Child Marriage

The marriage or informal union between a child under 18 years old to an adult or another child. Child marriages affect one in five girls around the world and lead to increased risks of intimate partner violence, impoverishment, child pregnancy and insufficient education.

In ‘Lotus Leadership,’ Kamini Ramani Explores What Immigrant Daughters Owe the Mothers Who Taught Them to Be Strong but Quiet

PUBLISHED 9/25/2026 by

Before any of it, there was a girl on a bus. Kamini Ramani grew up in Bombay, trudging through knee-deep monsoon water to board the Number 122 red double-decker while watching for men who would try to grope girls in the crowd. She was also raised on stories about goddesses—fearsome women who fought back.

Ramani is clear about what came with those stories: pressure to achieve, expectations that women be humble and meek, and rules about whom they could marry or love. Every Indian daughter is handed two things at once: goddesses who fight back, and a warning never to be one of them. Her new book, *Lotus Leadership*, treats the two as separable.

In the interviews I’ve done for this series and for a book of my own, the story that surfaces is often about a mother: whether she made a single refusal or still resents that she never did. Either way, the daughter is the one who finds out what it was worth—and which parts of that inheritance she wants to carry forward.

(This piece is part of an ongoing series, Redefining Power: How Indian American Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership, Identity and Care. The series explores what it means to modernize without losing our roots—through candid conversations with Indian American women reshaping culture, power and possibility.)

As World Leaders Gather at the U.N., the Push to Recognize Gender Apartheid Gains Ground

PUBLISHED 9/21/2026 by

Nearly 130 heads of state and government are expected to attend the United Nations General Assembly’s high-level week in New York. From Sept. 22 to 28, world leaders will gather for the General Debate of the 81st session under the theme, “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all.”

For Afghan women and girls living under the Taliban’s systematic oppression, whether the United Nations can deliver is not an abstract question. It requires the international community to recognize gender apartheid for what it is: a crime against humanity.

The support for recognizing forced marriage and reproductive violence, while stopping short of naming “gender apartheid,” presents an opportunity for feminist organizations to continue advocating for the full breadth of gender-based oppression to be recognized by the United Nations.

Marry Young, Skip the Career Ladder: Conservatives’ Pitch to Gen Z Women

PUBLISHED 9/14/2026 by

Conservative influencers and campus networks are urging Gen Z women to prioritize early marriage and motherhood over education and professional ambition.

Conservative groups now host several events and conferences aimed at young women, including Live Action’s Young Leaders Summit, Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit and the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Women Warriors Summit.

In the speeches and sessions I reviewed from these gatherings, speakers offered little encouragement for career-building or financial independence. Instead, they focused on chastity, marriage, traditional gender roles and what they described as God’s design for women’s lives. Their message was clear: The most important decision facing women in their twenties is not which major to choose or which job offer to accept, but whom to marry, and how soon.

Proponents of this narrative often skip over the practical risks of marrying young. Young age and economic stress are both associated with a heightened risk of intimate partner violence, while financial dependence can make an abusive relationship far more difficult to leave.

I’m a Gen Z woman and college student pursuing a career, financial independence and a life shaped by my own ambitions. After spending the summer researching conservative media, I found its messages unsettling: reminiscent of a past when women faced legal and social barriers to employment, property ownership and independent access to credit, and were valued primarily for their roles as wives and mothers.

Although I do not believe this narrative is widely accepted across Gen Z, I worry that without greater scrutiny, more young women may begin to internalize the idea that their ambitions matter less than those of their male peers.

Beyond Abortion: How the ERA Could Transform Pregnancy, Work and Family Life

PUBLISHED 8/26/2026 by

On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband, John, beseeching him to “remember the ladies” as he and his peers were drafting the Declaration of Independence. She warned, “All Men would be tyrants if they could” and urged him to “not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.”

He ignored her warning when she wrote: “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

Now, 250 years later, women are still fighting for inclusion.

The potential for state ERAs to advance the rights of women and girls is tremendous, but only if we have the will—and the resources—to push for favorable state supreme courts and to use ERAs to challenge discriminatory government policies.

While we fight for a Congress that will publish the federal ERA and a U.S. Supreme Court that will robustly interpret it, feminists are building an ERA jurisprudence that will one day achieve Abigail Adams’ dream: for women to finally, truly, be equal citizens and live freely, safely and empowered throughout the United States.

