More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) continues to make headlines for his repeated, deliberate efforts to limit access to information.
These individual actions are part of a larger effort to upend educational rights in the state’s public school system and change the collective understanding of both the history and lived experience of the nation’s most marginalized groups.
Part of “Turning 50“—an exploration of women in hip-hop and their role in the feminist movement—here are 10 notable songs and five momentous albums from the last five decades, with in-text explainers from editor Janell Hobson.
Even now, 158 years after the first Juneteenth, our elected leaders remain overwhelmingly white and male. Even as white women saw marginal gains in political representation, progress for Black women has been infuriatingly slow. Black women candidates for elected office must fight bias on multiple fronts—not just at the ballot box, but all along the way to get there. And party leadership often wants to throw their money behind a less politically “risky” candidate, further entrenching the state of affairs.
We know how crucial representation is to building a new generation of leaders. As intersectional feminists, we have a responsibility to dismantle the barriers to a truly representative democracy.
A new Florida law severely restricts gender, race and sexuality studies at state-funded colleges—and eliminates diversity programs altogether. Far from just a “Florida problem,” this is one piece of an alarming right-wing strategy spreading nationwide. Gender studies advocates warn, “Thiis is about to be the entire country’s problem. Every Republican-dominated state legislature is watching closely what is happening in Florida.”
Far-right conservatives fear that younger generations will be taught to think critically about the rampant misrepresentation and sanitization of American history and the continued discrimination against women, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.
This week: Rhode Island expands guaranteed abortion coverage; PEN America and Penguin Random House file lawsuit against Florida book ban, while NAACP issues Florida travel ban; Michigan protects abortion patients from employment discrimination; rock fans mourn the death of star Tina Turner; South Carolina votes to pass six-week abortion ban; HIV infections decreased in the U.S.; and more.
When football legend and civil rights icon Jim Brown died at 87 years old on May 18, commentary about his life and legacy downplayed his long history of violence against women.
One of the extraordinary ironies of Brown’s life is that he was a Black man who, in the face of stinging racism, demanded to be treated as a full human being who was “not going to be pushed around or disrespected.” But he allegedly did just that, and worse, to many Black women.
From the Summer 2008 issue of Ms. magazine:
The summer of 1973 was the season of the supermama: kickass Black women such as Pam Grier and Tamara Dobson, who starred in big-screen “Blaxploitation” action films.
The cultural nostalgia for Blaxploitation has never really died. And at the movies in recent years, Black women continue to be underrepresented among the latest kick-butt heroes. Yet my hope for new supermamas survives. The screen and action cinema not only have room for Black women—but need them.
(For more iconic, ground-breaking stories like this, pre-order
50 YEARS OF Ms.: THE BEST OF THE PATHFINDING MAGAZINE THAT IGNITED A REVOLUTION (Alfred A. Knopf)—a collection of the most audacious, norm-breaking coverage Ms. has published.)
From the April 1979 issue of Ms. magazine:
“Since the era of slavery, music—and essentially singing— has given women the greatest range of styles, sensibilities and opportunities … [but] at present, old age and death seem to be the best guarantees of recognition for a Black blues woman.”
From the May 1974 issue of Ms. magazine:
“What did it mean for a Black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers’ time? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood. … How was the creativity of the Black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when for most of the years Black people have been in America, it was a punishable crime for a Black person to read or write? … The agony of the lives of women who might have been Poets, Novelists, Essayists and Short Story Writers, who died with their real gifts stifled within them.”
My hope is that each of you reading this column will do some research in your own communities to find out where the threats to the freedom to read lie. Talk to your local school and public librarians. Call your legislators, sign the petitions, run for your local school board, raise hell.
And also, keep reading. Read the 34 books on this list or whatever else you can get your hands on. Then pass those books on to your friends, your kids, your friends’ kids, or donate them to your libraries and schools.
