Meet the Voices

• Celinda Lake, pollster, political strategist, and president of Lake Research Partners. Follow her on Twitter @celindalake or on Facebook and read her work in Ms.
• Aimee Allison, founder and president of She The People, a national organization building political power for women of color. Follow her on Instagram and read her work in Ms.
• New Mexico State Senator Angel Charley, who is also the former Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women and Illuminative. Follow her on Instagram.
• Julie Suk, Honorable Deborah A. Batts Distinguished Research Scholar and Professor of Law at Fordham Law, and author of After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It. Follow her on Twitter. You can also listen to her interview with Michele Goodwin on the Fifteen Minutes of Feminism podcast from Ms. Studios.
• Cynthia Richie Terrell, founder of RepresentWomen — an organization devoted to cultivating gender-balanced representation in elected and appointed positions at every level of government. Follow her on Twitter and BlueSky and read her work in Ms.
• Jennifer Piscopo, Director of the Gender Institute and Professor of Gender and Politics at Royal Holloway University of London. Follow her on BlueSky and read her work in Ms.
• And your host, Carmen Rios, feminist superstar and Ms. consulting editor. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram, and everywhere else @carmenriosss and read her work in Ms.

Further Reading from the 50 Years of Ms. Collection

Get a copy of the book here.

• “Women Voters Can’t be Trusted,” by Gloria Steinem. July 1972.
• “The Ticket That Might Have Been… President Chisholm,” by Gloria Steinem. May 1973.
• “…And the Language Is Race,” by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. Jan/Feb 1992.
• “Hate Radio,” by Patricia J. Williams. March/April 1994.
• “Calling All Grand Mothers,” by Alice Walker. Fall 2010.
• “Most. Effective. Speaker. Ever.” by Linda Burstyn, Winter 2011.
• “The Feminist Factor,” by Eleanor Smeal. Winter 2013.
• “Parity in Everything,” by Jennifer M. Piscopo. Spring 2021.
• “The Patriarchs’ War on Women,” by Zoe Marks and Erica Chenoweth. Spring 2022.

Further Reading from the Ms. Archives

• Holding the Line for Women, by Katherine Spillar. Winter 2019.
• The Power of Women’s Votes, 100 Years Later, by Katherine Spillar. Winter 2020.
• Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Fearless Feminist Legacy, by Katherine Spillar. November 2022.
• The Canary in the Coal Mine, by Jennifer Weiss-Wolf. Summer 2023.
• Misogynist Manifesto, by Carrie N. Baker, Fall 2024.

More Links & Resources

• The Center for American Women has an archive of historical data on women’s representation in politics. 
• Want to dig deeper? You can explore an interactive timeline of Ms. history.
• Archival audio of Shirley Chisholm Declaring Her Presidential Bid in this episode was courtesy of the Municipal Library and Archives of the City of New York.
• Audio of Kamala Harris’ Remarks to the UN at the 65th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women in this episode was courtesy of the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Presidential Library. 
• Special thanks to the Omega Institute for allowing us to use an excerpt from Alice Walker’s reading of “Calling All Grand Mothers.”

Episode Transcript

Carmen Rios: Welcome to the first episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, a Ms. Studios podcast that traces the intertwined history of Ms. magazine and the feminist movement it has given voice to for over 50 years — and explores where the fight for gender equality must go next. 

I’m your host, feminist superstar and Ms. consulting editor Carmen Rios.

Today, we’re going to explore how feminists can shape the future of government, policy, and lawmaking — and why it’s long past time for us to re-envision a more representative democracy.

Alice Walker: We have to live differently or we will die in the same old ways. Therefore I call on all Grand Mothers everywhere on the planet to rise and take your place in the leadership of the world. Come out of the kitchen, out of the fields, out of the beauty parlors, out of the television. Step forward and assume the role for which you were created: to lead humanity to health, happiness, and sanity. 

Carmen Rios: That poem you just heard — “Calling All Grand Mothers,” written and read by Alice Walker — appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of Ms. magazine. But the question of how women can and will restore sanity, and cultivate a democracy in which we are all represented, has preoccupied Ms. writers and readers since its debut in 1972.

When Ms. was first published, there were just 15 women in Congress, and women made up only five percent of state legislators. No women were serving as Governors, and not a single woman had served as a presidential cabinet member in decades. No woman had ever run for president, been nominated as Vice President on a major party ticket. There had never been a female Speaker of the House. No woman had ever claimed a seat on the US Supreme Court bench. 

In the first full issue of Ms., its co-founder, Gloria Steinem, listed out the assumptions men in politics held about women in politics: that they voted like their husbands or fathers, that they chose candidates based on physical appearance, that they were less likely to vote for women candidates, and, of course, that they had little interest in becoming part of the political process — known, as it was, as a quote-unquote “male province.”

