‘Founding Feminists’ Series

A Public Syllabus on Feminist Resistance Across U.S. History: Books, Films, Archives and Tools to Rethink America’s Origins

PUBLISHED 4/16/2026 by

This curated public multimedia syllabus spans the Revolutionary era and the long afterlife of feminist resistance—from the 19th century to the present. It includes works by series authors, books and articles, podcasts, films and television, primary-source collections, a Google Map of sites across the U.S. relevant to women’s histories, and a Spotify playlist tracing the legacy of protest music.

Many of these works center marginalized communities and are organized under the themes of Revolution, Resistance and Reclamation.

Educating Women: A History of Access, Exclusion and Backlash

PUBLISHED 4/13/2026 by

The war against “radical gender ideology” has been staggering. The ascent of President Trump brought calls for the elimination of women’s and LGBTQ centers, rollbacks on Title IX protections, the exclusion of trans women from college sports and the purging of gender and sexuality studies from college curricula across U.S. higher education. These actions signal a massive backlash against decades of progress—and are inseparable from a broader assault on civil rights-era protections for people of color.

However, this moment is nothing new. It echoes an earlier race- and gender-based backlash over a century ago, when growing numbers of white middle-class women began to attend college. Against the backdrop of Black emancipation, increased migration and the expanding feminist movement, women’s education was cast as a threat—not just to patriarchy, but to the future of the white race.

Today’s backlash is the latest attempt to restore the status quo—to draw boundaries around who is entitled to higher education and to reinforce a racial and gender hierarchy that has always shaped access to learning in the United States.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Making Disability Visible in History: A Conversation With Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

PUBLISHED 4/9/2026 by

Dr. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is a pioneering scholar of bioethics, humanities, disability justice and culture, and professor emerita at Emory University. Widely considered the founder of feminist disability studies, Garland-Thomson is the author of several canonical works, including Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997) and the influential essay, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” (2002).

On the nation’s 250th anniversary and for the series on “America’s Founding Feminists,” Ms.’ guest editor Janell Hobson spoke with Garland-Thomson about disability history and its connections to women’s history.

She argues centering disability reshapes our understanding of history, citizenship and whose lives are recognized as foundational to U.S. democracy.

“Women’s bodies have always offered men an opportunity to talk about nations, to talk about themselves, to talk about government.”

“… These human variations that we think of as disabilities are often an opportunity for resourcefulness.”

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging In the U.S. 

PUBLISHED 4/6/2026 by

The Asian woman in America has long been both overnamed and erased—reduced to stereotypes that obscure her humanity while fixating on her image.

In Afong Moy, a teenage girl exhibited across the U.S. as “The Chinese Lady,” we see how fascination and domination intertwine: her body staged as spectacle, her silence misread as passivity, her personhood collapsed into an object for public consumption.

That same logic shaped the law. From Chy Lung v. Freeman to the Page Act of 1875, Asian women were treated as presumptively immoral, their bodies scrutinized and excluded based on racialized assumptions.

What began as spectacle hardened into policy—ensuring that Asian women’s belonging in America has never been fully granted, only contested.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy

PUBLISHED 3/30/2026 by

The United States was founded not through declarations of equality, but through the labor of Black women whose political work reproduced the nation, even as it was erased from the democratic archive. 

Sally Hemings is rarely situated within the United States’ democratic legacy, despite her central role in the material conditions through which democracy was made possible.

In shaping the conditions of her children’s freedom, Hemings exercised a form of maternal political authority that governed who could move beyond enslavement. This labor stands in sharp contrast to Jefferson’s authorship of democratic ideals, which articulated freedom in abstract and ambiguous terms, while Hemings produced freedom materially through the governance of reproduction and kinship under constraint.

Hemings’ strategic negotiations secured her and her children’s futures within a political order that both denied her legal personhood and depended on her labor.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America

PUBLISHED 3/23/2026 by

The revolutionary era was one of surprising possibilities to express same-sex attraction and gender nonconformity.

At the time, gender was widely understood not as an inner truth but as a social practice: something one did, not something one was. That understanding made gender surprisingly flexible.

In a moment when LGBTQ+ people are again being told that they do not belong in the nation’s story, Revolutionary America offers a different lesson.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776

PUBLISHED 3/12/2026 by

The American Revolution can feel like a legacy that belongs to a select few. It has often been told as the story of wealthy white men—many of them enslavers, many of them beneficiaries of Indigenous dispossession—who rebelled in the name of liberty while denying it to most of the people around them. From this perspective, those who are most marginalized—including women, LGBTQ people and communities of color—may feel as if they are reinforcing political amnesia, or worse, complicity, in patriotic celebrations of 1776.   

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

‘¡Este País También Es Nuestro!’: La Herencia Duradera De Las Mujeres Hispanohablantes En La América Colonial

PUBLISHED 3/9/2026 by and

Siglos antes de la Revolución Americana, las mujeres hispanohablantes cruzaron océanos y desiertos para construir comunidades cuyo legado aún define a Estados Unidos.

Dado que el sentimiento antilatino coincide con el 250.º aniversario de la fundación de Estados Unidos, debemos recordar que mucho antes de la Revolución Americana, las mujeres hispanohablantes habitaban el territorio que se convertiría en Estados Unidos.

Al igual que sus homólogas protestantes inglesas de Nueva Inglaterra, las mujeres hispanohablantes fueron las madres fundadoras de nuestra nación. Su legado perdura a través de sus descendientes y de las muchas otras latinas que emigraron a Estados Unidos en los últimos 250 años. Ante la detención generalizada de mujeres hispanohablantes, es crucial recordar que Estados Unidos también ha sido su país durante mucho tiempo.

(Este ensayo es parte de la serie FEMINIST 250: Feministas fundadoras, que conmemora el 250 aniversario de Estados Unidos reclamando la revolución a través de las mujeres y las personas de género expansivo cuyas ideas, trabajo y resistencia dieron forma a la democracia estadounidense).

‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America

PUBLISHED 3/9/2026 by and

Centuries before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women crossed oceans and deserts to build communities whose legacies still shape the United States.

As anti-Latino sentiment coincides with the 250th anniversary of the United States, we must remember that long before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women inhabited territory that would become the United States. 

Like their English Protestant counterparts in New England, Spanish-speaking women were founding mothers of our nation. Their legacies live on through their descendants and the many other Latinas who immigrated to the U.S. over the past 250 years. Faced with the widespread detention of Spanish-speaking women, it is crucial to remember that it has long been their country too.  

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America

PUBLISHED 3/5/2026 by

I am a member of the Oneida Nation Wolf Clan of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, whose governance model influenced modern democracy and the women’s rights movement. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is recognized as the oldest continuous, participatory democracy in the world.

Our representative form of government, organized on local, state, national and international levels, flows organically from our Creation Story, which begins with Sky Woman, pregnant, falling from Sky World. She descends toward an endless water world, where water animals already reside and help form the first land, known as Turtle Island. Through their efforts, the living world we inhabit today was brought forth.

Haudenosaunee women inherently hold political, economic and spiritual authority—a significant difference from colonial patriarchy.

When the U.S. founding fathers drafted their Constitution, drawing inspiration from Haudenosaunee governance, they committed a catastrophic omission: matrilineal leadership. As the U.S. commemorates the 250th anniversary of its founding documents amid political, social and ecological upheaval, the country has a unique opportunity to revisit the original influences of American democracy.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)