Looking Back, Moving Forward

Women Can’t Afford to Wait for a Feminist Economic Future (with Premilla Nadasen, Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino, Aisha Nyandoro, Gaylynn Burroughs, and Dolores Huerta)

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August 1, 2025

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Looking Back, Moving Forward

with Carmen Rios

5 Episodes
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In this Episode:

Women have experienced multiple economic upheavals since the founding of Ms., but one thing remains true: economic inequity is still shaping women’s lives — especially for women of color, LGBTQ women, women with disabilities, and low-income women. Ms. has long given voice to the economic disparities women face, and the nuances within our economic experiences along intersectional lines. 

This episode traces the transformation of women’s economic experiences over the last 50 years, zooming in on workplace discrimination, women’s unpaid domestic and care burdens, and the factors pushing women disproportionately into poverty — revealing how the system seeks to devalue all of “women’s work,” and what feminists are doing about it.

Meet the Voices

Bonus Content from This Episode

Further Reading from the 50 Years of Ms. Collection

Get a copy of the book.

  • “Click! The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,” by Jane O’Reilly. Spring 1972 Preview Issue.
  • “Welfare is a Women’s Issue,” by Johnnie Tillmon. Spring 1972 Preview Issue.
  • “Life on the Global Assembly Line,” by Babrara Ehrenreich and Annette Fuentes. January 1981.
  • “The Politics of Housework,” by Patricia Mainardi. May/June 1992. 
  • “Too Poor to Parent,” by Gaylynn Burroughs. Spring 2008.
  • “Domestic Workers Take it to the Streets,” by Premilla Nadasen. Fall 2009.
  • “Do We Care?” by Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino. Spring 2021.

Further Reading from the Ms. Archives

  • “The Nearly Impossible Dream,” by C. Nicole Mason. Winter 2016.
  • “One Tough (Rebel, Activist, Feminist) Mother,” by Lisa Barca. Fall 2017.
  • “A Basic Worker’s Right,” by Martha Burk. Spring 2018.
  • “Unfair Pay and Unsafe Workplaces,” by Andrea Camp. Fall 2018.
  • “Charting an Equal Future,” by Martha Burk. Spring 2024.
  • “Greedflation,” by Martha Burk. Fall 2024.
  • “Misogynist Manifesto,” by Carrie N Baker. Fall 2024.

More Links & Resources

Episode Transcript

Carmen Rios: Welcome to the third 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 examine the longstanding fight for women’s economic justice — and how much work is left in the struggle to ensure equitable opportunities for all of us.

[Transition Music] 

Carmen Rios: The cover of very first issue of Ms. — the Spring 1972 preview issue that was included inside of New York magazine — featured an original illustration by artist Miriam Wosk that embodied the dizzying array of tasks the everyday woman was juggling. A pregnant woman with many arms, inspired by the Hindu goddess Kali, used each one to tend to a different pressure demanded by patriarchal capitalism. 

In one, she held an iron, presumably for her husband’s shirts; in another, a duster, so she could clean the house while he was at work. In one, a steering wheel, we can assume to drive the children to school; in another, a pan with a fresh-cooked egg on the surface, because the entire household can’t possibly feed itself. In one, a telephone — after all, who better than a woman to tend to the administrative load for the whole family? — and in another, a mirror — because let’s be honest, she’s not doing it well unless it looks effortless. In one, a clock — a reminder of both the hurried nature of all of the stuff of life, and the sexist idea that women’s time, when spent managing domestic life, should be infinite.

And in the last, a typewriter — I’d like to imagine, in order to finally tell the truth about her life, so that things might finally change, and the tears on her face might dry.

Wosk’s art was paired with Jane O’Reilly’s groundbreaking cover piece for Ms.: “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth.” O’Reilly described a series of mothers and wives pushed to the edge by domestic life and familial demands, by their lack of agency in the homes they managed, and by husbands who didn’t take them seriously. They had, she wrote, “suddenly and shockingly perceived the basic disorder in what has been believed to be the natural order of things.” 

Not all of the women O’Reilly recalled were housewives — at least in the traditional sense. One was an editor mistaken for a secretary. One was a copywriter whose own husband laughed at her success. Yet another was an artist who wanted to return to her craft after years of hosting her husband’s prospective clients. 

But the distinction didn’t matter much. “We are all housewives,” O’Reily bemoaned, “the natural people to turn to when there is something unpleasant, inconvenient, or inconclusive to be done.”

O’Reilly’s piece laid out a six-step program for women who wanted to reclaim their time — and their proper place in their own lives. Do less housework, she advised, and don’t waiver. Plan a more equitable distribution of household tasks and stand firm when the husband and kids push back. And of course: Abandon guilt, and think revolutionary thoughts instead.

She warned that the process of overcoming what she called “domestic trauma,” quote, “requires the conscious loss of the role we have been taught, and its replacement by a true identity.”

“What if we succeed?” she asked. “What if we become liberated women who recognize that our guilt is reinforced by the marketplace, which would have us attach our identity to furniture polish and confine our deepest anxieties to color coordinating our toilet paper and our washing machines?… What if we don’t allow ourselves to be treated as people with nothing better to do than wait for repairmen and gynecologists? What if we finally learn that we are defined not by our children and our husbands but by ourselves?”

For more than 50 years, Ms. writers have shared their answers to those inquiries — and continued to question not only the structures of our economic lives, but what the feminist future might look like if they changed.