The women that have spoken up in the pages of Ms. for more than 50 years have proven every one of those assumptions wrong, exemplifying instead the transformation Steinem predicted in the same piece: That women at that time were, quote, “just beginning to flex our muscles and figure out what kind of political force we might be.” 

Women as Voters

Celinda Lake: We are our own voter. We make up our own minds. Women really want government to be a help for their families. They believe that they could depend on a social safety net program. Men think it’s a good day when government hasn’t done anything bad to you. 

Carmen Rios: That was pollster and political strategist Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners and one of the nation’s leading experts on electing women candidates and reaching women voters. 

Steinem highlighted, in her 1972 piece, that women as voters had been understudied and undervalued. Pollsters, she argued, had not thought to include women meaningfully in their data or to question how their experiences as women shaped their opinions. Lake has spent much of her career doing just the opposite: Her polling and her data-driven strategies are designed to advance feminist progress and help women win political office. 

The phenomena we now know as “the gender gap” was discovered 8 years after Ms. launched, in 1980, when exit polls on Election Day finally began reporting out by gender — and Eleanor Smeal, now the publisher of Ms., observed and named the trend. Just two years later, the gender gap drove the outcomes of gubernatorial elections in various states. By 1984, it had become a decisive factor in Senatorial campaigns. Over the next two decades, women’s votes would shape countless elections, including the outcomes of some with the highest stakes.

Working with Lake Research Partners over 20 years later, the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. additionally identified the power of feminist votes. “The Feminist Factor” — a term that describes the voting bloc of self-identified feminists voting in line with their values. 

Celinda Lake: What’s really interesting is that you have, without describing in our most recent data that we did for the fund, you see 49 percent of people describing themselves as feminists. When you describe what feminism is, 57 percent describe themselves as feminist, and there is a big gender gap. Without it being described, 35 percent of men and 60 percent of women describe themselves as feminists. When you describe it, 50 percent of men and 63 percent of women describe themselves… People think that feminism is a dirty word. In fact, it’s a very strong word.

Carmen Rios: Ms. first coined the term “The Feminist Factor” after the 2012 elections, which kept President Barack Obama in the White House for a second term. If only men had voted in that election, Smeal noted in a 2013 piece for Ms., Mitt Romney would have become President. 

But more importantly, voters’ feminist beliefs shaped the outcome of that election. 55 percent of women and 30 percent of men reported in 2012 that they considered themselves feminists. 64 percent of those women and 54 percent of those men voted for Obama, as did 61 percent of voters who identified as pro-choice.

“While there were many reasons for President Obama’s decisive victory,” Smeal wrote, “the feminist factor may be one of the most significant.”

In 2018, women voters shifted the balance of power in the US House. And in 2020, the gender gap grew to a record 12 points due to a growing feminist factor. Across racial and ethnic lines, majorities of women claimed the term “feminist” as they cast their ballots, alongside four in ten men. Katherine Spillar, executive editor of Ms., predicted the outcome in a piece in the Winter 2020 issue. 

“Political candidates who oppose women’s full equality,” Spillar warned, “should be wary.” It’s a warning that remains true today.

Celinda Lake: What are feminist issues? Feminist issues are equal pay. Men and women are adamantly in favor of it, and everybody believes that women are not paid the same as men, and they think it’s bad for families… Every state in the country is 10 points more pro-abortion than it was before Dobbs, every single state… When we were doing work on structural racism, Black women’s maternal health was the single best example of that in people’s minds. They thought, something is structurally very wrong here. There’s no other explanation. Women’s issues, feminist issues are every issue, everybody’s issues.

Democrats, Republicans, and Independents want to spend more at the state and federal level on children’s programs, not less, more. People want in-home healthcare. What is the feminist agenda? Wherever you measure it, it is wildly, wildly popular. 

Carmen Rios: Polling data over the years has demonstrated that feminists are not alone in their demands and their visions for the future. The current administration has used the claim of a “mandate” to push an agenda of regression, isolation, and division — but the data proves that feminist issues remain important to voters, and feminist aims remain popular across the country. 

Celinda Lake: The public is very progressive and very feminist, but we don’t have enough voices, we don’t have enough courage, we don’t have enough people standing up. Feminist issues, however we define them, are doing quite well. What we don’t have is we don’t have enough of them out front. We don’t have enough leaders taking them on, and there are just too many of our leaders that are silenced, right now, because they don’t understand what happened, and what voters want is for you to stand up, be for change, propose a positive vision, get out there, stand up and fight.

