Women in Politics

Ms. spotlights stories of women making political change by holding office and pioneering legislation all over the world, from the local to the federal level—despite the sex discrimination they often face in their positions.

Detaining Families, Policing Pregnancy: Trump’s Immigration Crackdown on Women and Children

PUBLISHED 8/12/2026 by

Trump’s latest attacks on birthright citizenship are part of a much broader effort to police American identity, punish migrant women for entering the U.S. and ultimately regulate their reproduction. Immigrant women and children remain particular targets of a hostile immigration system that seeks to control them through detention, family separation and deportation. The administration’s reinstatement of family detention has made it possible to incarcerate whole families while avoiding the political backlash generated by the “zero tolerance” separations of Trump’s first term.

But detaining families together does not make detention humane. Family residential facilities expose mothers and children to interrupted medical care, inadequate health screenings, poor living conditions and lasting physical and psychological harm. Women—particularly those who are pregnant, postpartum or caring for young children—also face heightened vulnerability to neglect and abuse inside a system where government officers and private contractors wield enormous power over their daily lives.

These policies are not simply about immigration enforcement. They are a means of penalizing pregnancy, motherhood and family formation in immigrant communities. From attacks on birthright citizenship to the detention of pregnant women and U.S.-citizen children, the administration is using the immigration system to make migration more painful and precarious—and to enact that punishment on the bodies and families of migrant women.

Another Blow to Women’s Equality at Work: The Trump Administration Is Trying to Weaken a Key Workplace Discrimination Protection

PUBLISHED 8/6/2026 by

The Trump administration is attempting to weaken one of the nation’s most important workplace discrimination protections—a legal standard that has, for decades, allowed workers to challenge hiring and promotion policies that unfairly exclude qualified people, even when those policies appear neutral on their face.

A new opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), issued in June, argues these longstanding interpretations of Title VII’s “disparate-impact” standard are unconstitutional, and contends certain Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance improperly allows employers to be held liable based on discriminatory effects rather than intent. The opinion is meant to guide executive branch enforcement.

Civil rights advocates are pushing back, arguing the new OLC opinion misstates decades of Supreme Court precedent and congressional action.

Below is a joint explainer—issued by the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), Democracy Forward, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), Equal Rights Advocates, and LatinoJustice PRLDEF—originally published as “The Office of Legal Counsel’s Opinion on the ‘Constitutionality of Disparate-Impact Liability Under Title VII’: What You Need to Know.”

The organizations argue that the opinion does not change federal law. Instead, they emphasize that only Congress can amend Title VII and that courts—not the executive branch—determine how the law is interpreted. Employers, they say, remain legally obligated to comply with existing anti-discrimination protections.

“Across America, workers are struggling to find living-wage jobs to support themselves and their families. Too often, qualified workers are blocked from getting hired and promoted due to employer policies that screen out applicants based on factors unrelated to whether the applicant could do the job, from unnecessary college degree requirements and credit checks to commute-radius limitations and AI resume reviews. The Trump-Vance administration is making this problem worse.

“For decades, under Supreme Court precedent, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), and other legal authority, workers have been able to challenge exclusionary policies like these using a legal tool known as “disparate-impact liability.” That tool has resulted in employers adopting more thoughtful, rigorous standards in evaluating their own selection criteria and advancing their business objectives. The administration is now attacking this tool, encouraging employers to ignore the harms caused by their own policies while denying workers the ability to question whether those policies are justified and fair.

“In its latest move, the Trump-Vance administration’s Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) released an opinion claiming that longstanding U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance on disparate-impact liability under Title VII is unconstitutional. The OLC opinion is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. Only Congress and the courts have authority to change the law or its impact.”

A Decade After Hillary Clinton’s Historic Presidential Run, the DNC Is Fighting Over Ranked-Choice Voting

PUBLISHED 8/1/2026 by

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!

