More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Alyce Stevens Rohrer is one of the few living Women Air Service Pilots of WWII. Rohrer grew up impoverished with two brothers and two sisters in Provo, Utah, squished into a two-bedroom home on a tiny farm. Everyone worked the farm as soon as they could walk.
“I knew I wanted more,” she told me. “I wanted freedom. As a little girl I would work the fields and watch a plane fly over. The first time I saw one I lit up. I knew I would be a pilot one day, and no one could stop me.”
Investing in weapons is like trusting in a house of cards: overdue for a universal collapse and destruction that seldom makes headlines. While the planet grows warmer and its climate more deadly, we’re adding to Earth’s refugee crisis by building and transporting more bloodshed.
Watching cable news coverage of the tragic events in Ukraine, I hear again and again how brave the Ukrainian men who are staying to fight are. But we should be very careful about who we worship because fetishizing the masculinist and militarist response of war will hurt women and LGBTQ people for decades to come.
Putin is a madman, but his regime depends on these century-old notions of binary gender and “normal” sexuality. The way the U.S. mainstream media is covering the illegal invasion of Ukraine is doing similar cultural work.
When I woke up on Tuesday, Feb. 1, I found myself scrolling through Instagram and seeing every other post celebrating Black History Month—from brands and organizations to politicians and friends in my feed. Three days later, in the early hours of the morning, Minneapolis police killed Amir Locke in his sleep while serving a no-knock warrant—the same type police used to kill Breonna Taylor in her sleep, and the same Minneapolis police that killed George Floyd in 2020 in front of all of our eyes. As I tried to understand why I was feeling incredibly cynical, I realized the reason: I am tired. We are tired.
Yet, despite being tired, we must keep going. We have to keep fighting. We have to keep organizing. Together we must continue to press forward, turning pain into purpose and purpose into power.
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 in this biweekly round-up.
This week: Mississippi abortion ban threatens future of Roe v. Wade; McDonald’s employees pursue anti-sexual harassment and discrimination training; Democrats demand permanent repeal of global gag rule; California signs Equal Pay Pledge; same-gender couples face $30,000 income gap; and more.
In one of its last sessions of 2021, Congress passed a pared-down version of the Military Family Basic Needs Allowance as part of the Fiscal Year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This marks an important first step toward closing gaps in our social safety net through which currently-serving military families have been allowed to fall. But it’s miles from enough.
In the wake of Congress’s lackluster response, it is more urgent than ever for the administration to use its authority to take action on concrete, long-term solutions to address military hunger.
From COVID vaccines to abortion rights, infrastructure bills to Olympic athletes, 2021 has been a monunmental year for feminists around the globe. With so many of our rights in jeopardy, and with so many women struggling to recover from the pandemic, activists have had to work even harder to stand up for the causes we believe in.
Tackling voting rights, public health, reproductive justice and much more, here are our top feminists of 2021.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand says that despite rare bipartisan backing, “four men, in a closed room” blocked long-sought changes to how the military handles sexual assault and other major justice issues.
The Feminist Peace Initiative, co-founded by MADRE, Women Cross DMZ and the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, challenges and reimagines a U.S. foreign policy in the interests of all people and the planet.
“The conditions people flee—economic, violence—are push factors often created by U.S. policies, and exacerbated by the climate catastrophe, a result of corporate extraction or militarized pollution.”
As we rush to supermarkets and plan our holiday meals, one simple, stunning fact should give us all pause: Tens of thousands of America’s military families don’t know if they’ll have enough to eat tomorrow, much less on Thanksgiving.