We now have a critical mass of women’s voices. It’s been incremental gains. We’ve got to gain more. We’re gaining now with women of color. We’re gaining now with LGBTQ women, but we need more, and we’re still really at a quarter, not 50 percent. 

We know that when women are over a third of a body, a legislative body, different legislation gets introduced, and the pace of work, there’s more that gets done. 

We need to have a woman president. It’s about time we had women’s leadership and women’s example.

Carmen Rios: In 1985, Gloria Steinem posed an intriguing question in the pages of Ms.: “Why should national interest always be equated with male interest?” What feminist candidates are challenging us to ask as well is: What would be possible if it wasn’t?

Shirley Chisholm: I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States of America. I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country although I am a woman and I’m equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests. I stand here now without endorsements from many big-name politicians or celebrities or any other kind of prop. I do not intend to offer to you the tired and glip cliches which for too long have been an accepted part of our political life. I am the candidate of the people of America.

Carmen Rios: That’s Shirley Chisholm, on January 25, 1972, announcing her campaign for president. 

Chisholm was the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first woman and woman of color to seek the nomination on a major party ticket. She was featured on the cover of Ms in May 1973, alongside her Vice Presidential candidate, Frances “Sissy” Farenthold. 

Two postmortem features inside wondered what might have been had they been selected to run. Instead, Gloria Steinem lamented in her piece on Chisholm’s campaign, “the election is over, and there will be a familiar face, a familiar white and male face, in the White House for four more years.”

More than 50 years later, that lamentation remains familiar.

Women still have far to go to reach parity in politics — and in power. US politics remain lopsided, with a higher proportion of White people in Congress than in the overall U.S. population and women, who make up half of the US population, represented by only 26 percent of members of Congress.

Aimee Allison: There are three huge cultural forces that we’re dealing with, right now, and we have since the inception of this country, racism and white supremacy, at its core. It has a lot to do with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous people. That force, patriarchy, right, and male supremacy, in all the ways that we have seen the culture, even now, and market capitalism. And all of these forces have pressed on and limited our review of what’s possible.

Carmen Rios: To get to the core of why we need more diversity and representation in politics, I talked to Aimee Allison, founder and president of She The People, a national organization building power for women of color to lead America into a new political era. Hers is a vision that is more critical and important than ever in this current moment, and it’s one that has been building for centuries.

Aimee Allison: We have to break the spell that we have been under about what this country is in order for us to create something new, and Black women, I would just argue, more than most people, throughout history, have been able to see through the lies and to embrace a justice vision. The founding documents were crafted by a bunch of slaveholding people, who wrote in there that Black people were not human, and Native people were not human.

Women-led movements have been central to both defining what’s possible in terms of justice and having the infrastructure in terms of fighting for democracy.

Carmen Rios: Intersectional feminist movements are also fertile ground for candidates looking not just to play the game of politics and win, but to change the political system and fundamentally alter how it impacts their communities.

Angel Charley: One morning I got an AMBER Alert. And I remember everything about that morning because it was a Native girl who had gone missing, 11 years old, and my daughter was 10 years old at the time. And then fast-forward a couple of days later, and she didn’t make it home. 

There was a local organization in Albuquerque who was putting on a candlelight vigil for her and they were asking for donations for the family… And I just remember being in community and thinking, like, I have to do something. I have to volunteer with this organization or something.

Carmen Rios: That’s New Mexico State Senator Angel Charley. Before her election last year, she became the office coordinator — and eventually the Executive Director — of the organization hosting that vigil, the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, as well as the Executive Director of Illuminative, a Native women-led organization building power for Native peoples. 

Angel Charley: It was through that advocacy that I just was drawn into what good policy means… It really has been because of advocacy that I am here. 

Carmen Rios: Charley is now serving in New Mexico’s legislature during a historic moment for the state. After the 2024 elections, the Land of Enchantment has 60 women in its legislature — the largest female legislative majority in US history — as well as women serving as governor, secretary of state, land commissioner, and state treasurer. Women also hold two of the state’s five seats in the US Congress. 

But Charley remains one of only a few Native voices elected to office in a state that is home to 23 sovereign nations — something she thinks about every day as she serves in the state Senate.

Angel Charley: I’m a mom. I’m a daughter of parents that are getting older. I’m a wife and a partner. But I’m also an indigenous woman. I’m a Native woman before I’m anything else in this world and that is how I’ve been approaching this, and for as inclusive as New Mexico is for native people in policy, there are still things that we can do better here. 

Carmen Rios: Just days before we spoke, Charley passed a bill creating a system similar to the AMBER Alert system for missing indigenous women, bringing her political origin story full circle, and she and her colleagues have already put forward paid family medical leave legislation. They’re also holding the line against Trump administration policies and far-right efforts that are endangering, among so many other critical rights and freedoms, access to abortion and protections for immigrant communities.

