More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Voting is more than a civic duty; it is an expression of your voice, your values and your vision for the future. The fight continues to this day.
It’s easy to feel like one vote doesn’t matter, but history has shown us that collective action can lead to transformative change. That is why those who resist change continue to suppress the vote, more than 150 years after the 15th Amendment. When we all show up, the power of our voices combined can create a force that is impossible to ignore.
Artist Tiffany Shlain’s Dendrofemonology: Feminist History Tree Ring is on the move, soon to take up temporary residence in New York City’s Madison Square Park as a focal point for her “Mobilization for Women’s Rights and the Planet” on Sept. 21. Coinciding with the start of climate week and anticipating a historic election, Shlain’s daylong, public activation and rally address a convergence of critical concerns in this “age of urgency.”
“I’m hoping that the next tree ring moment will be having the Equal Rights Amendment added into our Constitution and sex equality guaranteed across this country,” said Shlain. “And who knows? Maybe there’ll be something else new to burn” into the timeline “in January.”
Monday, Sept. 16, marks two years since the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini made international headlines and sparked an uprising in Iran. Her death triggered the longest citizen-led rebellion in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Nasrin Sotoudeh and her husband Reza Khandan are no strangers to brutal and violent government suppression. The two Iranian activists and attorneys have faced harassment, violence and imprisonment from a government that will do virtually anything to crush women’s rights and freedom of expression.
In her new memoir, A Termination, writer and actor Honor Moore recounts her decision to have an abortion in 1969: “I didn’t think about I’m having an abortion, I just did it. Blasted through fear; I want this life, not that life. … I made the decision by myself. But also with the remote-control help of my mother: ‘Don’t come home pregnant.'”
Abortions are sought by a wide range of people for many different reasons. There is no single story. Telling stories of then and now shows how critical abortion has been and continues to be for women and girls. (Share your abortion story by emailing myabortionstory@msmagazine.com.)
“The pregnancy continued not so much because I chose it … I sobbed, until I could sob no more, and a quiet defiance and resolution settled around me, holding it all.”
Abortion advocates have created volunteer-run, donor-supported, community-based mutual aid groups around the country to provide free abortion pills to people living in states restricting abortion.
These groups serve people of all ages and gestational stages, using different protocols for people in later pregnancy. As they start their third year of operations, they have mailed abortion medications to over 70,000 people in total.
There’s about seven weeks till Election Day, but voters in most states—except those in Mississippi, Alabama and New Hampshire—will have the opportunity to vote in mere weeks.
For some states, the last day to register to vote is less than a month away. Currently 21 states and D.C. allow voter registration on Election Day, meaning that you can wait until Nov. 5 to register and vote. However, many states require registration as early as the first week in October.
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: a new ranked-choice voting ballot initiative in Colorado, the “electability” debate for women running for office, the Democratic Party is challenging long-held beliefs regarding the electability of women candidates, and more.
Title X, the federally funded family planning program that provides confidential family planning services to teens has once again come under attack. In separate lawsuits, two Texas parents have alleged that by allowing their daughters to obtain contraceptives in the absence of their consent, the program has effectively divested them of their “God-given right to ensure their daughters remain virgins until marriage.”
This attack is on Title X is nothing new. The rights of parents to control the upbringing of their children has long been a rallying cry of Christian conservatives as they battle against the ostensible indoctrination of their children “with a secular worldview that amount[s] to a godless religion.” As they see it, a particularly pernicious aspect of this “godless religion” is the belief that “’teen promiscuity is … normal and acceptable conduct.”
Over the course of four decades, courts have consistently held that although Title X encourages parental involvement, it does not require it based on the recognition that “confidentiality [is] a crucial factor in attracting teenagers to Title X clinics and reducing incidence of teenage pregnancies.”
Just days after Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic party’s official nomination, Gloria Feldt—former Planned Parenthood president and longtime women’s rights activist—convened the 10th annual Take the Lead Conference in Washington, D.C., on Women’s Equality Day.
Hopes are high and determination steeled that 2025 will see the first woman president and the ratification of the ERA. For the hundreds of women and dozens of presenters and organizers who took part in the Take the Lead conference, promoting women’s power at every level and in every field has always been essential to the formula for that success.