New York

What Rights Should the Constitution Protect? Alicia Keys and Leigh Blake Are Asking You to Decide

PUBLISHED 9/23/2026 by

On Saturday, Sept. 26, Alicia Keys will use a special performance at the Global Citizen Festival in New York City’s Central Park to amplify the People’s Bill of Rights 250, a civic initiative asking Americans to help define the rights the Constitution should protect during the country’s next 250 years.

During her “Alicia Keys & Friends” performance, Keys will bring the People’s Bill of Rights’ message—“WE THE PEOPLE. AGAIN.”—to tens of thousands of festivalgoers.

“The People’s Bill of Rights 250 is about … passing the mic,” says Keys, “making sure every voice gets heard, and giving people the power to shape what comes next.”

It asks Americans to participate in small online deliberations and ultimately vote on which ideas should move forward. Current deliberations ask Americans to consider whether healthcare, reproductive freedom, equality for women and girls, housing, education and environmental protections should be constitutional rights. You can add your own idea (if you feel like typing), or just swipe right or left on others’ ideas.

Leigh Blake, a longtime activist who has spent decades using music and culture to mobilize people around social causes, co-spearheaded of the People’s Bill of Rights 250. The project is an extension of a decades-long philosophy of activism: that ordinary people have more in common than they are told, that rights are inseparable from human dignity, and that meaningful changes come through collective action and service.

“There’s always going to be people on the fringes,” she says, “but I don’t think we’re divided as a country in the way we’ve been led to believe we are.”

Blake describes the initiative as operating almost like “politics without politicians.” Instead of waiting for elected officials to decide which issues deserve attention, Americans can propose their own ideas and vote on the proposals of others.

The Perfect Victim Is a Dead Woman

PUBLISHED 9/17/2026 by

This is a story about choices that are not really choices. It is a story about impossible circumstances propelling us down pathways we believe unimaginable. You always believe it could never happen to you, until it does.

“Our last encounter was him trying to choke me, and me stabbing him.” Naomi sighs and leans against the passenger seat of my car, ending the story of the night she killed her abuser.

A grand jury indicted her for second-degree murder. A year later, she pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter. Initially facing five to 25 years in prison, her sentence was reduced under New York state’s Domestic Violence Survivor Justice Act to three years’ incarceration, with five years of post-release supervision. Even the District Attorney’s office acknowledged Naomi was a victim of domestic violence, which “was a significant contributing factor” to her behavior.

When the options available to her were kill or be killed, why was she even indicted?

We live in a world that punishes survivors and creates more victims with generous latitude inexplicably afforded to men who have proven themselves dangerous to society. It seems that the only perfect victim is a dead one, a woman who can’t talk back.

Tuesday, Sept. 22 in NYC: A Crucial Conversation on the Future of Feminist Journalism, Hosted by Ms. and Women’s Media Group

PUBLISHED 9/15/2026 by

Ms. magazine and Women’s Media Group will bring together leading journalists, writers and media executives in New York City on Tuesday, Sept. 22, for a timely conversation about the role of feminist journalism, and the power of women’s voices to shape news, culture and public policy.

“Feminist Journalism Today: Continuing the Crucial Conversation About Women’s Voices in Media” will explore where feminist journalism is thriving, which approaches are most effective, the challenges confronting the field and how women in media can steer the national discourse.

Was Mary Oliver a Feminist? 

PUBLISHED 8/29/2026 by

From Pinterest boards to classroom walls, Mary Oliver’s words have become popular in a way that most poets could only dream. People have even gone as far as to call her “Saint Mary.”

But in a new documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, director and producer Sasha Waters presents Oliver with complexity, hoping that more people will read her poetry with the poet behind it in mind.

“I think there’s also this way in which she becomes a little flattened and one-dimensional through the way that she circulates now,” says Waters. “Understanding that she was very much a complicated person and woman until the end of her life is what I hope people take away from her.”

Madonna Is Still Rewriting the Rules For Women in Pop

PUBLISHED 8/18/2026 by

Thousands of fans, writers, nightlife legends and artists walked between the legs of a towering inflatable Madonna last month—a fitting monument to four decades of Madonna’s subversive expression of female sexuality and autonomy. The giant inflatable served as the entrance to Club Confessions at the Knockdown Center, where she celebrated Confessions II, her 15th studio album and sequel to her landmark 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor.

The event followed a summer in which Madonna staged a surprise album launch performance in Times Square; joined Sabrina Carpenter onstage during Carpenter’s headlining Coachella set; and opened the first-ever FIFA World Cup Final halftime show.

Widely regarded as a pioneering voice of women’s sexuality, authorship and autonomy in entertainment, Madonna has paved the way for generations of artists since the 1980s. But the industry moves at a relentless pace, with artists becoming irrelevant after a single album cycle and women in particular expected to endlessly reinvent themselves to remain culturally valuable. Against that backdrop, her newest work radically celebrates her own legacy.