Angel Charley: There was a bill that came before us a couple of days ago about U visa certification. And the debate, of course, gets heated, and in that room, I’m the only native person on that committee, and I had to remind people: If you are not native to this land your people immigrated at some point. You are descendants of immigrants and there is, nobody is illegal on stolen land. And so, to say that in that room, I mean, I got some reactions, for sure, but the truth is there is nobody else who can say that but me, you know? So, it’s those moments of just understanding that at the state level we’re protecting ourselves from the federal government.

Carmen Rios: Allison echoed that sentiment when she spoke to me about the fight feminists need to wage now to shape the future, not just in politics, but of our democracy and our republic. 

Aimee Allison: The battle in this next period is going to be in the cities and in the states, and we absolutely must have leaders. We need our best and brightest to be leading in these areas, in the cities, in local, in state. We do need leaders to be preparing themselves to be in political office, and we equally need people to be leading movements to strengthen the ability for us to serve the needs of the community at the local and at the state level. 

And culturally, as women, we’re going to have to look to different kinds of leaders, who don’t shrink from diversity, equity, inclusion, don’t shrink from demands for reparations and land back movement, that embrace and refuse to participate in structures made for women that don’t include and that aren’t diverse in terms of age and class… We’re going to have to lead differently as women. And we’re going to have to reject a certain kind of way that people have been able to get away with around advocating for women.

If we’re willing to challenge the old assumptions and the old biases that have limited the women’s movement, there’s a lot of places that we can go.

Carmen Rios: After Chisholm’s historic campaign, Ms. would go on to cover the presidential bids of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris in 2016 and 2024, the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro as vice president in 1984 and election of Harris as Vice President in 2020, and the hard-won and hard-fought careers of women across the political system, including openly feminist Congresswomen like Bella Abzug — a Ms. woman of the year — and Nancy Pelosi, the first and only woman to become Speaker of the House, who was featured on the cover of Ms. after TIME and Newsweek failed to do her the honor. (In fact, we did it thrice.) 

Since its launch, Ms. has borne witness to not just one, but two “Years of The Woman” in US politics. First, in 1992, outrage over Clarence Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court, despite Anita Hill’s now-infamous testimony that he had sexually harassed her, led voters to triple the number of women in the Senate and send 24 new women to the U.S. House of Representatives. And then, in 2018, two years after Donald Trump’s inauguration sparked massive feminist protests nationwide, a gender gap driven by women of color, young women, and college-educated women led to a record number of women in both chambers of Congress, within Congressional committee leadership, and in state legislatures, as well as a series of historic firsts for Black, Latina, Native American, and young women candidates. 

There are 151 women in Congress right now. Two women have run for president on major party tickets — one of whom won the popular vote — and Kamala Harris made history, in 2020, as the first woman and first woman of color to win the Vice Presidency. 13 US Governors are women, and 2,467 women are serving in state legislatures — holding a record 33 percent of seats and, in a record seven states, forming majorities in legislative chambers. Women hold seats on the US Supreme Court and have served in some of the highest cabinet positions in White House administrations — and Nancy Pelosi is known widely not just as the first woman Speaker, but as the most successful and effective in House history.

“Perhaps the best indicator of her campaign’s impact,” Steinem opined in that 1973 piece on Chisholm, “is the effect it had on individual lives. All over the country,” she wrote, “there are people who will never be quite the same.”

Though too many glass ceilings remain intact in politics, women — especially those at the intersections of gender, race, and class — have demonstrated time and time again since that a new vision for how politics is organized and who politics serves is possible — by running, winning, and bringing their feminist agenda to the halls of power.

Aimee Allison: The mantra of She the People is to love our own and others. We start with love, to create a nation where everyone belongs, to ensure justice for all, and to make the American democracy live up to its greatest promise, and that’s it. That’s what I want. That’s what millions of us want. And despite what has happened over the last 10 years, it’s like the MAGA movement, white supremacist movement, anti-immigrant, you know, movement, it’s like all of this, anti-democracy movement, has always had strength, and it seems like it’s overwhelmingly strong, right now. I just want us to remember, at the same time, love, justice, belonging, and democracy, the core of that has also been growing. 

I think there’s a lot of people feeling all is lost, right now, and I can only say that we weren’t wrong, we stand for something extremely powerful, and we have a legacy of women who came before us that are going to actually show us the way forward.

Kamala Harris: Eleanor Roosevelt, who shaped the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, once said, “Without equality, there can be no democracy.” In other words, the status of women is the status of democracy.

