Civil Rights

Civil rights mean equal protections and opportunities under the law, and are a vital part of human rights and for the functioning of a democracy. They include liberties such as the right to vote, the right to a trial, and the right to access government services and education.

Federal Civil Rights Protections for Students Are Being Hollowed Out

PUBLISHED 1/28/2026 by

At least 25,000 unresolved civil rights complaints involving race, gender and disability discrimination are currently stalled as the Trump administration moves to dismantle the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—leaving students in K-12 schools and colleges with few viable paths to federal protection.

At the same time, new Title IX guidance has shifted federal priorities away from survivors of sexual violence and toward expanded due-process protections for the accused—further eroding accountability in school environments already struggling to respond to gender-based harm.

Taken together, these changes represent a sweeping redefinition of equal access to education—one that disproportionately harms women, students of color, disabled students and survivors of sexual assault.

Last semester, after I published a piece in Ms. critiquing Charlie Kirk and violent masculinity, South Carolina politicians—including Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and Rep. Ralph Norman—publicly suggested I should be fired. In a climate where ideologically driven attacks on funding and governance threaten the very survival of colleges and universities, I ultimately resigned my full professorship. The message from state lawmakers was unmistakable: Even private institutions are no longer insulated from direct government interference, regardless of stated commitments to academic freedom.

How We Build a Better System: Celebrating Ranked-Choice Voting Day

PUBLISHED 1/23/2026 by

Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, sports and entertainment, judicial offices and the private sector—with a little gardening mixed in!

This week:
—Friday marks is Ranked-Choice Voting Day, an annual event held every Jan. 23 (1-2-3) to celebrate a proven, people-powered reform that strengthens democracy by giving voters more choice and candidates a fairer path to office. 
—Steven Hill and Paul Haughey call a 2023 study from the University of Minnesota repeatedly cited by opponents of ranked-choice voting “one of the most error-prone” they encountered—relying heavily on cherry-picked citations, simulated elections and surveys disconnected from how voters actually behave in real contests. 
—We honor the life and legacy of Claudette Colvin, an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.
—The Vermont Voting Rights Act seeks to codify key federal voting protections in the state.
—Portland reaches an important compromise in their City Council elections.

… and more.

Move Over, Childless Cat Ladies—The Right Has a New Woman to Hate

PUBLISHED 1/22/2026 by

The right-wing manosphere has quickly absorbed the lexicon of AWFUL: “Affluent White Female Urban Liberals.” Move over childless cat ladies, there is a new broad in town.

The movement hell-bent on extolling the virtues of tradwife life has now set its sights on “organized gangs of wine moms us[ing] Antifa tactics to harass and impede” ICE, according to the talking heads at Fox News.

Sigh, MAGA. There you go again, mangling the plotline. Don’t you know? Motherhood has always been political, embedded in acts of resistance, from Reconstruction to women’s suffrage through the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.

Trump’s Silence on World AIDS Day Revives a New Lavender Scare

PUBLISHED 12/3/2025 by

Last month, the State Department warned employees not to commemorate World AIDS Day through official work accounts, including social media, nor should they use government funds to mark Tuesday, Dec. 2, as World AIDS Day. The day came and went in a quiet, cold Washington, D.C., without the president marking what it represented—the more than 700,000 Americans who died from HIV/AIDS-related causes in the United States since 1981. 

If his intentions were unclear, Trump’s budget proposed ending all CDC HIV prevention programs this past June, and Congress continues to negotiate next year’s budget, proposing massive cuts to HIV programs. 

For many young people who never lost friends or family, there may be the misconception that the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s was localized and small, but nearly 300,000 men who have sex with men have died from AIDS-related complications, with over 6,000 deaths in 2019 alone. To put this in perspective, this would be as if over half of Wyoming’s population disappeared, or if everyone in Pittsburgh, Penn., vanished overnight. 

Even Madonna criticized Trump’s move, posting on Instagram, “It’s one thing to order federal agents to refrain from commemorating this day, but to ask the general public to pretend it never happened is ridiculous, it’s absurd, it’s unthinkable. I bet he’s never watched his best friend die of AIDS, held their hand, and watched the blood drain from their face as they took their last breath at the age of 23.” 

From Berlin to Beijing to U.S. Congress, Women’s Courage to Convene Propels Us Forward

PUBLISHED 9/26/2025 by

Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, sports and entertainment, judicial offices and the private sector—with a little gardening mixed in!

This week:
—We mark 60 years since former President Lyndon Johnson advanced equal opportunity in employment.
—When women come together, share our strength, and lift one another up, the impossible becomes possible. 
—In a landslide victory, Adelita Grigalva becomes Arizona’s first Latina to Congress.
—Of the four Republican House members signing the petition about the actions and allies of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, three are women.
—A record number of U.S. legislators won’t run for reelection next year.
—Hillary Clinton “sees a dangerous moment for women’s rights and democracy.”
—Akshi Chawla, who writes the #WomenLead Substack and is a valuable resource on international women’s representation, on the great question: “How do I get started?”
—The Marshall Islands, a rapidly vanishing Oceania nation, is led by the region’s first-ever woman president, Hilda Heine.
—Who was the first American woman to have an airport named in her honor?

… and more.

Five Best Books on Black Women’s Political Leadership

PUBLISHED 9/16/2025 by

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.

Why Big Business Is Trying to Defeat the ERA: The Economic Implications of Equality (May 1976)

PUBLISHED 8/27/2025 by

On Nov. 7, 1975—more than half a year ago as you read this—the voters of New York and New Jersey defeated amendments to their state constitutions which said that men and women should be treated equally before the law. It was one of those old-fashioned political events that the rise of the pollster is supposed to have leeched from our body politic—namely, a surprise. It set off a period both of private introspection on the part of individual women who had previously taken ratification of the federal Equal Rights Amendment for granted, and public reconsideration on the part of the organizations and politicians to whom stewardship of the ratification movement had fallen.

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.

Trump’s Pronatalist Agenda Weaponizes Motherhood to Push Women Out of Public Life

PUBLISHED 8/26/2025 by

The Trump administration is using one of the oldest tools of patriarchy—promising rewards for compliance—through a wave of proposed pronatalist policies designed to push women into motherhood and encourage them to give birth to more children.

A recent report by the National Women’s Law Center warns that these proposals are not random: They stem from an “obscure, dangerous, and increasingly influential movement of ‘pronatalists’” that are now dictating the Trump administration’s family policy. 

According to NWLC, there are two major groups of pronatalists: Silicon Valley tech elites, such as Elon Musk, who claim that “high-IQ” people like themselves should be having more children; and traditional conservatives, who advocate for pushing women back into stay-at-home motherhood.

The Purse Is More Than a Fashion Statement. It’s a Historical and Social Signifier.

PUBLISHED 8/4/2025 by

Americans have long used items of apparel such as hats and shoes to express aspirations, amplify differences and alleviate anxieties, but only the purse—with its cavernous, pocketed interior—has also provided marginalized people with much-needed space, privacy and power.

The Things She Carried: A Cultural History of the Purse—out Aug. 4—examines how a variety of bags and purses became meaningful for Americans often ignored in studies of fashion and whose possessions are largely left out of museum artifact collections. It asks how one seemingly ordinary object became so ubiquitous, unpacking how and why it became almost exclusively linked to women.