Interviewer: You were telling me before there’s a great organization here, in fact the title to your new movie is nine to five. And you really advocate women getting together Jane, as a force? 

Jane Fonda: It’s an organization of clerical workers office workers. Some people don’t know what women who work in offices have to put up with. How many people here are office workers? I’m making a comedy about office workers. It’s a movie about secretaries fantasizing about murdering their boss. 

Interviewer: So it’s not a political statement… is it?

Carmen Rios: That’s iconic actor and activist Jane Fonda, speaking in 1980 about the film 9 to 5, in which she starred alongside Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton as a secretary sparring with a sexist boss. 9 to 5, which landed the three women on the cover of Ms., confronted how brazen misogyny was in the workplace by the turn of the 1980s. (The 2024 documentary Still Working 9 to 5 broke down how pervasive it remains today.)

By the time Ms. hit newsstands in 1972, pay discrimination by sex had been prohibited by the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and other forms of sex discrimination in employment had been made illegal by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, created by the Act, had been tasked with making sure the law was enforced. 

Although women’s economic lives were rapidly changing, the “cult of domesticity” women had been relegated to for centuries didn’t melt away overnight — and the fight for women’s economic equality was far from over.

In 1969, five years after Title VII became law, around 25 percent of all women in the workforce still had the same five occupations: They were secretaries, domestic workers, bookkeepers, elementary school teachers, or waitresses. In some states, women weren’t even legally allowed to enter fields like law and engineering. 

It wasn’t until 1973, after a five-year campaign and three years of litigation by the National Organization for Women, that the Supreme Court’s decision in Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations forced newspapers and employers to stop segregating help wanted ads by gender — opening up opportunities for women to apply for higher-paying jobs.

Although the number of women in the workforce nearly doubled between 1969 and 1974, by 1972, women working full-time were making just 58 cents on every man’s dollar. (And if you looked at the data across all workers, they were making only 40.) Back then, as is true now, women of color faced even larger pay gaps than their white counterparts.

Until the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974, women were largely excluded from applying for their own lines of credit without their husband or father’s signature — meaning women couldn’t open credit cards, get mortgages, start businesses, or take out student loans on their own.

Before the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, women could be and often were fired for becoming pregnant.

And until 1980, sexual harassment — a widespread problem to this day that we’ll dig into more in our next episode — wasn’t even considered a form of workplace sex discrimination. Eleanor Holmes Norton, now the US House Delegate representing Washington, DC, issued the EEOC’s historic guidance declaring that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination in violation of Title VII after she became the first woman appointed to chair the commission. In the years before and since, it was feminist activism — and a series of legal cases brought largely by Black women and girls — that forced policy and culture change around sexual harassment.

“It will not do for women who have jobs to pretend that society’s ills will be cured if all women are gainfully employed,” O’Reilly wrote in her 1972 piece. But it also won’t do for women who have jobs to be mistreated, discriminated against, and exploited.

In the January 1981 issue of Ms., Barbara Ehrenreich and Annette Fuentes broke down how the United States had begun exporting its own economic misogyny. Women at the time held 80 to 90 percent of assembly line jobs in developing nations — and they still make up 70 percent of that workforce today. They often lived on-site at the factories that employed them, four to eight or even twenty to a room, working inconsistent shifts around the clock that exposed them to toxic and dangerous materials.

“This is the world’s new industrial proletariat,” Ehrenreich and Fuentes wrote. “Young, female, Third World. Viewed from the ‘first world,’ they are still faceless, genderless, ‘cheap labor.’” The business model that shaped what corporate powers and politicians call globalization, one UN official told the reporters, “depends on poor people staying poor.” 

“If feminism is going to mean anything to women all over the world,” an organizer with the American Friends Service Committee asserted to them, “it’s going to have to find new ways to resist corporate power internationally.” 

The struggle against those powers has continued — and its urgency remains. 

In a piece for the Fall 2018 issue of Ms., Andrea Camp laid out the continued ways in which, and I quote, “the persistent gender pay gap, increasing costs of healthcare and housing, workplace policies that ignore their rights and dignity, [and] the increasing student debt burden all undermine women’s economic stability and their ability to provide for themselves and their families.”

Camp shared a more comprehensive wage gap analysis, incorporating factors like pension contributions, employer-sponsored health and disability insurance, and paid leave, that found women were still making just 57 cents to every man’s dollar, with women of color making even less. If women were paid the same as men, she noted, the poverty rate among women would drop nearly five points — and 2.5 million kids would no longer be living below the poverty line.

43 percent of women workers in the U.S, she explained, and 73 percent of those in low wage jobs, don’t have access to paid sick leave. Only 15 percent have paid family leave, and only 60 have access to unpaid leave. Less than one-fifth of new mothers have access to even unpaid family leave.

Despite laws meant to address occupational segregation, a 2022 report from the Center for American Progress also found that white men continue to dominate the highest-paying industries in the U.S., while men of color and women dominate the lowest. 

In the Fall 2009 issue of Ms., Premilla Nadasen, history professor at Barnard College and author of Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement, spotlighted the innovative organizing tactics of the New York City-based organization Domestic Workers United, which at the time represented 200,000 housekeepers, nannies, and caregivers. Nine out of 10 of those workers didn’t have health insurance from their employers. Close to three-quarters lived below the poverty line. Two-thirds didn’t receive overtime, despite working sometimes 100 hours per week.