Carmen Rios: Kamala Harris, in those remarks as Vice President during the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women, captured the urgency of why the fight for diverse representation in politics — and for all people to have the power, as voters and candidates, to shape the future — matters so much.

The work feminists have done to equalize representation in politics is about much more than a moral imperative, or the sake of fairness. Women’s right to fully participate in politics — and the rights of all people to share the same responsibility — are inextricably tied to the health of our nation’s democracy. 

“The connection between sexism and authoritarianism is not coincidental or a mere character flaw of individual misogynists in chief,” Zoe Marks and Erica Chenoweth wrote in a piece for the Spring 2022 issue of Ms. “Women’s political power is essential to a properly functioning multiracial democracy, and fully free, empowered women are a threat to autocracy.” 

In the piece, Marks and Chenoweth quoted political scientist Valerie Hudson, who called patriarchy “the first political order.” They declared that “feminist candidates, women elected officials, and feminist policies are fundamental to the health and well-being of democracy,” and insisted that “feminists must find their political homes and invest in them.”

For too long, women, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, and other marginalized communities have been denied a voice in US politics. And now, the anti-diversity, anti-woman backlash we’re seeing now at the highest levels of our political system threatens to undo not just the progress of the last 50 or 250 years for women, but to unravel our democratic system itself.

The time has come, Marks and Chenoweth warned, to take a stand.

Julie Suk: The point that we’ve reached is a crisis, but it’s a crisis for, perhaps, different reasons than is often assumed. The problem is that we have a constitutional system that sets up representative institutions that actually don’t represent all the people very well. One of the chambers, the Senate, is very malapportioned. It represents every state equally, two senators per state, and so, that’s, itself, undemocratic… We have an electoral system where we elect the president. No modern democracy uses an electoral college to elect the president. It’s very normal, in most modern democracies, to let the people pick the president. 

And these problems are related to the moment that we’re now in. I mean, I understand that Donald Trump did win the national popular vote and the Electoral college to get into power in 2024, but I don’t think the Second Trump Presidency would have been possible without the first Trump Presidency.

Carmen Rios: That’s Julie Suk, Honorable Deborah A. Batts Distinguished Research Scholar and Professor of Law at Fordham Law, and author of the 2023 book After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It.

Julie Suk: Misogyny is a system, patriarchy is a system, by which people who are in power extract benefits and value from people who have no rights. And in our nation, that meant enslaved African Americans and women who did not have rights, but were expected to basically take care of our posterity, just to quote the Preamble of the US Constitution, to do all the reproductive labor necessary to perpetuate the nation throughout the generations, so that inherently anti-democratic idea, that the people who govern are benefitting from the exclusion of others who can’t govern, that’s actually been maintained through institutions that are not democratic. 

Even when we corrected that, by way of the 19th Amendment and by way of the amendments that were adopted after the Civil War, creating formal equality or a formal right to vote, unabridged on account of sex, was not enough to dismantle the vast infrastructures, enforced by law, that continued the extraction of value and the expectation that women perform the reproductive labor and raise the nation without compensation and without other important rights. Even if we formally have the right to vote and we formally have equality, the entire infrastructure by which women have been excluded from real participation in decision making and power, that continues.

Carmen Rios: White supremacy and misogyny have always been antithetical to the true promise of democracy in the US, and this country is long overdue for a real conversation — and a reckoning — around how racism and sexism, as well as other forms of power and privilege, shape our government and undergird our daily lives. 

Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, executive director of Ms. partnerships and strategy, wrote in the Summer 2023 issue of the magazine that, and I quote: “The hard truth is that our democracy has been flailing — by failing women, particularly women of color — since the nation’s founding.”

Among other issues, Weiss-Wolf points to the lack of meaningful representation for women in politics as proof, citing recent “firsts” and dismal records for diversity in politics — like the first time in US history that at least one LGBTQ+ candidate ran for office in every state, in 2022, or Nevada becoming the first state, in 2018, to have a woman-majority legislature. Nearly 250 years into the history of the United States, and over 100 years since women won the right to vote, the most women to ever serve as governor simultaneously is 13, and 28 percent is the record high for women’s representation in Congress.

Julie Suk: If we were truly committed to equal participation, equal representation, and equal rights for all people, regardless of race and gender, you would see decision-making positions occupied by roughly equal numbers of men and women or people of all genders, and I think you would probably see, in decision-making positions, roughly proportionate representation by people of all races that are in American society. 

If we were, in fact, not discriminating and not perpetuating anti-democratic or oppressive dynamics, you would expect gender parity in decision-making positions to emerge naturally, and of course…so, the fact that we don’t see that should lead us to investigate why.