Keeping Score: Abortion Bans Cost $140B Per Year; Federal Courts Protect Trans Youth and Incarcerated Trans Women; Feminists React to FBI Raid on Ohio Voting Rights Organization

PUBLISHED 6/24/2026 by

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:
—Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) is working to get Republicans on the record on the Right to Contraception Act.
—ICE has already reported the deaths of 18 detainees this year, on pace to surpass the highest number of deaths in decades.
—Abortion restrictions could cost the U.S. economy $140 billion annually in lost earnings.
—”I love the inflation,” says Trump.
—The EEOC will no longer require federal agencies to report on race, ethnicity, sex or gender identity.
—83 percent of American voters agree that emergency contraception should be easily accessible.
—Abortion ban states are slowly losing a generation of women medical students and doctors.
—More than 770,000 children have already lost access to SNAP benefits after last year’s funding cuts.
—A new study found trans women athletes have no significant physical advantages over cis women.
—Missouri has restored access to medication abortions after a Jackson County judge struck down key state restrictions, allowing clinics to resume providing the service and marking the first time medication abortion has been available in Missouri since 2018.
—Republicans passed a reconciliation bill that provides roughly $70 billion for ICE and CBP, sending it to President Trump’s desk. (This is on top of more than $140 billion Republicans already provided for those agencies last year.)

… and more.

Imagining a World Where No Mothers Die

PUBLISHED 5/8/2026 by

More than 700 women die each day, on average, from causes linked to pregnancy or childbirth. Almost all of these deaths are preventable. 

To honor the world’s mothers, we asked midwives about their memories of helping women survive the journey to motherhood. And we asked how the world would be different if no woman died in the act of creating life.

Ms. Global: Energy Crisis in Cuba, Feminist Activist Assassinated in Iraq, Gay Asylum-Seeker Deported and More

PUBLISHED 4/8/2026 by and

The U.S. ranks as the 19th most dangerous country for women, 11th in maternal mortality, 30th in closing the gender pay gap, 75th in women’s political representation, and painfully lacks paid family leave and equal access to healthcare. But Ms. has always understood: Feminist movements around the world hold answers to some of the U.S.’s most intractable problems. Ms. Global is taking note of feminists worldwide.

This month:
—Seoul holds the 41st Women’s Strike in South Korea for International Women’s Day.
—Hospital patients suffer during Cuba’s three major blackouts.
—The U.S. is at fault for the missile strike that hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Girls’ School in Minab, Iran, on Feb. 28, killing 175 people.
—Yanar Mohammed, a leading Iraqi feminist and human rights defender, was killed in an armed attack in Baghdad.
—IOC restricts transgender participation in Olympics.
—Amid widespread displacement, poverty and institutional collapse during the ongoing war in Gaza, families are increasingly turning to child marriage for their daughters.

… and more.

The Erosion of Women’s Rights Is a Warning Sign for Democracies Everywhere

PUBLISHED 3/17/2026 by

Over 30 years ago, world leaders came together in Beijing and made a promise: Gender equality would be a global standard, not a distant aspiration. This March, as the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women convenes for CSW70 under the theme of strengthening access to justice and eliminating discriminatory laws, that promise remains not only unfinished, but increasingly under coordinated assault.

Since 1999, Equality Now’s Words & Deeds reports have tracked laws and policies that discriminate against women and girls, documenting progress when legal reform has been achieved and holding governments accountable when words fail to translate into action.

Our new Words & Deeds update, Progress and Backlash: Accountability for the Rights of Women and Girls, shows that we are at a perilous moment of global regression in women’s rights. Across regions, protections once considered settled are being diluted, defunded and, in some cases, deliberately dismantled.

Sundance 2026: In Documentary ‘One in a Million,’ a Syrian Girl’s Life in Exile Reveals the Long Road After War

PUBLISHED 3/6/2026 by

Winner of Sundance’s Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary category, as well as the Directing Award for filmmakers Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes, One in a Million lives up to its title. It homes in with a laser focus on the experiences of Israa, a Syrian girl whose family undertakes the perilous migration to Germany after the start of the Syrian civil war.

When the filmmakers first meet Israa in 2015, she is an inquisitive 11-year-old selling cigarettes on the street in Turkey while her family waits for the chance to cross the Mediterranean. The journey that follows—overcrowded rafts, long treks across multiple borders and nights spent sleeping on the street—contains harrowing moments, but it ultimately occupies only a sliver of the film’s larger story.

Once the family arrives in Germany, where the filmmakers check in with them over the next nine years, One in a Million reveals a far more complicated and intimate portrait of migration and acculturation.

As Israa grows from child to teenager to young adult, she navigates questions of identity, freedom and belonging, while her mother Nisreen becomes increasingly confident and independent in a country that offers opportunities she was denied in Syria. The result is a quietly riveting portrait of family life in transition, showing how the experience of displacement continues to reshape relationships, expectations and the possibilities of who each person might become.

(This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.)