Premilla Nadasen: Domestic workers have long argued that domestic labor is a feminist issue. It is an issue that unites us all, regardless of class, race, legal status, ethnic background. It is, historically, women’s work, whether it’s paid or unpaid, and women have, generally, carried the burden of doing or ensuring that domestic work gets done. That, of course, does not mean that there aren’t differences or tensions or even oppositional interests within domestic work, because we know that wealthy women tend to hire poorer women to do this work. In fact, in the 1970s and ‘80s, many middle-class women went into the workforce for the first time, and they hired poorer women, often women of color, to take care of household responsibilities. Their very feminist liberation was dependent upon the exploitation of other women. Even though there is this tension, this contradiction, we can’t think about domestic work as an individual issue within the household, but as a structural problem, and try to come up with collective, rather than individualized, privatized solutions.

Carmen Rios: The lack of labor rights for domestic workers is a testament to the racism and sexism that have shaped the economic history of the United States. New Deal legislation in the 1930s, like the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act, purposefully excluded domestic workers — largely because of the notion, held by many powerful white men, that they should be able to control a workforce that was often Black and often female. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed — and domestic workers were explicitly cut out of minimum wage, overtime, and collective bargaining protections. Organized labor groups at the time often overlooked racism and sexism as well, giving these women few pathways to justice through traditional labor organizing. 

That’s where groups like DWU came in.

Premilla Nadasen: I’m a labor historian. I’m a women’s historian. I’m a historian of race, and so, I was reading a lot about the labor movement in the early 2000s, and a lot of what I was reading was about how the labor movement had died. Policymakers were saying this. Journalists were saying this. Historians were saying this. At the same time, I was involved in the domestic worker rights movement. I was attending demonstrations in downtown Manhattan. I was attending meetings in Brooklyn. And there was a real disconnect there between what the experts were telling us and what I was witnessing in the streets, I was really intrigued by this massive multiracial movement of women of all ages who were coming together, who were demanding labor rights, who were demanding fair treatment, who were demanding better working conditions.

Carmen Rios: Domestic Workers United publicized cases of mistreated workers, sued employers for back wages on behalf of workers, and wrote a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights that has since been adopted by 12 states and the cities of Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington DC. It includes overtime pay, paid sick leave and holidays, and cost of living raises. 

As we confront the challenges we’re facing — knowing full well we have a bigger vision to work toward — Nadasen takes inspiration in the movement she saw emerging when she wrote her piece for Ms.

Premilla Nadasen: We have this standard model of labor organizing, where workers on an assembly line come together in their breakroom and picket outside the factory, and meet in dark rooms. What I saw was something very different. Domestic workers were organizing in public places. They were organizing on playgrounds. They were organizing in laundry rooms. They were organizing on buses. They were organizing outside of their places of work because they couldn’t organize in their place of work. They were single employees in a household behind closed doors. They organized, both documented and undocumented workers. They weren’t only organizing people by employer. They directed their demands to the state, which was extremely important, because it meant that even if you changed employers, you would still get the protections you deserve. 

The takeaway here for me about this innovative organizing is that we, as feminists today, need to think outside the box. We could use this really difficult moment to kind of think much more expansively and really think in new and different ways about how to organize a feminist movement.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

Carmen Rios: This brings the story of women’s economic justice right back to the home — where, 50 plus years after O’Reilly’s piece, women’s work remains largely unpaid and invisible. 

In her 1972 piece, O’Reilly commented that an insurance company had valued the work of one wife, Alice, who worked a grueling 99.6 hours per week, at 8 to 9,000 dollars a year. Today, Legal and General Life Insurance predicts moms work 183 hours per week — more than 26 hours each day — and that their labor is worth 184,820 dollars per year.

Frustrated that, quote, “we are still trying to arrange our households according to [the] ‘ideal’ image of family life” from the nineteenth century, O’Reilly pleaded with readers to “think of something new.” But Patricia Mainardi, 20 years later in the May/June 1992 issue of Ms., was still struggling with just the first few steps in O’Reilly’s guide to household liberation. Mainardi chronicled in her piece for Ms. the multiple strategies her male partner used to try and weasel his way out of housework: weaponized incompetence, passive resistance, and even starting fights or arguments each time the issue was raised. 

The hidden message, Mainardi noted, is that housework is beneath men — beneath their status, intellect, and passions — but never beneath a woman’s. “The measure of your oppression, she wrote, “is his resistance.”

That resistance continues. 

According to a 2024 analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute, women spend twice as much time as men on childcare and household work on average. Women spend 12.6 hours cooking, cleaning, and doing other types of housework — while men spend just 5.7 hours doing the same.

“If human endeavors are like a pyramid with men’s highest achievements at the top,” Mainardi wrote, “then keeping oneself alive is at the bottom. Men have always had servants — us — to take care of his bottom stratum of life while they have confined their efforts to the rarefied upper regions.” 

Mainardi asserted in her piece that, quote, “participatory democracy begins at home.” In a moment when our democracy at-large is under threat, dividing household work more equally — and removing gender from our notions of care labor and domestic work — is more critical than ever. 

If you need proof, look no further back than 2020, when women across the country found themselves in the midst of a full-on care crisis.

On the cover of the Spring 2021 issue of Ms, a multi-armed woman once again juggled the stressors of day-to-day life in patriarchal capitalism. The illustration, this time by Ashley Jaye Williams, depicted a COVID-era working mom. 

