feminists worldwide.
This week: News from Bangladesh, Colombia, the U.K. and more.
As salient as extreme heat and wildfires have been this summer, an important dimension has been mostly absent from discussions of it: gender.
Climate change impacts are not gender-neutral. Heat affects different populations in different ways. Climate vulnerability depends on intersecting factors like age, income, occupation, disability, race, but also gender, which is often overlooked.
Protecting women, especially those with multiple factors of vulnerability, must be central to climate action, not peripheral.
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:
—Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is freezing her eggs and documenting the process on social media to normalize this facet of women’s reproductive healthcare.
—The top brands donating to members of Congress trying to expand ICE’s power include SpaceX, Home Depot, UPS and Walmart.
—Organizations speak out after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero were shot and killed by federal agents, and Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva died in ICE custody.
—Epstein survivors warn the Senate not to confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General.
—The Trump administration continues its attacks on immigrants, students, disabled people, gun control and more.
—Pete Hesgeth blocked the promotion of women Navy officers.
—Nicole Tung won the IWMF’s Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award.
—Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has been accused of abusing his ex-wife and their young daughter.
—President Trump finally paid E. Jean Carroll $5.6 million for sexually abusing and defaming her.
—84 percent of women’s organizations working in crisis-affected countries say the need for humanitarian services has increased since January 2025, but almost 90 percent don’t have the funding to meet those needs.
—The United States is unique among similar countries, with single mothers participating in the workforce more often than partnered mothers.
… and more.
Trump’s latest attacks on birthright citizenship are part of a much broader effort to police American identity, punish migrant women for entering the U.S. and ultimately regulate their reproduction. Immigrant women and children remain particular targets of a hostile immigration system that seeks to control them through detention, family separation and deportation. The administration’s reinstatement of family detention has made it possible to incarcerate whole families while avoiding the political backlash generated by the “zero tolerance” separations of Trump’s first term.
But detaining families together does not make detention humane. Family residential facilities expose mothers and children to interrupted medical care, inadequate health screenings, poor living conditions and lasting physical and psychological harm. Women—particularly those who are pregnant, postpartum or caring for young children—also face heightened vulnerability to neglect and abuse inside a system where government officers and private contractors wield enormous power over their daily lives.
These policies are not simply about immigration enforcement. They are a means of penalizing pregnancy, motherhood and family formation in immigrant communities. From attacks on birthright citizenship to the detention of pregnant women and U.S.-citizen children, the administration is using the immigration system to make migration more painful and precarious—and to enact that punishment on the bodies and families of migrant women.
No food, no water, no electricity—and, increasingly, little hope for the future. Cuba’s humanitarian crisis has deepened dramatically as the Trump administration escalates a decades-long U.S. sanctions regime that has already strangled the island’s economy and access to basic goods. The embargo was supposedly intended to promote democracy, but after more than 60 years, no regime change has come. Instead, ordinary Cubans are living with blackouts, fuel shortages, collapsing public transportation, scarce medicine and food that cannot even be kept cold.
When I studied at the University of Havana in 2024, blackouts and water shortages were already part of daily life. Now, friends I met there tell me the situation has become almost unrecognizable. Paula and Lupita, two women in their twenties, say electricity may come for only two or three hours a day—sometimes in the middle of the night, forcing people awake to cook, wash clothes and charge their phones. Without electricity, there is often no running water, no refrigeration and no relief from the Caribbean heat. Food spoils, preserved food costs more, and even cooking has become a challenge as gas grows scarce and families turn to charcoal.
Children, pregnant women and families are bearing some of the crisis’s heaviest costs. Schools have closed early or shortened their days, hospitals are operating through blackouts, medicines are increasingly difficult to find, and women are giving birth in darkened, understaffed facilities. Menstrual products that were once subsidized are now largely available only in private stores many women cannot afford. And after dark, entire neighborhoods are pitch black, making already-expensive transportation harder to access and leaving young women feeling less safe simply walking outside.
“We know that we are inside of a dictatorship,” says Paula. “We need help to change the government. It has been 70 years without us being able to actually do something about it, like 70 years of brainwashing, of indoctrination, of exile, emigration. The population that we have left, [is] not strong enough to face the government. If you don’t have the basic needs covered, or at least [enough] power to sleep at night, you wouldn’t have the strength to actually face the government.”
For young Cubans, the crisis has become inseparable from the question of whether there is any future for them on the island. Paula told me that nearly everyone she knows between 20 and 30 is trying to leave. She is painfully clear-eyed about the Cuban government’s repression and failures—but also about the failure of decades of U.S. sanctions to produce the democracy they supposedly seek. Cubans are caught between a government that will not change and a U.S. policy that has not forced it to, while ordinary people are left exhausted, hungry and desperate. After seven decades, it is past time to confront the human cost.
Survivors and advocates in Ireland are fighting to stop the construction of luxury apartments on the grounds of the former Bessborough Mother and Baby Institute, where hundreds of infants who died in state- and church-run custody are believed to remain buried in unmarked graves.