—Ten years ago this week, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to secure a major party’s nomination for president. Eight years later, Kamala Harris walked up to that same door and secured her own party’s nomination.
—The data is convincing: Ranked-choice voting helps level the electoral playing field for women by weakening the control of gatekeepers and incentivizing more civil and collaborative campaigns. RCV has additional benefits too, such as its clear value for political parties to nominate more unifying candidates, as recently demonstrated in Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary won handily by Democrat Hannah Pingree after she trailed in first choices. That’s why I was so enraged to learn that the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) has voted to block state parties from making use of RCV to select a nominee.
—Rest in power, Ida Schmertz, co-founder of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. who described herself as “a feminist before I knew the word.”

… and more.

Never Surrender: Empowered Wives Were Never the Problem

PUBLISHED 7/31/2026 by

Over the past year, several women-focused articles in the New York Times declared feminism has gone too far, and put the onus on women to fix what is broken.

An article asking if liberal feminism “ruined the workplace” broke the internet late last year.

An article last month featured a conversation with influential, right-wing columnist Louise Perry, about how women need to change, in order to close the growing gap between men and women. Perry’s position justifies re‑inscribing patriarchal control over women’s bodies and sexuality in the name of “protecting” us.

I feel a familiar sense of disappointment in the recent feature, “Women Are Too Controlling, She Wrote. Her Message Still Resonates,” about Laura Doyle, author of The Surrendered Wife, a 2001 self‑help book and the basis for a relationship “movement” that teaches women to relinquish control in their marriages, defer to their husbands’ decisions (including finances), and focus on their own “self‑care” and gratitude to restore intimacy and harmony.

Each article asks a version of the same question: How should women change?

Doyle’s message and the broader “surrendered wife” ideology, is troubling.

What struck me even more was that one of the country’s most influential newspapers presented it as a growing cultural trend, without examining the cultural forces and gender expectations that have long reinforced this ideology.

Women and feminism don’t need to surrender. They were never the problem.    

War on Women Report: Hegseth Blocks Promotions of Women in Navy; Trump Finally Pays E. Jean Carroll; Colorado Police Pray With Abortion Clinic Harassers

PUBLISHED 7/31/2026 by and

MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide: the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.”

We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.

Since our last report:
—Celebrity women are 3.5 times more likely than men to be deepfaked.
—The Department of Health and Human Services abruptly canceled $68 million in federal grants under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program.
—Planned Parenthood clinics regained access to millions of dollars in essential federal funding. The temporary ban was originally approved in July 2025 as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The denial of federal funding over the past year forced Planned Parenthood to close nearly 30 health centers nationwide, impacting roughly 40,000 patients. Despite regaining an estimated $800 million in annual federal funding, ongoing financial uncertainty at both the state and federal levels means the shuttered clinics will not reopen.
—Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner has suspended his campaign after a former girlfriend accused him of raping her nearly five years ago.
—For the first time in a decade, no active-duty women naval officers will be promoted to admiral this year.
—Police officers in Boulder, Colo., were photographed pausing to pray with antiabortion protestors harassing the RISE Collective, an all-trimester abortion clinic, after concerned RISE Collective staff alerted the police of the protestors’ presence.
—Abortion-rights organizers in Idaho have been working to collect signatures for a proposed ballot measure that would restore abortion rights in the state, revoking Idaho’s total ban. On July 2, volunteers gathered in Boise to turn in over 110,000 signatures they collected for the initiative (called the Reproductive Freedom and Privacy Act). About one-quarter are from registered Republicans, demonstrating support for abortion rights is widespread even in deep red states.

… and more.

Believing Women (or Not) Shapes More Than Sexual Assault Cases

PUBLISHED 7/30/2026 by

Nearly a decade after the rise of #MeToo, public conversations about sexual harassment and assault have entered a new phase—one marked by growing skepticism.

New data from Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute 2025 Violence Experiences Survey suggests that this skepticism extends beyond individual cases. People who are more likely to doubt women’s reports of sexual violence are also more likely to question women’s leadership and their ability to make decisions about their own health.

This matters because believing women—and believing in women—shapes whether survivors come forward, whether they are taken seriously and whether women are trusted in positions of authority. Ultimately, the issue is larger than sexual violence alone. It is about women’s credibility, and whether society trusts women to speak about their own experiences, lead their communities and decide what is best for their health and safety.