With one child sitting in front of her — attending school, no doubt, on Zoom — she juggles another child, a baby, in one hand. In another, she holds a face mask — probably one she pulled from her pocket for her kids — and, in a second, she juggles a COVID vaccine — because who else is going to book the appointments that keep the whole family safe? She has a laptop in one hand, probably so she can work remotely full-time, but she also has an iPad in another, with a FaceTime call in progress — because kin-keeping is women’s work, even if in three other hands she is carrying a bag of groceries that needs to be put away, laundry detergent so she can wash the latest load, and a broom — because even when everyone is home, apparently no one else can sweep. 

The cover story in that issue, co-authored by economic expert and independent consultant Rakeen Mabud and economist, lawyer, and associate professor of economics and public policy at UMass Amherst, Lenore Palladino, posed a critical question: Do We Care? 

Mabud and Palladino asserted that the pandemic, quote, “made it more evident than ever that women, especially Black women and Latinas, are trapped in an economy that is set up to extract their labor without paying them their due — all while also relying on them to solve the caregiving needs of their families on their own.”

In less than a year from the outset of COVID lockdowns in the U.S., American women lost a net total of 5.4 million jobs — 1 million more than men. Nearly 3 million women, disproportionately women of color, left the workforce entirely. That meant a loss of 64.5 billion dollars in wages for mothers alone.

These losses happened because, Mabud and Palladino wrote, “care labor is undervalued and unappreciated — precisely because we undervalue the women of color who provide it.” Many of the women pushed out of the workforce, after all, did it to keep their families functioning — to provide child care when schools and care centers closed and to be there for relatives who got sick. According to a survey by the National Employment Law Project, Color of Change, the Worker Institute at Cornell and the Time’s Up Foundation, more than half of Latinas and 44 percent of Black women said unpaid caregiving responsibilities would continue to negatively affect their capacity for paid work. 

90 percent of voters, Mabud and Palladino noted, “are in favor of a comprehensive plan to provide services and support for people who are responsible for family and child care.” They laid out a vision in their piece for an annual federal investment of 77.5 billion dollars in childcare and healthcare that they projected would create over 2 million jobs and 220 billion dollars in economic activity — not to mention lift women of color out of poverty and empower unpaid caregivers to join the paid workforce.

“It’s time for the nation to act on a fundamental truth,” they asserted. “Our economy and society are stronger when all people can live lives of stability and dignity.”

Lenore Palladino: At the time, as so many organizing groups and political leaders were talking about how to improve the care infrastructure, there is so much conversation about the need to raise wages and increase the quality of care, which are essential, but not as much conversation about how this investing in care has a positive impact on the overall economy. It felt like a real need, a real gap to bring that part into the conversation, to make it really clear that investing in care strengthens the overall economy. It’s not like, oh, if we take money away from other things, then maybe children will be better off, but the economy will suffer. That’s a total myth. We needed to really puncture that right away.

Rakeen Mabud: Crises are opportunities, right? They’re a moment to inject something into the conversation that maybe hasn’t been in the conversation before, and care was suddenly in the spotlight. So many of us were living off Zoom screens with little children around, like, interrupting us every three seconds, and I think that brought the caregiving crisis home, quite literally, for people who maybe hadn’t thought about it so much before, there was a bit of an opening to insert care into this broader economic conversation, to reframe care as infrastructure, as vital, a vital service, vital labor that provides the foundation for all of the rest of our labor, and really advancing the idea that care jobs are job-creating jobs. When we pay caregivers, when we value that work, it not only ensures that our loved ones are well taken care of, that we’re raising a generation of the future with all the support that they need, or helping people out of this life with all the support that they need, but it has the potential to unleash a lot of productivity that’s pent up, especially for women who, disproportionately, do unpaid care work in particular, and that pent-up productivity, when we unleash it, that fuels our economy. That makes our economy stronger and more resilient.

Carmen Rios: That was Palladino and Mabud. I talked to them about their piece — and what has and hasn’t changed in the few years since they called for, quote, “centering care work as essential work through major public investments that could establish universal access to high-quality care.”

“For too long,” Jackie Speier wrote in 2021 in Ms., “women — and particularly women of color — have been treated as second-class citizens as they’ve struggled to juggle it all. Women can’t wait any longer for policy to catch up with reality. Otherwise, this she-cession will usher in nothing more than a he-covery.”

Unfortunately, a he-covery is largely what we got.

Lenore Palladino: So much of the conversation among economists and among policy people about infrastructure has always been about male-dominated infrastructure. We cannot rebuild our economy or build back better, as it were, with male-dominated sectors and not female-dominated sectors, and of course, that’s what ended up happening.

We had a global pandemic and a deep health crisis that affected every single person in this country, and we don’t have paid sick leave coming out. We clearly haven’t moved forward in terms of public support, and in fact, we’ve moved backwards in terms of everything happening with Medicaid and Medicare right now. We’re going to need to really continue to hammer home on these needs.

Rakeen Mabud: You can’t jumpstart an economy, you can’t jumpstart a sector, you can’t jumpstart green investments if you don’t offer people the basic needs that they need to go to work.

Carmen Rios: “When we choose not to spend our public funds on a public problem we are making an active choice about whom we value in our economy — and whom we don’t,” Mabud and Palladino wrote in their piece. They added that “choosing to invest in care would serve as an important signal that as a society we cannot and will not take women for granted any longer.”

More than 50 years after Ms. began shaping this conversation, addressing the unequal division of domestic and care work in our society has only become more urgent.

