More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Spotlighting books that tell important feminist stories.
Each month, Ms. provides readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.
Enjoy November’s 13 recommended Reads for the Rest of Us!
December will bring the month’s recommendations and the annual “Best of the Rest,” where I will also offer a few words about the feminist giants we’ve lost this year.
January will highlight the books I’m most excited about for 2027 and will include a bit about how I’m navigating artificial intelligence in this work.
In the fall of 2024, Louisiana implemented the nation’s first-ever law designating mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances. That put the pills in the same category as opioids and anxiety medications that have a high risk of dependency and abuse, even though mifepristone and misoprostol have no recreational use, aren’t stimulants or sedatives, and are not addictive.
“They do not meet the definition or intent of what a controlled substance is, and categorizing them as such can lead to harm,” warned the American College of Medical Toxicology. “Additionally, it sets a dangerous precedent of politicizing pharmaceutical regulation.”
The state targeted the two drugs because they are used in combination in most abortions. But mifepristone and misoprostol have a broad range of other medical uses beyond abortion—from inducing labor, to assisting in the removal of uterine polyps.
Dr. Emily Holt, a family medicine physician in New Orleans, had regularly prescribed both drugs to help patients manage miscarriages, and had offered just misoprostol to those with a stenotic cervix, in which the entrance to the uterus closes up. But she most frequently used misoprostol for IUD insertions.
Tools of the Patriarchy is a column on the tools that establish men’s dominance in society, or, in other words, uphold the patriarchy. Whether or not these tools are used intentionally, they contribute to a world in which women are not equal to men.
The books disappearing from shelves are not random. Censorship campaigns continue to sweep up stories about women’s sexuality, sexual violence, reproductive autonomy and girls coming of age, alongside books about LGBTQ+ people and people of color.
Stories are also one of the places girls first encounter women who leave, resist, desire, survive, refuse motherhood, question authority or name the harm done to them.
Another gendered aspect of the censorship story: the people expected to absorb the backlash. Librarians are trusted to help children find books and create welcoming spaces … until their professional judgment includes a book about queer identity, reproductive autonomy or sexual violence. Then the helpful librarian can quickly become an “activist.”
For Louisiana librarian Amanda Jones, speaking against censorship at a public library board meeting turned her into a target. She was accused online of promoting pornography to children and subjected to harassment and threats. Her experience shows how quickly a librarian defending access to books can be recast as the danger herself—especially when a woman in a feminized profession refuses to quietly enforce someone else’s definition of what is “appropriate.”
Around her 50th birthday, Oprah Winfrey began having heart palpitations so frightening she thought she might die. She went to five doctors; none connected her symptoms to menopause.
She happened to pick up a book that finally gave her a possible explanation. “Heart palpitations and sleeplessness were indications that The Change was coming,” Winfrey writes. “But no one, including my trusted doctors, had warned me (did they even know?), and when my symptoms showed up, we looked for the most dire explanation—heart disease—instead of the most likely.”
Later, a friend’s experience prompted Oprah to ask her doctor about getting on an estrogen supplement. “After I started hormone therapy, the world returned to technicolor. … For the first time in years, I was sleeping the whole night through.”
That sequence—doctor, book (or article), friend, doctor again—will sound familiar to many women who have had to assemble their own understanding of this major health transition that remains underfunded and underdiscussed, despite affecting 51 percent of the world’s population.
It also runs through two new books arriving this month: Jennifer Weiss-Wolf’s When in Menopause: A User’s Manual and Citizen’s Guide and The Book of Menopause: Real Talk, Real Science, Real Strategies for Your Next Chapter, from the editors of Oprah Daily.
“As women we have become way too comfortable with suffering,” said menopause expert Dr. Sharon Malone, MD, at a New York City book launch event for Jennifer Weiss-Wolf’s When in Menopause. “Menopause is just the last on the long train of suffering stops we’ve had.”
Weiss-Wolf’s new book makes the case for changing that, from demanding better care in the doctor’s office to fighting for policies that take women’s health seriously. As she put it during the conversation: “We’re saying we demand to be seen. We demand to be heard.”
In the following excerpt, Weiss-Wolf offers practical guidance for becoming your own best champion and receiving informed, respectful midlife healthcare.
When in Menopause: A User’s Manual and Citizen’s Guide is out Tuesday, Oct. 6, from Sheldon Press.
Each month, Ms. provides readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.
I love autumn in the Midwest. It’s cooler, the leaves are turning and change is in the air. I also love reading horror and watching scary movies at this time of year, so you know I’ve included a couple spooky stories this month—and a couple nonfiction titles I think are particularly terrifying.
There’s memoir and history, stories and essays. Even the scariest are packaged in lovingly written prose that educates and entertains. And there’s a first: I don’t think I’ve ever featured the new releases of both a mother and a daughter in a single month. So there’s that.
With further ado, here are the 13 titles I’ve chosen for the month. Read, reflect, learn, enjoy, resist and repeat.
In 1983, Whitney Houston appeared on The Merv Griffin Show to sing “Home.” The performance reveals the bright, complex selfhood Whitney sought to express even in spaces that were framed for her, not by her.
Whereas hosts today speak with artists themselves, not their male chaperones, the segment begins with Merv introducing not Whitney but Clive Davis, the head of her label, Arista, whom he praises as “a giant of a man, probably the most knowledgeable man the record business has ever known.”
The gesture was likely meant to secure the gentleman’s agreement, whereby Clive would break new Arista artists on the show.
Their exchange was as good a point of origin as any for the mythology always ready to spring up around the female artist: She is the raw material, the spark of gold, that the great man discovers and shapes.
Black women are often commandeered in this way, their rise attributed to some power beyond themselves, and to the men who recount their own crucial role to whomever will listen.
Behind the carefully curated images of homemade bread, gingham dresses and backyard chickens, is an economic vision that depends crucially on normalizing women’s secondary status in society.
Hello, feminist reader friends! Each month, I provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups. The aims of these lists are threefold:
I want to do my part in the disruption of what has been the acceptable “norm” in the book world for far too long—white, cis, heterosexual, male;
I want 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; and
I want to challenge and encourage you all to buy, borrow and read them!
This month, it’s back to school and back to heavy book-publishing schedules. I can’t wait for you to check out the 15 other books I’m recommending this month. So get to it.
Over the years, I’ve immersed myself in the stories of other Black women, not only as literary models, but as encouragement that the world might actually want to hear my story, my lessons and my truth. These books reminded me I am part of a long lineage of brave Black women who decided to leave home in search of adventure and themselves. The following memoirs, anthologies and novels explore movement across borders while grappling with history, race, identity, belonging, faith, joy and ultimately, home.