More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Women make up a little over a quarter of Congress and around one-third of state legislators. Policy can remedy inequities and create a world that is more supportive of women. When our government truly represents women, we won’t have to defend our right to exist in the halls of power, or our right to vote for the policy we need and deserve.
(This essay is part of The Majority Rules project—an artful essay and op-ed series from Ms. and Supermajority Education Fund.)
Safety is our most fundamental need, but the U.S. denies it to women—especially women of color. Every attack on our safety stands in the way of our freedom. We need to get serious about the problem with serious policy solutions.
Securing safety for women is possible. State legislatures across the country are proposing legislation to ensure that people who have committed violence can’t get access to guns, support families who experience domestic violence, improve investigative processes for missing Indigenous people, and fund mental health crisis services.
(This essay is part of The Majority Rules project—an artful essay and op-ed series from Ms. and Supermajority Education Fund.)
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: We honor Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to become a member of U.S. Congress and to run for president; teenage girls are increasingly “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma”; Scotland’s leader Nicola Sturgeon will be stepping down; and more.
I’m an Asian American woman who serves on the city council in Eastvale, Calif. I’ve served as mayor there. I’m also a survivor of intimate partner violence, and it’s time for me to talk about it.
Up to 55 percent of Asian women report experiencing intimate partner violence. In 236 cases involving homicides of AAPI (Asian and Pacific Islander) women, 58 percent with known causes were related to intimate partner violence, with 81 percent of perpetrators being the victim’s current intimate partner, and 10 percent a former intimate partner. There is power in sharing stories like mine to come to terms with our past, and to help other women dealing with situations like this in the present or in the future.
Domestic work in America has been a long-time battleground between the sexes. Further complicating the issue is that women and women of color make up a majority of domestic workers: 90.2 percent are women and 51.3 percent are Black, Hispanic, or Asian American and Pacific Islander. There is no honest and accurate way to talk about housework and childcare without also discussing the negative effects on women.
One day, perhaps the world will act as though domestic work is a collective responsibility and effort that requires no self-help books, a product line or a Netflix series.
Already, 150 bills aimed at LGBTQ youth have been filed or introduced in 25 states, from restrictions on drag performances, to bans on pronouns teachers can use in the classroom, to mandates that schools ‘out’ trans students to their families.
As a multiracial queer mom to a nonbinary Jewish child, these issues are both personal and political.
I have spent the last few months scouring catalogs and websites, receiving hundreds of books and even more emails from authors, publicists and publishers, reading your book Tweets and DMs, all to find out what books are coming out in 2023 that I think you, my exceptional, inquisitive and discerning Ms readers, will want to hear about.
Here’s your TBR (to be read) for the year. Enjoy!
Each month, I provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups. Here’s to a new year and, hopefully, a better one for us all. I wish you a year of peace, collectivity, good health, bountiful joy and, of course, fantastic reading! You can start with these 33 titles that I am most excited about this month.
Each month, we provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups. And each year, we review our monthly Reads for the Rest of Us lists and choose our favorite books of the year.
You’ve read the other “Best of” lists—now read the other one. You know, for the rest of us. Here they are, my top 40+ feminist books, in alphabetical order.
Each month, we provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.
I want to do my part in the disruption of the “norm” in the book world for far too long—white, cis, heterosexual, male—and to amplify indie publishers and amazing works by writers who are women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, APIA/AAPI, international, queer, trans, nonbinary, disabled, fat, immigrant, Muslim, neurodivergent, sex-positive or of other historically marginalized identities. You know … the rest of us.