Rakeen Mabud, 13:38-14:12: this is a practice. This is a cultural practice of valuing women and valuing women’s labor and valuing women’s worth and agency and lives, and right now, we’re in a moment where we’re retrenching real fast, and I think that’s a really scary place to be, because there was this opening, and there was this wellspring of a conversation that happened over the course of the pandemic where, all of a sudden, women were seen as economic actors and recognized as important, critical economic actors, and we’re so far from that conversation, that it feels almost odd to be talking about it right now.

Lenore Palladino: We’re in this circular problem in which care jobs are low paid, and they’re not respected in society, and so, men won’t take them on, but at the same time, these are the jobs of our economic growth and prosperity going forward. It is the care sector. It is the healthcare sector. We don’t live in an industrial economy anymore. We live in an economy that’s about maintaining the infrastructure of our lives.

Rakeen Mabud: if you don’t give everyday people who keep our economy going the tools they need to function as humans, as workers, as consumers, then how can we possibly have a healthy economy?

[Transition Music]

Carmen Rios: In the preview issue of Ms., welfare activist and National Welfare Rights Organization founder Johnnie Tillmon made a critical declaration: that “Welfare is a Women’s Issue.”

Tillmon’s piece connecting the dots between patriarchy, racism, and class warfare in the U.S. still resonates more than 50 years later.

The result of widespread economic inequality for women — by way of economic exclusion, wage discrimination, and disproportionate domestic burdens — is widespread poverty. Women live in poverty at higher rates than men, and women of color are disproportionately represented among those in poverty. 

In fact, the losses Mabud and Palladino were talking about pushed 50 million women and girls worldwide into extreme poverty by 2021, and projections predict that we won’t even get back to where we were before the pandemic until 2030 — and as we know, there were already myriad gaps in our economy before it.

“Because until now we’ve been raised to expect to work, all our lives, for nothing,” Tillmon wrote. “Because we are the worst-educated, the least skilled, and the lowest-paid people there are. Because we have to be almost totally responsible for our children. Because we are regarded by everybody as dependents. That’s why we are on welfare. And that’s why we stay on it.”

“For a lot of middle-class women in this country,” she added, “women’s liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it’s a matter of survival.”

When Tillmon’s piece was published, 99 percent of families on welfare were headed by women. According to a Fall 2024 piece by Ms. money editor Martha Burk, today three in ten households headed by single women, and more than 16 percent of Black and Latina women, live in poverty. A 2018 analysis from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also found that 94 percent of one-parent families receiving public assistance had a female head of household.

C. Nicole Mason, in the Winter 2016 issue of Ms., wrote that only four percent of those born into poverty — into the bottom 20 percent of this country’s economy — will ever make it to the top fifth of income earners in the United States. Tillmon’s adage, then, holds true: “Welfare’s like a traffic accident,” she wrote. “It can happen to anyone, but especially it happens to women.”

Aisha Nyandoro: We cannot talk about the need for guaranteed income without talking about how Black women in the South have systematically been locked out of the economy for generations and what that looks like. So, when we started the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, it really, for me, was about that lived legacy, how do we continue the work that Johnnie Tillmon started with welfare reform? How do we not only continue that work, how do we bring it forward, and not only how do we bring it forward, how do we seed what is needed next?

Carmen Rios: That’s Aisha Nyandoro, founding CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, which is home to the Magnolia Mother’s Trust — a guaranteed income initiative that provides low-income Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi with $1,000 each month for 12 months—no strings attached—and gives each of their children a $1,000 savings account deposit.

Aisha Nyandoro: Maybe 4 or 5 years into Springboard, I had a conversation with one of our moms that quite frankly changed the trajectory of the organization. It was a random Friday. I was on-site at one of the communities, like I typically was back in the day, and I just saw one of our moms, and I just said what are you doing this weekend? And she was like, I’m not doing anything, and I said, what do you mean? It’s Friday, you’re not doing anything? And she was like, Ms. Aisha, I don’t even have 5 dollars for a pizza. I remember, in that moment, thinking that, okay, this is a mom that I know, and know quite well, that we have relationship with. How do I not know that something as seemingly as inconsequential as a movie night with her kids, she can’t afford, and that that’s a hardship? I was like, we are missing something, fundamentally, here, with the families and the moms that we are in relationship with. This should not be their narrative. 

We went out and instead of having all of these questions about, oh, what do you need for your kids, the question was what are we missing? And we heard all of these stories from our families where they were not asking us to do anything more. They were not saying that what it was that we were doing was not enough or wrong. They were simply talking about the realities of life and how hard life was when you have economic insecurity. There were stories, you know, the one mom talking about, her daughter had made the cheer squad, and how she was so excited about her making the cheer squad, but on the other hand, she was so stressed because how was she going to afford the uniform? How was she going to afford cheer camp? What would it look like if she had to tell her baby no about this opportunity? There was another mom whose kid had made the next level of the science fair, and she was stressed about the 25 dollar registration fee for Jackson State. When we sat down and listened, it was like, okay, this can all be solved with money, and not a lot of money.

Carmen Rios: Magnolia Mother’s Trust beneficiaries are 40 percent less likely to report debt from emergency loans, 20 percent more likely to have children performing at or above grade level, 27 percent more likely to seek medical care, and are able to budget up to 150 dollars more for groceries and household costs.