Carmen Rios: Suk’s solution is a “constitution of care” — made possible through constitutional change, with a resetting of our basic rights that directly addresses and combats discrimination and builds infrastructure that empowers women. It’s the most powerful form of redress, she posits, to what is a fundamentally undemocratic system of government.

Julie Suk: I think it’s so important for people who are interested in feminism and ending patriarchy and ending misogyny, women, gender nonconforming people, just everyone who’s interested in the gender justice issues, really needs to focus our energies on structures, the political structures by which we try to pursue our feminists ends. Part of the reason our rights are under siege is that the structures of power have not been changed… Unless and until we focus on structure and infrastructure, by which power is exercised, I think we’re not going to make a lot of progress.

Carmen Rios: Many of those structures, of course, are currently under siege from within. 

The Trump administration — inspired so precisely by The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — is working steadily not to improve the imbalances in government, but to further enshrine them. 

It was Project 2025 that called for the end of all programs fighting discrimination against women within federal, state, and local government, as well as the private sector — a vision Donald Trump began actualizing on his first day in office, with an Executive Order attacking DEI efforts. A report by the National Women’s Law Center released in March also found that women and people of color were disproportionately impacted by the widespread layoffs of federal workers earlier this year by the Trump administration.

These attacks on diversity in the workforce, Carrie Baker wrote in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms., “work to advance white men in the workforce, at the expense of all women and men of color.”

Project 2025 also laid out plans for a series of attacks on voting rights, which are already imperiled by widespread gerrymandering and voter restriction laws.

Trump’s handbook threatens to attach criminal charges to voter fraud — a move the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights believes will result in fake investigations, unwarranted prosecutions, and the further diminishment of voter participation in elections — and seeks to give the federal government unnecessary access to voter rolls. It also outlines plans to force the Department of Justice to investigate and pursue cases against election officials who disagree with the administration. 

The Trump administration has been working for months to eliminate safeguards that protect Americans from election mis and disinformation campaigns — something else that was also inspired directly from Project 2025. In February, over a dozen staffers at the nation’s cybersecurity agency who protected the security of US elections were placed on administrative leave. Two months later, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget proposed, in a letter to Congress, the wholesale elimination of funding for projects countering mis- and disinformation. 

Suk pointed out during our call that Trump’s attempt by Executive Order to require proof of citizenship to vote — which has been blocked by not just one, but two federal judges — threatened to uniquely disenfranchise married women, whose legal names no longer match their birth certificates. As we know, many laws attacking voting rights also disproportionately impact and disenfranchise the poor, the working-class, and communities of color.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: We need to shift who has power in this country. The history of the United States has been a long struggle that will continue, and I would hope that within 50 years we’d be much closer to that promise of John Adams to have Congress be a portrait of the people in miniature. That’s what I really want to see. I don’t want to have any one gender completely in charge of anything, but I do want women to feel safe and secure, and well paid, and proud and in charge of our autonomy in every way, and part of every decision that impacts us and impacts our families. 

That’s doable, but it’s going to require a lot of shifting of power, shifting of power away from older people, from White people, from men. And you know Frederick Douglass has that great line that, power concedes nothing without a demand. 

We need to embrace a new reality in which we’re going to have to do some incredible collective organizing to protect what we believe in about this country and some incredible innovation to really understand what’s working well in other countries, and really embrace that vision of what a remodeled power structure looks like… We’ve got to push our own major women’s led democracy and everything else movement, and use all the strategies that we can think of to get that job done and reach that vision of a gender-balanced world.

Carmen Rios: That vision is the antidote — not just to Project 2025 and the politics of the Trump administration, but to the larger issue of how our government is fundamentally shaped by persistent systems of discrimination. That’s why I wanted to talk to Cynthia Richie Terrell — founder of RepresentWomen, an organization devoted to cultivating gender-balanced representation in elected and appointed positions at every level of government — about how we get there.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: This year we saw the first decline in two decades of women in the house of representatives, which I find really shocking, and it’s due to all those constraints in our polarized, rigid system and the only way that we’re really going to address that and tackle that is to change the electoral system. We can’t spend our way out of it. We already spent, what, 15 billion dollars on house and senate races in the 2024 election cycle — yet we have the first decline in women’s representation, so it’s not a spending issue per se. We know we’ve got a huge field of talented women, but we need to break up the gridlock of our electoral system in order to get them elected. 