At a national rally on July 18 outside the Cork City Library—the site of the former Bessborough Mother and Baby Institute—survivors and their families warned building over the site would erase one of Ireland’s darkest chapters. There, survivors and their families spoke about their experiences. Advocates held a banner with the names of infants who died at Bessborough and others marched with signs reading “to be forgotten is to die twice.”
Bessborough is part of a system of containment institutes first founded back in the 1760s as places to help sex workers pursue more “moral” forms of employment.
By the 1800s, these institutions—called the Magdalene laundries, or mother and baby homes—effectively became prisons for “fallen” or “immoral” women who deviated from strict social norms. Run by Christian religious orders and institutions, mother and baby institutes kept unmarried pregnant women hidden from public view in a Catholic country where unmarried pregnant women and girls were and are deeply stigmatized.
Inside mother and baby institutes—which received public funding and were run by religious orders—unmarried pregnant women and girls were hidden away and faced intense violence. According to the Irish Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, 11.4 percent of the people incarcerated in these institutions were minors. After their children were born and babies at least partially weaned, these women were forcibly separated from their children who would be taken for adoption. But many children died in these institutes because of systemic neglect and abuse.
The conversations over a Black actor like Lupita Nyong’o portraying the iconic Helen of Troy, “the most beautiful woman in the world”, reveal a broader discomfort with depictions of dark-skinned Black beauty in Hollywood.
Whether Nolan intended to or not, Nyong’o’s dual roles reinforced the white feminine ideal, since her Helen does not threaten whiteness as the beauty status quo, nor does her Clytemnestra establish her as sufficiently feminine.
Writer Karen Attiah argues we don’t need a Black Helen so much as we need more “Black mythologies. … “We don’t need Black Helens of Troy. We need more Wakanda women. We need more Women Kings. We need more Queens of Katwe. It is precisely in this moment of historical erasure and rejection of even the most nominal forms of Black inclusion that Black writers and thinkers, and especially Black women, should be focusing on building out the civilizational myths, histories, and heroines we already have.”
Imagine an epic movie about Amanirenas, the Kandake queen who prevented the conquest of the ancient kingdom of Kush from the powerful Roman army circa 25 B.C.E.
Or Queen Nzinga, who fought against the Portuguese seeking to enslave her people during the transatlantic slave trade era circa 1600s.
We can hardly visualize the kingdom of Haiti in existence between 1811 and 1820 during the era of Bridgerton, as historian Marlene Daut argues, let alone tell the story of its king and queen (instead of reclaiming the British Queen Charlotte as a Black royal).
Imagine Lupita Nyong’o cast in any of these majestic roles.
And these roles need not be historical. Imagine the same actor reprising her role as the spy “war dog” Nakia from the Black Panther franchise in her own movie spin-off, traipsing James-Bond style around the world without the need to replace James Bond himself.
If we must wait until 2028 to witness Nyong’o on our big screens again (when the third Black Panther film is scheduled), then this moment in The Odyssey is a misuse of her talents.
Nearly a decade after the rise of #MeToo, public conversations about sexual harassment and assault have entered a new phase—one marked by growing skepticism.
New data from Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute 2025 Violence Experiences Survey suggests that this skepticism extends beyond individual cases. People who are more likely to doubt women’s reports of sexual violence are also more likely to question women’s leadership and their ability to make decisions about their own health.
This matters because believing women—and believing in women—shapes whether survivors come forward, whether they are taken seriously and whether women are trusted in positions of authority. Ultimately, the issue is larger than sexual violence alone. It is about women’s credibility, and whether society trusts women to speak about their own experiences, lead their communities and decide what is best for their health and safety.
The Trump administration’s ceaseless attacks on immigrant communities continue to bring tragedy and death to people who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time: After ICE agents shot into the cars of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, killing both men—neither of whom was even a target of that day’s raid—the Department of Homeland Security agreed to pause its use of traffic stops.
The pause lasted only a few hours: President Trump took to social media to rant against the DHS decision, and it was reversed—signaling that another round of violent deportation efforts are going to be pushed and applauded by this White House.
Trump’s insistence that traffic stops by ICE agents are a vital mechanism for fighting crime shows how seamlessly he has blurred the lines between being in the country without authorization and committing crimes.
The same thing is happening in the world of unaccompanied children—and I suspect one of the next waves of deportation efforts will be aimed at the sponsors of those children. The Trump administration has spun an elaborate web of lies to paint parents and family members as criminals, participating in trafficking and child exploitation.
A new online public platform—The People’s Bill of Rights 250—invites Americans to propose, discuss and vote on ideas they believe belong in the Constitution. As the U.S. marks 250 years, the bold, interactive project asks Americans not only to reflect on the nation’s founding, but to help shape its future.
The nonpartisan organization The People and executive director Katie Fahey, alongside a coalition of civic, advocacy and cultural leaders, spearheaded the People’s Bill of Rights 250. It invites Americans to answer a simple question: What freedoms, rights and protections should every person in the country be guaranteed over the next 250 years?
From now until Friday, July 31, Americans are encouraged to vote and share their own ideas at the People’s Bill of Rights 250’s website.