‘Founding Feminists’ Series

‘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.)

America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story

PUBLISHED 3/2/2026 by | UPDATED 5/1/2026 at 7:59 A.M. PT

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small group of men declared that “all men are created equal,” casting a vision of liberty that has shaped the American imagination ever since.

Yet even as they debated freedom in Philadelphia, women were writing, organizing, governing, resisting and insisting on their place within the nation taking form. Some, like Mary Katherine Goddard, literally set their names in print; others, like Phillis Wheatley, wrote themselves into intellectual existence against a backdrop of enslavement and doubt. Still others left their mark through acts of refusal and flight, choosing freedom when the republic would not grant it.

A new series, Founding Feminists—launching at the start of Women’s History Month—unfolds over two months, twice a week. On this semiquincentennial of the United States, Ms. turns to these “founding feminists” not as anachronistic heroines, but as architects of an unfinished democratic project. There is no nation without women at its core—no democracy without their labor, intellect, resistance and imagination.

From Haudenosaunee matrilineal governance, to Black women’s freedom-seeking acts, from revolutionary manifestos to quiet domestic rebellions, our Founding Feminists series reexamines the past to illuminate our present moment of backlash and possibility.

If the Declaration of Independence set forth a promise of equality, it was women—across race, class, sexuality and nationality—who pressed the nation to live up to it.

Two hundred and fifty years later, their questions remain ours: What does freedom truly mean, and who gets to claim it?