More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Access to information is critical for reproductive rights and in promoting gender equality. The anti-abortion movement knows this—so one of their tactics is to instigate confusion, blur the lines between opinion and facts, and in that confusion, instill fear and obstruct people from making informed decisions in their own lives.
Writer, disability-justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha knows that it’s possible for society to become more equitable. Piepzna-Samarasinha’s latest book, The Future Is Disabled: Prophesies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, lays out a bare-bones agenda for what is needed to make the U.S. more socially just.
Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ms. contributor Eleanor J. Bader communicated about the book, the disability justice movement and the ways that activists can support each other in the fight for a more ecologically sustainable and humane social order.
He is in Tehran. I am in Baltimore. The separation is unbearable. Right now, I don’t even want an answer. I want a sign that means he’s alive, that he’s not dead, that the internet has been restored, that he hasn’t been arrested or beaten.
The death of the 22-year-old Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, at the hands of the “morality police” hasn’t just sparked spontaneous protests—it’s countrywide. Women are removing their headscarves and burning them because they are tired of being told what to do with their bodies. Men cheer them on, and some block the fists and batons crashing down on their sisters.
The Ms. community, family, friends and colleagues recently said goodbye to R. Dianne Bartlow—professor, scholar, feminist writer, Emmy-winning producer and director. She’s left too soon, at the age of 67 after a short battle with lung cancer.
I remember Dianne for her easygoing temperament and her patience. Dianne was humble and down-to-earth, which is why I was surprised to learn of her accomplishments as an award-winning television writer-producer.
Ms. spoke with film producer Nicole London about learning Harriet Tubman’s visions of freedom during the Civil War.
“Her story was really well-documented. And that’s all the more disgraceful about how much we still don’t know about her story.”
As a South Carolinian who had a life-saving abortion, I am urging our state representatives to listen to us, their constituents, and stay out of our most personal and private healthcare decisions.
If this summer has shown us anything, it is that from now on, women’s rights hang in a precarious electoral balance.
Critical House bills aimed at protecting women’s and reproductive rights are not even close to meeting the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, leaving many across the U.S. without adequate legal protections to access reproductive healthcare—and making filibuster reform that much more urgent. This also makes the midterm races crucial for Democrats, who need to pick up another two senators in support of filibuster reform.
Each month, I provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups—to do my part in the disruption of what has been the acceptable “norm” in the book world for far too long (white, cis, heterosexual, male); and to amplify indie publishers and amazing works by writers who are women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, APIA/AAPI, international, queer, trans, nonbinary, disabled, fat, immigrant, Muslim, neurodivergent, sex-positive or of other historically marginalized identities—you know, the rest of us.
Make some time to read one or two of these 30 new books, or whatever goes well with your pumpkin spice latte or hot apple cider.
Ms.‘s Jennifer Weiss-Wolf and Dr. Sharon Malone’s Washington Post op-ed became the catalyst for a new bipartisan bill, The Menopause Research Act of 2022, introduced in the House by Rep. David McKinley (R-W.V.) and Rep. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa). If passed, the bill would require the National Institutes of Health to conduct an evaluation of menopause-related research, coordinate a plan of action to resolve apparent gaps in the research and identify further research needed.
I spoke with Weiss-Wolf and Malone about the House bill, the ways in which menopause has been pushed to the margins of federal health research and what new investments could mean for women experiencing menopause.
Disregarded precedent. A lack of legal restraint. A runaway right-wing majority.
As the U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term, we look back at last one—where, for the first time, the 6–3 conservative supermajority was truly able to wield power. It frequently did so in radical ways.