LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto on Fighting Child Sex Trafficking—Because Kids’ Rights Are Not for Sale

LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto—the first female city attorney in the city’s history and the first Latina elected citywide—has made fighting child sex trafficking a priority since her election in November 2022.

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, today Feldstein Soto leads a team of 1,000 legal professionals. She was driven to tackle this issue after witnessing the extent of the problem firsthand during a ride-along on South Figueroa Street. Ms.spoke with her on her multifaceted approach includes rescuing minors, prosecuting predators, and disrupting the demand for trafficked children.

Project 2025’s Holier-Than-Thou Plans for Your Health

Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership is the radical vision for America’s future under the next Republican president. If you’re like me, you’re curious about where the $22 million to produce its 900-pages of planning and policy came from. The project claims it’s the product of over 100 organizations, headed by The Heritage Foundation, a tax-exempt nonprofit. It has a long and influential history with deep monied roots.

I focused on the health-related parts of Project 2025’s chapter on Health and Human Services—our nation’s department for medical and family concerns—as its authors rail against the Center for Disease Control, abortion access and abortion pills, childcare, fertility treatments, what makes a proper family, and more. It’s dystopian, to say the least.

What Kamala Harris Means to Me as a Young Indian American Woman

Vice President Harris is no stranger to being the ‘first,’ and with every barrier she breaks, she ensures more women, people of color and women of color like me will follow.

I’ve watched Vice President Harris make masala dosas alongside Mindy Kaling, tell her mother’s story, and speak to leaders in the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. I am proud to see her embrace her Indian roots on the national stage. It is a new and exciting feeling to see myself in a presidential candidate.

The ‘Electability’ Question: Don’t Fall for Sexist, Racist Clickbait

Posing women’s leadership writ large as an open and unanswered question—and questioning the electability of a candidate who has made a career of supporting women’s lives and fundamental rights in an election largely defined by these issues—is nothing short of irresponsible journalism. Women lead politics around the world every single day.

Black women are electable if we elect them.

Feminist Film History Is Alive in Bologna

Last month, 3,000 cinephiles congregated at dusk in the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, Italy for an outdoor cine-concert of The Wind (1928)—a silent film about desperate love in bad weather—with the message “FREE ABORTION” projected on a church at the side of the square.

It’s all part of the the feminist programming at Il Cinema Ritrovato. The annual archival film festival spotlights long unseen, unjustly forgotten but urgently timely works from the celluloid archive and unleashed them onto the volatile, open-ended present. The Ritrovato is nothing less than a celebration of the capacity to create community around films that you quite literally could not see anywhere else—long obliterated from the archive due to a combination of material decay, political censorship and ideological incomprehension. I was especially struck this year by the feminist themes that emerged.

Gen Z’s Fight to Secure the ERA in the Constitution

Women are still fighting for the ERA and constitutional gender equality. It’s astonishing that in 2024, women are not legally considered equal to their male counterparts.

For Gen Z, a generation that prides itself on embracing diversity, inclusion and equality, this discrimination cannot stand. We are in a unique position to support gender equality, demanding that it becomes a constitutional right.

Remembering the Late Faith Ringgold—the Black Feminist Artist Who Knew Who She Was

The late Faith Ringgold was a feminist, an activist, a teacher, a mother and an artist known for her innovative use of mediums, ranging from the more traditional oil on canvas, murals and mosaics, to story quilts, protest posters and soft sculptures.

(This article originally appears in the Summer 2024 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)

‘My Journey From Guerilla to Grandmother’: The Ms. Q&A With Katherine Ann Power

In 1970, college student Katherine Ann Power became involved with a revolutionary anti-war guerilla group. Power was the getaway driver when the group attempted to rob a Massachusetts bank to help finance the anti-war movement.
For years, Power lived as Alice Metzinger: baker, cook and eventually— mom. As she reflected on her own responsibility for the officer’s death, she concluded that she needed to turn herself in to begin the long process of redemption and restitution.

Power has just written a memoir about her experience, Surrender: My Journey from Guerilla to Grandmother. She recently talked with Ms. about her involvement in the anti-war movement, the killing of police officer Walter Schroeder, her time in prison and her reflections on it all.