Aisha Nyandoro: People are always like, oh, well, what did people buy? Of course, people bought shit. It’s capitalism. When you give people money, they go about buying stuff. It’s a given. You give people money, they pay their bills, they get out of debt, they go back to school, But that’s not the only story. That’s the only story that we like to talk about because that then moves into the deservedness narrative, that, oh, they used the money to do the things that I think are appropriate for them to be doing. That’s not your business what they use the money for. 

When I say liberate financial capital, it’s just that. It’s recognizing that individuals are all deserved of a life that they envision for themselves and their family. They should not be predicated on their race, their gender, their zip code. Liberating financial capital really is first interrogating what are your views on cash? What are your views on poverty? Do you believe in this failed trap narratives that individuals can work themselves out of these poverty-wage jobs, when we are a country as rich as we are, and our minimum wage is still 7 dollars and 25 cents an hour, because let’s be very clear, no, that is not liberating financial capital in any sense of the imagination. 

Carmen Rios: Tillmon likened the relationship between women on welfare and the state with “a super-sexist marriage,” remarking that when you, quote, “trade in a man for the man,” he can cut you off whenever he wants, take the kids, determine how much you’re “allowed” to spend on rent and food, and even control how you live your life.

“We’ve been trained to believe that the only reason people are on welfare is that there’s something wrong with their character,” Tillmon wrote — but, she observed, women were the most likely to be offered jobs that paid the least. In other words: It isn’t a woman’s fault she’s in poverty. It’s our society’s fault women are in poverty. And our policies keep them there.

Aisha Nyandoro: Poverty is the result of systems that have been intentionally put in place that the majority of us benefit from. That’s why poverty exists. Individuals are not poor simply because they are not working hard enough, simply because they are not educated enough, simply because they are not doing whatever the things are we tell ourselves individuals are not doing. Poverty is a systemic failing, not an individual failing. We do not want to take off our mask and recognize that, oh, I am actually benefitting from this thing, and oh, it actually may be some of what I have voted for, or how I am positioning myself, that the individuals in my community are struggling the way that they are struggling. 

Carmen Rios: “Society needs women on welfare as ‘examples,’” as Tillmon wrote, “to let every woman, factory workers and housewives alike, know what will happen if she lets up, if she’s laid off, if she tries to go it all alone without a man.”

36 years later, Gaylynn Burroughs, now the Vice President for Education & Workplace Justice at the National Women’s Law Center, observed the same pattern taking shape in the foster care system in New York City. In a piece in the Spring 2008 issue of Ms., she detailed the ways in which women in precarious economic situations, quote, “must cope not only with the daily frustrations of parenting but also with the crushing gaze of the state.”

Gaylynn Burroughs: When I wrote that piece, I was a family defense attorney at The Bronx Defenders. I represented parents and caregivers who were mostly in child neglect cases, and sometimes, those cases resulted in cases to terminate their parental rights. All of the families that I served were struggling to make ends meet, right? Struggling to put food on the table, to maintain their housing, struggling to pay for transportation and medical care, and the list goes on. And there are a lot of families out there struggling, but for some reason, the families that I serve are mostly families of color, and families of color get extra scrutiny. You’re not allowed to have a bad day if you’re a Black mom, and there was this sense that being poor and being a person of color, were, like, per se, evidence of neglect. There was assumption that, if you remove these kids from their homes, that they would be better off. 

Carmen Rios: What Burroughs was witnessing was part of a nationwide trend in targeting poor Black mothers. Black children are twice as likely as white kids to enter the system. Poor families are up to 22 times more likely to be involved in child welfare cases than wealthier families. And Black families are four times more likely to live in poverty. While funding for foster care skyrocketed in the 1980s, funding for anti-poverty services and family reunification stagnated, and welfare reform in the 1990s made it even harder for women at the economic margins to make ends meet.

Burroughs, like Tillmon and Nyandoro, was clear-eyed in her recognition in the piece that, quote, “these mothers and children are almost always made to suffer individually for the consequences of one of the United States’ most pressing social problems.”

“Until this country comes to terms with its culpability in allowing wide-spread poverty to exist,” she added, “poor Black mothers will continue to lose their children to the state, and we will continue to label these women bad mothers to assuage our own guilt.”

Gaylynn Burroughs: We could’ve just provided the food. We could’ve just helped people get medical care. Why don’t we just provide the support people need? Why do we have to traumatize these families? 

There is this trend that we have seen, that women are just more likely to live in poverty and to experience hardship, It’s not like this is inevitable. The fact that women are disproportionately more likely to live in poverty is a choice that we have made as a society. 

Carmen Rios: That’s why we cannot articulate an economic justice agenda without centering the women who are most vulnerable to the consequences of our entire economic system. 

In Tillmon’s piece, she remarked that “there are some ten million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you’re a woman, you’ve got the best chance of getting one.” There are nearly 24 million workers in low-wage jobs today — and, according to the Law Center, women make up nearly two-thirds of them, outnumbering men in the low-wage workforce in every state and the District of Columbia.

Tillmon called the members of the NWRO, quote, “the front-line troops of women’s freedom… both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women: the right to a living wage for women’s work, the right to life itself.”

The fight for those rights continues today.

[Transition Music] 

Dolores Huerta: When you see the injustices that there are in low-income communities and people-of-color communities and women in general, then you realize that this is not right and that we should do something to change it. This is what has perpetuated me into this lifelong struggle, because even though, with 70 years of my life devoted to making things better, we’re not done yet. You know, there’s still a lot more work to do.

