More Than A Magazine, A Movement
“Ms. has always broken the silence on issues that mainstream media barely touched or refused to cover.”
(This essay is part of the “Feminist Journalism Is Essential to Democracy” project—Ms. magazine’s latest installment of Women & Democracy, presented in partnership with the International Women’s Media Foundation.)
Despite the slew of Jezebel-inspired clickbait headlines (“End of an Era!”), feminist media is hardly dead. Far from it. Among the extraordinary and thriving nonprofit and membership-driven newsrooms, hubs and websites with which Ms. is proud to share this mantel: The International Women’s Media Foundation, “Abortion, Every Day,” Rewire News Group, The 19th* and Women’s Media Center.
It is imperative that feminist media be understood as more than merely a hub for like-minded women. Its role is far more existential: It is where you will find the voices best able to call out and counter the rise in anti-democratic impulses and action that is growing all around us.
(This essay is part of the “Feminist Journalism is Essential to Democracy” project—Ms. magazine’s latest installment of Women & Democracy, presented in partnership with the International Women’s Media Foundation.)
Twenty women are challenging the state’s abortion laws, saying they were unable to get the healthcare they needed for their medically complex pregnancies.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, is the nation’s most important food assistance programs for low-income Americans, and one of its most important anti-poverty measures.
Former Representative Leonor Sullivan (D-Mo.) was one of only 11 women in the House in 1953, and came to Congress determined to help her constituents. Sullivan’s legislative strategy, aided by growing urban, Democratic power in the House, eventually led Congress to approve food stamp “pilot projects,” which ultimately laid the groundwork for SNAP.
Lawmakers are barring the education of, or exposure to, an understanding of the purposes and catalysts for the civil rights movement and the lasting impacts of white supremacy and white superiority by insisting on revisionist history and outright elimination of teaching facts in schools.
As Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reminded us on the anniversary of the Birmingham bombing, “The uncomfortable lessons are often the ones that teach us the most about ourselves.”
On Oct. 23, three male Lubbock County commissioners approved an abortion trafficking ordinance making it unlawful to transport anyone seeking an abortion through the unincorporated area of Lubbock County—all thanks to tireless crusader Mark Lee Dickson, director of East Texas Right to Life and the founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative, who is pushing to bring about the day when “abortion is considered a great moral, social and political wrong and is outlawed in every single state.”
Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh—certainly no fan of Roe—expressed the view in his concurring opinion in Dobbs that a state cannot bar its residents from cross-border abortion travel.
The government might shut down this week (again). At the same time, House Republicans are trying to abolish the Women’s Bureau; cut the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; slash maternal and child health support from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA); eliminate funding for Title X family planning; *and* reverse the FDA decision on the abortion pill mifepristone.
The world is not confined to Israel and Palestine, and it should be possible to give that conflict the attention and outrage it deserves—which is a lot—while not treating other people as trivial or disposable because they happen to live in places that are not as geopolitically relevant to U.S. interests, or are not as psychologically or biologically tied to as many Americans and Europeans, or are not as connected to the American and European telling of history.
It does not have to be this way. We do not have to turn our eyes away.
On Monday, Ms. Studios is dropping a brand-new podcast: Torn Apart: Abolishing Family Policing and Reimagining Child Welfare, hosted by Dorothy Roberts, which investigates how the U.S. child welfare system destroys Black families.
Over four episodes, Professor Roberts brings listeners front and center with the oppressive child protection system and what we need to do to reimagine child welfare.
As climate change fuels ever-deadlier disasters, it may seem that no one is immune to the wildfires, storms and heat waves that plague our baking planet. While this may be true, some are more threatened than others, and older women are among those most at risk.
Older adults represent a significantly disproportionate share of deaths associated with climate-fueled disasters.