More Than A Magazine, A Movement
On Feb. 28, 2025, the lookback window under New York City’s Gender-Motivated Violence Act (GMVA) will expire, erasing an essential opportunity for survivors of gender-based offenses, sex trafficking, sexual assault, workplace harassment, reproductive coercion and other forms of violence to seek justice.
The National Organization for Women, New York City, urges individuals to act quickly to protect their right to file civil claims for incidents of gender-motivated violence.
An excerpt from Juanita Tolliver’s A More Perfect Party: The Night Shirley Chisholm and Diahann Carrol Reshaped Politics, a story of how the first Black woman to star in a network sitcom teamed up with the first Black woman to run for president in order to spark change.
“Diahann Carroll knew how to throw a party. On the cool evening of April 29, 1972, Carroll’s estate was bursting with celebrity, exuberance and history in support of the first Black person, and the first woman, to seek the Democratic nomination for president. The Welcome to Hollywood party for the Honorable Shirley Chisholm, U.S. representative of New York, was kicking into high gear.”
Here we go again. President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to deport millions of immigrants as soon as he takes office. As of mid-November, he vowed to use the military to deliver on this promise, and for those states and cities so bold to defy his orders, he’ll cut their federal funding. All of it.
What does this mean for schools? Well, with more immigrant students enrolling in more districts across the country, these proposals bring the threat of immigration enforcement closer to the school gates than many school leaders realize. It’s time to act. Fortunately, school leaders have morality, financial logic and the law on their side. In this commentary, we’ll outline why, and then present an example of how.
A new battlefront in the war on women is being led by right-wing extremist Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s coming with guns blazing after a New York doctor who prescribed and sent abortion pills to a 20-year-old Texas woman who requested and used them. In the first-of-its-kind lawsuit, Paxton is suing Dr. Margaret Carpenter for $100,000 in a Collin County, Texas, court for enabling an abortion in Texas … even though Carpenter practices medicine in New York, and what she’s doing—providing abortion pills to women in all 50 states—is legal in New York as a result of the state’s shield law.
Jhody Polk was arrested, convicted and jailed in 2007. She served the majority of the seven-year sentence at Gadsden Correctional Facility in Quincy, Fla., where she met a group of women called Law Clerks who had been trained to help others: doing legal research, filing appeals and applications in addition to assisting other incarcerated women with the paperwork needed to request a pardon, early release or lodge a complaint about dangerous conditions or abuse by correction officers or others.
Although all of the Clerks at Gadsden were serving life sentences and she was not, Polk says that the prison’s librarian—a civilian employee—encouraged her to join their ranks. She did, studying to become a “jailhouse lawyer,” a shift she considers life-changing.
Boomerang Theatre Company’s premiere production of Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves by Gina Femia is keenly, tenderly aware of the pain of high school theater and being a teenage girl.
Directed by Scott Ebersold, the play is “a new queer kinda adaptation of Romeo and Juliet,” according to Boomerang’s online program, marking the first-ever production of Femia’s new play.
Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves is running at The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at ART/New York until Nov. 24, 2024.
Even in states where abortion is still legal, abortion is not necessarily available through college health services, leaving students to find their own care. In New York City, students at Barnard College—the historically women’s college affiliated with Columbia University just across the street—are working to help their peers access abortions. Because Barnard does not currently offer abortion, finding care is still a struggle even for students in New York—a state that’s become a haven for out-of-state abortion patients—even at a women’s college that was one of the Seven Sisters.
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 this biweekly roundup.
This week’s special post-election edition is tracking the 2024 election’s bright spots, feminist victories and a full rundown of the challenges and dangers we now face.
Amid devastating news in the election, there are some bright spots. Of the 10 states with abortion ballot questions, seven passed constitutional protections for reproductive rights, including Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York.
Three states defeated abortion rights measures: South Dakota, Florida (which required 60 percent to pass) and Nebraska.
Voters in Amarillo, Texas, defeated a local ballot measure that would have designated Amarillo as a “sanctuary city for the unborn” and enact local regulations and restrictions on abortion.
This piece, based on three funds in the Northeast, is the fourth in a series of articles spotlighting interviews with fund representatives across the U.S.
We interviewed representatives from the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF), New Jersey Abortion Access Fund (NJAAF) and Abortion Liberation Fund of Pennsylvania (ALF-PA). Activists at each of these funds noted the delicate balance between supporting abortion seekers from their home states and helping the influx of folks traveling to “blue states” for abortion care.