Carmen Rios: She requires no introduction — but that’s Dolores Huerta, the legendary labor organizer and feminist leader and founder of the Dolores Huerta Foundation. (She was also a Ms. Woman of the Year in 1998!) I spoke with her about the horrific attacks on women, especially poor women and women of color, taking shape at the national level. 

The Trump administration and his cronies in Congress have already demonstrated that they will stop at nothing to slash social supports for people in poverty, weaken protections for women against workplace discrimination and harassment, and exacerbate the deeply-entrenched white- and male-dominated power structures that shape our economy. 

Most recently, the Trump administration, in concert with Congressional Republicans, rammed a bill through the Senate and the House that experts are calling the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in American history. The so-called Big, Beautiful, Bill, which is more of a Colossal Betrayal, slashes funding for Medicaid, Medicare, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Planned Parenthood, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps, and limits access to the child tax credit among the lowest-income parents in the country.

These cuts will disproportionately hurt women, especially poor women. 

Medicaid currently covers more than 40 percent of all births in the US, as well as care for 24 million women — more than half of whom are women of color. Despite three million Medicaid enrollees reporting that they cannot work due to caregiving responsibilities, Trump’s bill will also boot anyone from coverage who does not work 80 hours a month, further targeting poor mothers. And restrictions on funding for Planned Parenthood and other reproductive health care clinics, even when they are providing non-abortion care, will also impact the 2 million patients who access care there each year — who are often poor and rural women with few other options for care.

Women make up more than half, and women of color make up one-third, of nonelderly adult SNAP recipients. 20 percent of LGBTQIA+ women and 28 percent of nonbinary or genderqueer people have also received benefits or have partners or children who have been on SNAP. A National Women’s Law Center analysis found that in 2022, SNAP moved 1.3 million women out of poverty — a majority of whom were Black and Latina.

Women’s workplace rights are also on Trump’s chopping block. On day one of his presidency, he issued an executive order claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were discriminatory against white men — demanding that federal offices terminate their DEI programs and obligate contractors to do the same, and threatening non-governmental institutions, organizations, and businesses with legal action if they didn’t follow suit. Many companies infamously cooperated voluntarily, ending their internal DEI programs. 

Another executive order Trump issued attacking trans people not only encourages government discrimination against trans women, but threatens their protection under already-diminishing sex discrimination laws. The EEOC has already moved to dismiss all cases pending in their court dockets that involve transgender and nonbinary workers.

Trump has also fired key federal employees — including EEOC Commissioners and members of the National Labor Relations Board — who were tasked with protecting workers, enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and defending unions, which now represent over 7 million women workers. He also rolled back anti-discrimination protections for federal workers that were on the books for 60 years and eliminated civil rights enforcement offices within federal agencies and the White House Gender Policy Council. 

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 laid out the blueprint for Trump’s cruel and callous attacks on women and the poor and working-class. Project 2025 was the document that called to rescind those 60-year-old anti-discrimination protections, open the floodgates for unsanctioned discrimination against women and LGBTQ workers, and dismantle DEI programs at every level. It also recommends weaponizing the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division to prosecute state and local governments that continue to implement them.

The guidebook also laid out how Trump could weaken the EEOC and reinforce a false narrative, through the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, that the wage gap is actually about women’s choices — or in other words, that it’s all our fault we get paid less across the board for our work. 

The Trump administration’s slashing of the federal workforce, led by Elon Musk’s meme-inspired Department of Government Efficiency, also disproportionately impacted women and people of color. An analysis by the National Women’s Law Center found that women made up a majority of the workers in departments that were shuttered completely or targeted for mass layoffs.

Even Trump’s recently-escalated attacks on immigrants have major gender and economic dimensions to them. According to the Center for Migration Studies, women and girls make up 46 percent of undocumented immigrants in the US — many of whom are now afraid to go to work and school due to widespread ICE raids. Huerta and her namesake foundation are focused on economic justice for immigrant and low-income communities — work she knows is more critical than ever in this moment.

Dolores Huerta: We’re focusing right now on immigrants rights and providing our immigrant community with  the resources that they need. We have many families who have had members deported, and so, we’re trying to provide food for some of those families, gathering money for rental assistance, also, providing them with the information that they need in case some family member gets deported, et cetera.

When we see the way that our undocumented immigrants and people of color are being treated right now, the very brutal, fascist way that people are being taken…they’re being kidnapped. They’re being taken into prisons. They’re sending them to other countries, their human rights and their civil rights are being violated. If there’s ever a time that we have to come together and we have to rise up and we have to march and protest, then now is the time, because I think most of us never thought that we would see this moment come to the United States of America.

People of color have always experienced these kinds of actions, but never at the level that we’re seeing now, and it’s not people of color. It’s children. It’s women. All of us are being affected. Now they’re talking about taking away food. The food bank in our area here has been closed. In a country that is so rich and powerful, that our own people in our own country are going to be deprived of food and medical care, educational resources that they had before. This is a very, very scary time, and god knows it’s a time for women to rise up.

Carmen Rios: Every woman I spoke to for this episode agreed.

Gaylynn Burroughs: We still are facing the consequences of historical and present-day discrimination. We need to go faster in fixing these problems, but unfortunately, it seems like we’re going backwards. 