Carmen Rios: RepresentWomen is interested in solutions that address the lack of representation for women in politics across their political journeys — from empowering them when they think about running and helping them win once they do, to enabling women to serve effectively and rise to leadership positions in government. When I asked Richie Terrell what reforms to our political system she thinks would make the biggest impact, she talked to me about ranked-choice voting.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: In the United States context we elect about 520,000 offices, 75 percent of them are nonpartisan and about 75 percent of them are single-winner, and there are not that many reforms that can work in a nonpartisan, single-winner kind of environment. Ranked-choice voting happens to be the reform that works well in both of those contexts. Ranked-choice voting is the system where you get to rank your candidates in order of preference and the last place finisher is eliminated. Those votes are redistributed until you get a majority winner. 

And we are excited about the data because the more and more cities and jurisdictions, which pass ranked-choice voting, the data is still really strong that women hold 52 percent of seats in jurisdictions with ranked-choice voting and that’s about twice the norm, roughly. 

I mean, we’re talking about states, cities, counties, but that’s pretty impressive when you think of a single reform where women are winning about twice as many seats as the norm.

Carmen Rios: Applying ranked choice voting in multiseat, multiwinner, or at-large elections — the 25 percent of offices Richie Terrell referred to that are not single winner — is what she calls “The Gold Standard.” She sees it not just as a tool to improve representation, but also a mechanism to fight gerrymandering, increase participation in elections, and ensure that districts represent every community within their boundaries. The Fair Representation Act, authored by Jamie Raskin and Don Beyer, would make that Gold Standard apply in every congressional district.

Cynthia Richie Terrell: And the, maybe the icing, no, is it the cherry on the top, the icing on the cake, the brewer’s yeast on the tofu? It’s that women would probably win about 40 percent more seats just based on the data around ranked-choice voting and women’s representation is about twice the number percentage in multiseat districts. That’s a pretty quick way to, within one or two election cycles, to almost double the amount of women who are in Congress, in the state legislatures. 

Carmen Rios, 19:31-20:12: In the Spring 2021 issue of Ms., Jennifer Piscopo, Director of the Gender Institute and Professor of Gender and Politics at Royal Holloway University of London, explored the path to Mexico’s groundbreaking constitutional reform, “Parity in Everything,” that implemented gender quotas for elected offices and top posts in the executive and judicial branches in addition to a series of gender parity laws that sought to level the playing field for women candidates. 

The reform, Piscopo wrote, “sailed to victory in June 2019,” and “not a single member of Congress voted against it.” But the movement that made that possible began decades before.

Jennifer Piscopo: That did not come out of nowhere, right? That wasn’t a push that began two years before the constitutional reform process, but that was actually a process that started in the 1980s, in Mexico, when Mexican women in the political parties were very, very frustrated with how few opportunities the political parties were giving them to run as candidates, and they started insisting that the parties had to do more to nominate women and put women in electable positions. 

Some of the women within the political parties, especially parties of the left, managed in party conventions to secure commitments from their parties to nominate certain numbers of women in upcoming elections, and then the women started working together, across the party lines, to try to turn what were those internal party mandates into legislative mandates, passing laws that would require all of the parties, to run certain percentages of women. Mexico eventually passes what we call a 30 percent gender quota law, then it passes a 40 percent gender quota law. 

And these just apply, initially, to candidates for the federal congress, but gradually, this idea of quotas becomes parity. It becomes gender balance. It spreads beyond the congress to implicate other government institutions, and eventually, the parity in everything reform that’s talked about in that article.

Carmen Rios: Mexico’s gender parity movement was tied to its own democratization. When electoral reforms took shape in the 1990s, women legislators, then about 12 percent of Congress, added quotas as amendments to election laws. Despite loopholes in the initial quota laws, the reforms worked, boosting women’s representation in the lower body of Mexico’s Congress, in the 2003 elections, from 16.8 percent to 24.9. When women stopped making such gains, they closed the loopholes, with the help of Mexico’s federal electoral court, and a series of new constitutional reforms continued to build on the initial success of the quota system. 

Tied to those reforms, and driven by women legislators, were efforts to further empower women candidates. This year, their success is as apparent as ever: Mexico has a woman president, elected after a campaign featuring two women candidates — just 70 years after women there won the right to vote.

Jennifer Piscopo: There are some things that I take heart in, right? So, of course, if we go back to the 1990s, and this is the first moment in Mexico and in other countries where these gender quota laws are being talked about, we see some very predictable arguments from the political parties, right, which is, oh, women aren’t interested in being in politics, or oh, even if women are interested in being in politics, we just don’t know where they are. Where are they? It’s very difficult to say, after you’ve had 30 years of, you know, 30, and then 40, and now 50 percent women, not just in congress but also now in the governor’s seats, in the state legislatures, as mayors, because there’s gender parity, now, for the municipalities, and that includes the mayoral posts, it’s really hard to make the argument that women aren’t interested, and women aren’t competent, and women aren’t capable, right, and that there are no women available who could take on, right, these posts. 

