More Than A Magazine, A Movement
We’ve made it to July—another eighth of the Trump administration’s days behind us, halfway through a hell of a long year, and the eve of a long weekend to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
President Donald Trump’s apparent glee that women were absent from his recent White House UFC Fight was just the shot of inspiration I needed to collect and curate some of the best feminist takes on democracy to carry us through the national holiday.
Free Black women and Indigenous women are the foremothers of generations of African Americans. Yet they remain largely absent from the official story of American freedom. Their lives, contributions and descendants have been systematically erased—from colonial records and legal classifications to public memory itself.
That erasure began in the earliest colonial records. The 1620 Virginia census recorded “four Indians in the service of several planters,” alongside 15 Negro men and 17 Negro women, reducing people to categories that obscured their identities, families and histories. Over the centuries, laws, court decisions and public institutions repeatedly reinforced that disappearance.
The best celebration of 250 years of American freedom—after the fireworks and celebrations by a newly blue-painted Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are over—could be a visit to a cool, air-conditioned archive. In the quiet, anyone can search the records for the full story, of the enslaved and freeborn, Indian and African. Anyone can defy censorship and erasure with an open mind and a pencil, no fees required.
Donald Trump’s jingoistic whitewashing of the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country will no doubt celebrate the 1773 Boston Tea Party, where the Sons of Liberty protested oppressive British import taxes. But throughout American history, women activists—the Daughters of Liberty to suffragists, journalists and civil rights advocates—have been making patriarchal governments tremble, by taking full advantage of the precious rights protected by the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
That same spirit must now drive the final push to secure the Equal Rights Amendment. Although the ERA has been ratified by the required 38 states, it has yet to be officially recognized as part of the Constitution.
The First Amendment gives us the tools to change that: by speaking out, organizing, protesting and demanding that elected leaders make constitutional equality a national priority.
As the U.S. prepares to mark its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, questions loom over the celebration: Whose America gets remembered, whose gets erased—and how do we imagine and build a democracy that includes all of us?
In the Summer issue of Ms., we revisit the nation’s founding through a feminist lens, reclaiming the stories too often left out of the official narrative: women who challenged the authors of the Declaration of Independence and later the U.S. Constitution for deliberately writing women out of America’s founding documents, Black women who resisted oppression from the start, Indigenous societies built around women-led governance, queer lives in revolutionary America, Asian women’s struggles for belonging and the long fight to make disability visible in our history.
We also look back at 54 years of feminist reporting from the pages of Ms.—proof that the battles for bodily autonomy, equality and democracy did not begin yesterday—and forward to the bold new ideas that could shape a freer, fairer future for the next 250 years.
Get a year of Ms. for just $20 (a 43 percent discount off our usual price) when you join today!
From the Haudenosaunee women who successfully challenged warfare in the 17th century, to today’s feminist organizers defending democracy, reproductive freedom and civil rights, the struggle for women’s equality has never been a straight line. It is a story of persistence, resistance and collective action spanning centuries.
Compiled by editors at Ms. and researchers from the National Women’s History Alliance, this women’s history timeline traces the interconnected histories of feminism, abolition, labor organizing, civil rights, reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ liberation and democratic participation.
No timeline can fully capture more than 400 years of feminist history, let alone every movement, leader, victory and setback that has shaped the ongoing fight for equality. Rather than offering a comprehensive account, this chronology highlights pivotal moments and turning points that help tell the story of how women have expanded the boundaries of freedom, democracy and human rights in the United States and beyond.
The timeline is part of Ms. magazine’s FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists project, a multimedia essay series marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by examining the women and feminist movements that have worked to make the nation’s founding promises more fully realized. Through reported features, essays, interviews and historical analysis, FEMINIST 250 explores not only where we have been, but where we must go next to achieve true equality.
FEMINIST 250’s Parts 2 and 3—Feminist Lessons and Feminist Futures—drop this month on MsMagazine.com.
With a global market worth of over $56 billion, handbags are one of the main drivers of the fashion industry.
However, as Kathleen B. Casey shows in her latest book, The Things She Carried: The Social History of the Purse in America, they are more than just a fashionable accessory: Women’s purses are an important marker of identity and social status. They are a statement of power, of resilience, of defiance and even protection. Indeed, you can tell a lot about a person from their handbag and what’s in it.
While both women and men have carried bags in the past, it was the evolution of pockets (and lack thereof in women’s clothes) that led to the purse being specifically marked as a feminine accessory, often associated with the female body and particularly the womb.
With pockets becoming a symbol of functionality and masculinity, it is not a coincidence that utilitarian pockets became a feminist demand. Feminists have long argued for their right to free hands and movement, while keeping their possessions secure and concealed. Pockets were often equated to votes during the suffrage campaign, as activists criticized the lack of both in hindering women’s independence.
Despite being a conspicuous item, one that could be snatched or stolen, Casey is careful to show the power of the purse (pun intended) in offering women the ability to gain visibility in public as equal to men. Women could not only carry with them money, sanitary pads and birth control pills that allowed them freedom of movement and independence, but their bags enabled them to do it while maintaining their respectability and status. At times when women had little control over their bodies, the privacy of their purse offered them an autonomy they could not otherwise gain.
I want to be obsolete. I want to walk into a classroom full of students excited to learn feminist histories and begin by marveling at how far we’ve come—how unthinkable it now feels that a president once demeaned women, faced dozens of credible accusations of sexual violence, and still rose to the highest office in the country. I want that version of this story to feel distant, resolved, finished.
Instead, I walk into my gender, women and sexuality studies classes scanning for signs of hostility—wondering who might be recording, who might be there to report me, who might see my teaching not as scholarship but as something to punish.
Teaching about marginalized communities, especially through a feminist, anti-racist lens, now carries real risk: of being surveilled, doxxed, harassed or silenced. Books are banned, curricula are targeted, and the very act of naming systems of power is treated as a threat.
And yet, I keep teaching. I keep showing students that what they are experiencing is not individual failure but the result of structural forces—and that those forces can be challenged. I tell them their voices matter, their rage is justified, and their histories deserve to be known.
I would rather be obsolete. But as long as these attacks persist, our work is far from done.
Combahee was born in response to the murders of 12 Black women in Boston at a time when racial violence had a pernicious vice-hold over the city.
When so many Black feminist icons of their generation have gone on to become ancestors, we are privileged to have access to these women, and other Black feminist elders like them today. At a time when books are being banned, there are galling attempts to erase the histories and the stories of marginalized groups, the radical beginnings of the Combahee River Collective must be amplified. These women were proud of their African American heritage, unequivocal about their socialist politics, and unabashed about their lesbian identity. They have as much to teach us now as they did then.
Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment!
This week:
—Illinois primaries feature a big U.S. Senate win for Juliana Stratton.
—The IPU/U.N. Women Report on Women in Politics presents a sobering global snapshot.
—Mississippi will remain the only state that has never sent a woman to the U.S. House.
—Ranked-choice voting is being used for student elections at over 100 colleges and universities.
… and more.
In the wake of newly reported sexual abuse allegations against labor leader César Chávez, our hearts are with our long-time Ms. advisor, Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.) board member, friend, and feminist and labor icon Dolores Huerta. The fact that she felt she had to bear this in silence speaks to the layers of harm that women who suffer sexual assault must bear.
In the wake of going public for the first time, Huerta writes, “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor—of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”
“The knowledge that he hurt young girls sickens me. My heart aches for everyone who suffered alone and in silence for years. There are no words strong enough to condemn those deplorable actions that he did. César’s actions do not reflect the values of our community and our movement.”