As Thousands of Migrant Children Lose Legal Representation, Trump’s ‘Lost Children’ Myth Lives On

PUBLISHED 7/29/2026 by

The Trump administration’s ceaseless attacks on immigrant communities continue to bring tragedy and death to people who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time: After ICE agents shot into the cars of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, killing both men—neither of whom was even a target of that day’s raid—the Department of Homeland Security agreed to pause its use of traffic stops.

The pause lasted only a few hours: President Trump took to social media to rant against the DHS decision, and it was reversed—signaling that another round of violent deportation efforts are going to be pushed and applauded by this White House.  

Trump’s insistence that traffic stops by ICE agents are a vital mechanism for fighting crime shows how seamlessly he has blurred the lines between being in the country without authorization and committing crimes.

The same thing is happening in the world of unaccompanied children—and I suspect one of the next waves of deportation efforts will be aimed at the sponsors of those children. The Trump administration has spun an elaborate web of lies to paint parents and family members as criminals, participating in trafficking and child exploitation.  

Who’s Paying the Price for Trump’s Medicaid Cuts? Communities of Color and People Living With HIV.

PUBLISHED 7/29/2026 by

President Trump and his Republican backers have been determined to gut the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and expanded Medicaid coverage ever since his first term in office. This year he is finally getting his way, putting the health of tens of millions of Americans at risk.

It is racial minorities and the chronically ill who will be the most harmed.

A year ago, Congress passed the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, putting in place onerous new eligibility requirements for Medicaid coverage, including work requirements. Medicaid enrollees ages 19 to 64 must complete at least 80 hours a month of work, community service, job training or education to maintain coverage, unless they qualify for an exemption. All states must comply with the new rule by Jan. 1, 2027.

The combination of ACA cuts and new barriers to Medicaid enrollment will likely cause historic coverage losses across the United States for years to come, according to new research: Nearly 16 million people stand to lose coverage by 2034.

The People’s Bill of Rights 250 Invites Americans to Reimagine the Constitution

PUBLISHED 7/29/2026 by , and

A new online public platform—The People’s Bill of Rights 250—invites Americans to propose, discuss and vote on ideas they believe belong in the Constitution. As the U.S. marks 250 years, the bold, interactive project asks Americans not only to reflect on the nation’s founding, but to help shape its future.

The nonpartisan organization The People and executive director Katie Fahey, alongside a coalition of civic, advocacy and cultural leaders, spearheaded the People’s Bill of Rights 250. It invites Americans to answer a simple question: What freedoms, rights and protections should every person in the country be guaranteed over the next 250 years?  

From now until Friday, July 31, Americans are encouraged to vote and share their own ideas at the People’s Bill of Rights 250’s website.

Who Gets Remembered? The Fight to Put Women’s History on the National Mall

PUBLISHED 7/29/2026 by

America’s monuments tell us who matters. Yet on the National Mall, where presidents, generals and founding fathers dominate the landscape, women’s contributions remain strikingly absent.

The battle over a permanent Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum exposes how contested women’s place in our national story still is.

The museum’s new exhibit, Unhidden Heroines, uses augmented reality to offer a glimpse of what that story could look like—one in which women are no longer relegated to footnotes but recognized as central figures in shaping the nation.

The exhibit profiles five exceptional women whose substantial contributions to American history have been largely unrecognized or obscured in the historical record: Mary Katharine Goddard, the printer who published the first signed copy of the Declaration of Independence; Dr. Dorothy Height, a civil and women’s rights activist known as the “Godmother of the Civil Rights Movement”; Julia Ward Howe, creator of a rallying cry, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” for the Union cause during the Civil War; Elizebeth Smith Friedman, a cryptanalyst central to cracking Nazi code during World War II; and Polly Cooper, an Oneida woman pivotal to the success of Washington’s Continental Army.

Despite strong bipartisan support for the brick-and-mortar women’s museum project—and having raised tens of millions of dollars for its establishment—momentum for the public-private partnership suffered a setback on the Hill: The bill that would have finalized the museum’s location on the Mall was scuttled after Republicans added anti-trans language barring the depiction of “any biological male as a female” in its exhibits and giving President Trump control over selection of its location.  

It’s not the first time the administration has claimed to protect women’s rights while actually setting back their interests or causing them harm.