A new documentary short chronicles Little’s groundbreaking case—and her historic victory as the first U.S. woman acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault.
Black History
Trey Reed’s Death—and Its Swift Labeling as Suicide—Demands the Scrutiny Ida B. Wells Called For
Trey Reed, a young Black student, was found hanging from a tree on his college campus of Delta State University in Mississippi on Sept. 15, 2025. Trey Reed was a computer science major from Grenada, Miss., and a first-generation student, described as ambitious and eager to create a positive future for himself and his family.
Mississippi police and the Bolivar County coroner’s office have labeled the death a suicide. But Reed’s family members and other advocates, including Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, attorneys Ben Crump and Vanessa J. Jones (both of whom are representing the family), are calling for further investigation.
Cases like Reed’s awaken questions rooted in legacies of racial violence in the South. “While the details of this case are still emerging, we cannot ignore Mississippi’s painful history of lynching and racial violence against African Americans,” said Thompson in the days following Reed’s death. That history is not distant: Mississippi recorded more lynchings than any other state, and the echoes of those crimes persist in how the deaths of Black people are investigated and discussed. The reflex to dismiss possible racial motives—or to declare a death a suicide before all evidence is known—reflects a deeper national unwillingness to confront the full scope of anti-Black violence.
Five Best Books on Black Women’s Political Leadership
While writing my new book about the contributions Black women have made in the global struggle for human rights, I was humbled to see, over and over, how many of these women did not come from rich families, or hold positions of great power, or even have all that much education. But they did the hard and dangerous work required, day in and day out, because they believed in equal rights for everyone, around the world.
‘I’m Not Going to Tolerate Being Treated as a Second-Class Citizen’: Carol Moseley Braun Isn’t Giving Up on the Fight for Constitutional Equality
“The expectation of equality is the most important cultural thing that we can achieve, and we have to keep holding up that light.”
Carol Moseley Braun became the first Black woman elected to the Senate after her involvement in the movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. In the fifth and final episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, more than 40 years later, she asked a simple question: “Why haven’t we gotten this right yet?”
Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “The Feminist Fight For The Equal Rights Amendment Is Far From Over—and More Urgent Than Ever (with Pat Spearman, Ellie Smeal, Carol Moseley Braun, Kathy Spillar, and Ting Ting Cheng)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
“When and Where Do We Get to This Place Called ‘Fair?’” What Political Scientist and Survivor Vanessa Tyson Wants the Feminist Future to Look Like
The professor, advocate and veteran of multiple political campaigns reflected in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward on her journeys to both survivor advocacy and politics—and the ways in which our political structures reinforce the injustices survivors face writ large across the country.
Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “How Feminists are Breaking the Cycle of Gender-Based Violence and Harassment (with Ellen Sweet, Jane Caputi, Vanessa Tyson, Victoria Nourse, and Debra Katz)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
The 19th Amendment, Explained
It took more than a century of fighting by generations of activists to achieve suffrage for all American women.
The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” The amendment granting women the right to vote was enacted at the start of the Roaring Twenties, decades after a prolonged and meandering fight for enfranchisement.
The 19th Amendment codified women’s suffrage nationwide, but long before its ratification, unmarried women who owned property in New Jersey could and did cast ballots between 1776 and 1807. Beginning in 1869, women in Western territories won the right to vote. And in the decade leading up to the 19th Amendment’s passage, 23 states granted women full or partial voting rights through a series of successful campaigns.
‘In Whose Interests Are We Fighting?’ What Historian Premilla Nadasen Learned About Economic Justice from the Domestic Workers’ Rights Movement
Nadasen, who teaches history at Barnard College, offered lessons from the domestic workers’ movement for the current moment in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward. “We, as feminists today, like domestic workers in the 1970s and in the early 2000s,” she told me, “need to think outside the box.”
Listen to the latest episode of 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)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Great American Jeans Debate: Racializing Beauty and Democratizing ‘Good Genes’ in Commercial Media
“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” Get it?
The issue is, we all get it and cannot avoid the ad’s uncomfortable truths about how women’s bodies convey different symbols and meanings. As a symbol of beauty, Sweeney certainly fits the bill as an attractive, voluptuous young woman who has capitalized on her looks. However, when the camera emphasizes Sweeney’s blue eyes just after panning across her body as she gives a quasi-scientific lesson on how “genes” get passed down, beauty is no longer just about whether a young woman is attractive enough to serve as an ad campaign’s spokesperson. It’s about which type of woman gets to define beauty and promoting scientific fixation on “good genes,” a holdover from the era of eugenics (which literally means “good genes”).
The best “all-American jeans” advertisement should capture this sense of aspirational dreaming. And Ralph Lauren “Oak Bluffs” ads do just that. These campaigns depict the collegiate, bougie aesthetic of Black middle-class life—represented by those African Americans attending HBCUs and vacationing in Oak Bluffs at Martha’s Vineyard during the summertime—and resonates more positively for a wider audience than American Eagle’s exclusionary “great genes” messaging.
Sleep Is a Feminist Issue: Why Women’s Rest Is Political
Despite being among the top reasons women seek medical care, sleep disruptions during menopause have been understudied and undertreated. For women, sleep problems peak during the menopausal years, which span from their 40s to early 60s. Even more alarming, suicide rates also rise during these years. And the research shows that even amid immense hardship, the ability to sleep well buffers against suicidal thoughts. Yet, this crisis remains largely ignored.
Federal research, which now faces catastrophic budget cuts, has long neglected women’s sleep and menopause. And of course, in America, midlife women are holding the social safety net together, picking up the pieces of a broken welfare system.
Sleep is not a luxury. It is a nightly ritual restoring the brain through cellular growth and repair. To understand how we got here, we must examine the long history of how women’s sleep—or lack thereof—has been weaponized against us.
‘We Are the Experts of Our Experiences’: Why Renee Bracey Sherman Wants You to Tell Your Abortion Story
The We Testify founder and executive director explored the white supremacist roots of modern antiabortion policies—and the subversive power of abortion storytelling—in the latest episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward.
“I had an abortion when I was 19 … even though I grew up in a family that was supportive of abortion, and I knew what I wanted … it still was really emotionally hard because I felt really alone. … I felt like there wasn’t anyone who looked like me talking about it or having an abortion. … Later, I ended up seeing For Colored Girls, the Tyler Perry film, and Tessa Thompson’s character had an abortion. I then saw someone who looks like me, even though my decision was completely different than hers and the experience was completely different than hers. … I felt so seen. … A lot of my work has been about ensuring that people who have abortions see versions of themselves, and ensuring that they get to be that version for someone else—and that they get to share their whole story.”
Listen to the second episode —”Inside the Feminist Fight to Reclaim Our Reproductive Freedom (with Renee Bracey Sherman, Michele Goodwin, Angie Jean-Marie and Amy Merrill, Susan Frietsche, and Gov. Maura Healey)”—on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.