And I think that has been enormously important, and I think it changes the perceptions of what women can do. And in the Presidential race, in 2024, there was — two women, right, competed from the two main coalitions, and they were both highly qualified, right? And there was really no discussion about whether or not they were up for the job. And I think that’s actually a really significant advance.

Carmen Rios: Mexico’s gender parity laws can’t be replicated exactly within the framework of the US political system. But the ways in which Mexico’s gender parity movement addressed barriers women faced throughout the political process, Piscopo noted during our call, offers some inspiration for how we could begin shifting the landscape here at home.

Jennifer Piscopo: These laws often also contain a lot of other gender equality measures for women in politics. They’re part of the quota legislation, but they’re not part of the quota mechanism, itself, because as women work to reform the gender quota, they knew that their only barrier was not just getting the nomination. They knew that they also faced other barriers, such as would they get nominated in a winnable seat? Would they actually receive the campaign resources they needed to run effective campaigns? Would they actually receive media time? Would they receive equality in media time? 

So, we see mechanisms like encouraging political parties to transform more resources to women candidates versus men candidates. Sometimes, the state will pay a bonus to parties that actually give women certain amounts of money or place women in winnable districts. Sometimes they also allocate money within the parties for leadership training programs for women candidates. So, they also do think about a lot of other ways the playing field isn’t equal between women and men, and I think we can look at that in the United States, right? 

We know, still, that women don’t, on average, have access to the same kinds of campaign donations. We know that women also, often, are less likely to donate to campaigns than men. So, there’s lots of measures that we can think about around fundraising, around the use of campaign expenses, right? So, can women use their campaign expenses for things like childcare, for their staff to travel with them, to provide childcare while they’re on the campaign trail? There are lots of other ways that we can use policy in the US as a lever.

Carmen Rios: For more than 50 years, Ms. has chronicled the work women are doing to level the political playing field and make the United States live up to its democratic ideals. It’s as obvious as ever how necessary that work is, and how dangerous it would be to abandon it — no matter what challenges we face. 

When Ms. first began, it offered women the simple power of solace. To read its pages was to know that we were not alone — not in our sadness, not in our frustration, and not in our rage. Over 50 years later, Ms. continues to remind us that we are powerful. In a time of rampant backsliding and backlash, it’s up to all of us to come together to protect our democracy, safeguard our rights, and forge a better future — to move this country and our communities, as the suffragists would say, “forward, into light.”

Thank you so much for tuning in to the first episode of LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD: a podcast celebrating more than 50 years of Ms. and what’s yet to come as we carve out the second half of this feminist century. 

If you liked what you heard today, you know the drill: Be sure to subscribe to this show wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode — and please rate, review and share the show with your co-conspirators! You can also find more from every episode, including my full interviews with our incredible guests and episode notes, at ms magazine dot com and ms magazine dot com slash podcast.

Be sure to stay in touch between episodes, too! You can follow Ms. on Facebook at msmagazine, at ms underscore magazine on Instagram and Threads and via msmagazine dot com on BlueSky, and you can find me at carmen fucking rios dot com and on social media everywhere at carmen rios, with three s’s — that’s c a r m e n r i o s s s. 

Looking Back, Moving Forward is produced by Ms. Studios. Michele Goodwin and Kathy Spillar are our executive producers. Our Supervising Producer, Writer, and Host is yours truly, Carmen Rios. Roxy Szal and Oliver Haug are our episode producers. Every episode is edited by Natalie Hadland. And Art and design for this show are by Brandi Phipps.

Ms. is a non-profit, reader-funded magazine. Head to msmagazine dot com and hit JOIN to become a member or sustaining member today. You’ll get every issue of the magazine in print and in the Ms. app, access to special member-only newsletters, discounted and early access to our community events, and special supporter gifts! 

You can dive deeper into the history of Ms. by ordering your copy of the collection 50 Years of Ms: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution at bookstores and online at ms magazine dot com slash book. And now, for the first time, you can explore the entire digital collection of Ms. magazines, from 1972 to the present, at your public or university library through ProQuest! Ask your librarian to add the new Ms. Magazine Archive to their collections if you can’t find it.

Audio of Shirley Chisholm Declaring Her Presidential Bid Courtesy of the Municipal Library and Archives of the City of New York. Audio of Kamala Harris’ Remarks to the UN at the 65th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women was Courtesy the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Presidential Library.

And special thanks to the Omega Institute for allowing us to use an excerpt from Alice Walker’s reading of Calling All Grand Mothers. You can watch the full video on the Omega Institute website at eomega dot org. 

Our theme song is stock media provided by ProClips via Pond5.

Until next time, readers.