The pay gap persists. In fact, between 2022 and 2023, it was the first time that we saw that the pay gap actually widened between women and men in decades. We still have an epidemic of workplace harassment that is happening. Women shoulder, the burden of unpaid caregiving. We don’t have the support we need to be caregivers and to also be workers and also do all the things that we need to do in our lives. 

We know what to do to make it better for women in the economy. Raise the minimum wage. Protect people from workplace harassment. Have things like paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, support for childcare. We know these things, and yet, we are dealing with a flurry of activity that we have to sort of navigate through just to protect the things that we already have. It’s frustrating because it’s like your vision is on hold. You want to create this vision of a world where there’s gender and racial equity, but we now have to defend things like diversity.

Aisha Nyandoro: I would really like to see a federal guaranteed income. I would like to see the child tax credit made permanent. I would like to see universal childcare. But quite frankly, where we are, right now, I would love for us to have better empathy and better understanding about the policies and systems that actually exist within this country. I would like for the folks in charge to actually know how shit works. I want some baseline just basic stuff, and once we get to that, then we can get back to imagining. 

Carmen Rios: The imagining is key. We can confront this moment by daring to dream bigger. The antidote to scarcity politics is to come together and fight for a future in which we all have enough, in which we are not denied opportunities or our basic needs, in which we all thrive. 

Lenore Palladino: Economics is still seen as a man’s game. Women actually make most financial decisions in households, but men are the one who are seen as the experts, and our financial system is shaped around their life cycles. A small hope is just that we really change who are the leaders in thinking about and doing economic policy making.

Rakeen Mabud: We need to make sure that everyone is brought into this movement and that everyone, especially folks who are the most vulnerable, especially folks who have been historically left behind, are front and center in the policies that we’re creating. This is not a moment to be shy or exclusive. This is a moment to welcome people with open arms and make sure that, when we put forward policies, they’re policies that will really support people of all kinds, women, non-binary folks, trans folks, to let folks live their own lives, live their fullest lives, make the choices that are right for themselves, for their families, for their jobs, their bodies.

Carmen Rios: The expansive visions feminists have conjured over the last 50-plus years are a potent place to start.

Premilla Nadasen: The Combahee River Collective, a group of radical Black feminists in the Boston area, wrote more than 50 years ago that by liberating people who, simultaneously, experience sexism, racism, heterosexism, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism, we will free everyone, because freeing them means dismantling all those structures of power. As contemporary feminists, we have to continually ask in whose interests are we fighting? Who will benefit from the work that I’m doing right now? Who should we put at the center of our organizing campaigns?

It’s more important than ever that we turn to history, that we turn to feminist organizing, we turn to anti-racism organizing as a way to help us chart our new path forward. 

Gaylynn Burroughs: There’s a tendency for people to think, well, this is just the way things are. Once you start seeing these problems as being problems that policy can solve, a whole world opens up. That is something that we can change. Law and policy shapes culture, and culture shapes law and policy. There’s a lot of power in using the law to affirm rights. 

Carmen Rios: And while we expand our own visions of what is possible — of what our economic lives could and should look like — we still have to fight like hell to protect the gains we’ve made, and to protect the most vulnerable women in this fight. That’s exactly how Burroughs, and her colleagues at the Law Center, are approaching this moment.

Gaylynn Burroughs: It can be boiled down to block and build. We want to block as much bad stuff as possible. We want to make sure that we can mitigate harm to as many people as possible from attacks. Sometimes we will win, but oftentimes, especially in this context that we’re in, the win will be slowing things down. At the same time that we’re trying to mitigate harm, we’re trying to also make sure that we are working towards seeding strategies for creating this long-term vision we have of gender justice. 

Carmen Rios: For more than 50 years, Ms. has insisted that the economics of women’s lives mattered. It’s up to us to continue fighting for the economic realities women face to be taken seriously by people in power — and within our own communities and households. 

Min Chong Suk, a Korean garment worker, was one of the voices in Ehrenreich and Fuentes’s 1981 piece on women’s lives on the global assembly line. “We all have the same hard life,” she told them. “We are bound together with one string.” 

The challenges women are facing economically — whether it’s juggling impossible and unfair domestic burdens, facing persistent discrimination at work, or confronting the systemic failures that attempt to erase so many of us through poverty — are all rooted in the same patriarchal notions of male supremacy and the same capitalist framework of profit over people.

Our fights are bound together. That’s why we must demand more — for ourselves, for our sisters, for our communities. For everyone. 

And for those questioning whether we can win that fight, I’ll let Dolores Huerta close this one out.

Dolores Huerta: I’m 95 years old this year, and I can look back into my own history, and I can see how things have changed over the decades. We know how to reach that goal line of equality.

We’ve got to keep on marching. We’ve got to keep on protesting. The people have the power, and when the people go out there and protest, and they march, and they’re very visible in what they’re doing, this does send a message to the people that are trying to oppress us, and I think it is going to make a difference.

We have to identify the oppressors, and we have to make strategies and plan how we are going to confront them. We are being tested in terms of our democracy. We are being tested in terms of our organizational capacities and whether we can all come together to defend ourselves against fascism and save democracy. I think that we’re going to be able to overcome. Sí, se puede.

[Transition Music]

Carmen Rios: Thank you so much for tuning in to the third episode of LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD: a podcast celebrating 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. 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 — thats 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, and Roxy Szal and Oliver Haug are our episode producers. Art and design for this show are by Brandi Phipps, and every episode is edited by Natalie Hadland.

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 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, 1972-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.

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

Until next time, readers.

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