Forty-three years after releasing her debut single, Madonna has fundamentally expanded the possibilities of female autonomy.

Matilda Joslyn Gage: The Most Radical Suffragist Written Out of History Is Still Urgently Relevant

PUBLISHED 8/18/2026 by and

Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the most radical voices of the 19th-century women’s rights movement—and one of the most deliberately forgotten. Alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, she helped build the suffrage movement, but Gage pushed further, challenging not only women’s political exclusion but also patriarchal religion, sexual violence, economic inequality and the erasure of women’s accomplishments from history.

Gage paired those radical ideas with bold action. She protested the 1886 unveiling of the Statue of Liberty because women themselves had no political liberty; refused to pay taxes without representation; and wrote Woman, Church and State, a blistering critique of Christianity’s role in legitimizing women’s subordination. Her willingness to confront institutions other suffragists feared alienating ultimately helped push her out of the movement’s mainstream history.

A century later, Gage’s warnings feel strikingly current. As voting rights, bodily autonomy and the separation of church and state once again come under attack, her insistence that women understand their own history—and see themselves as part of a struggle extending across generations—offers both a warning and a call to action.

Why the Blake Lively Case Matters—and Why Most Women Like Her Have No Legal Recourse

PUBLISHED 7/22/2026 by

According to Blake Lively’s allegations, Justin Baldoni repeatedly discussed his porn addiction and personal sex life, made comments about her body and improvised physical intimacy that had not been choreographed.

Her claims were dismissed, not because a judge found them lacking in merit, but for procedural reasons tied to her independent contractor status under California law. The harassment itself was never adjudicated.

In 2019, in direct response to the #MeToo movement, New York state lowered the bar for what constitutes sexual harassment. Under current New York law, a worker cannot be subjected to inferior terms or conditions of employment because of their sex. Behavior that rises above a petty slight or trivial inconvenience is now actionable.

In my practice, I see the real effects of sexual harassment on women every day. That psychological weight is real and costly. Not only are women jumping from job to job to avoid harassers, but companies are also losing talented employees.

It is time for federal law to catch up, lowering the standard so that harassment that subjects women to inferior terms and conditions of employment is actionable, regardless of which state they work in.

Antiabortion Extremists Can’t Target Abortion Pill Prescribers If They Don’t Know Their Names

PUBLISHED 7/17/2026 by

Four years after the fall of Roe, telemedicine is not just a convenience. For thousands of women, it is the best or only option.

Telemedicine’s success means that antiabortion threats have grown more sophisticated and intense. Pregnancy is statistically the most dangerous time in a violent relationship. Patients seeking abortion care also risk harassment and violence from hostile partners, as well as abortion opponents, and in the worst cases, life-threatening violence. A pill bottle with your name on it is evidence that can be used with threats to expose you to your employer, your family, immigration authorities or a stranger on social media.

We have developed legislation that would better safeguard the privacy of people seeking abortion care by allowing patients and providers to choose not to have their names appear on pill packaging. Our organization is currently working to pass this legislation in several states.

As Dr. Mary Applegate, a public health physician who testified in favor of such a bill in New York, spelled out: Allowing the use of a pseudonym on prescription labels can be a matter of life and death.

Saving Seneca Falls: The U.S. Birthplace of ‘All Men and Women Are Created Equal’ Must Be Preserved

PUBLISHED 7/17/2026 by

A caved-in roof. A crumbling porch. A memorial water wall in need of restoration.

These are just a few areas of the $10 million of deferred maintenance needed at the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y., one of 11 sites on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2026 list of “Most Endangered Historic Places.” The Women’s Rights National Historical Park celebrates the first Women’s Rights Convention, held on July 19 and 20, 1848. Of the 433 parks within the National Park System, only 13 are dedicated to women’s history, making the inclusion of the Women’s Rights park on the “most endangered” list even more imperative. Rather than merely lament a need for restoration, the list, according to the trust, aims to increase “visibility, public attention and new resources to save and activate historic places for the public good.”

The story of suffrage, like so many stories in our nation’s history, is neither uncomplicated nor is it a “single story” that’s “preserved in amber,” insists Miranda Johnson-Haddad, president of the Friends of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park, the non-profit philanthropic group that supports the park. Johnson-Haddad emphasizes that the park’s leadership wants to continue to have “brave conversations about difficult subjects,” including that some suffragists, like Stanton, succumbed to white supremacist thinking—despite being active in the abolition movement—championing the right to vote for white women, but not for Black men and women. No Black women were known to be in attendance at the first Seneca Falls Convention, and only one Black man, Frederick Douglass, signed the declaration.

Still, “these are stories that belong to all of us in all their messiness and complexity,” Johnson-Haddad stresses, “and that can guide us through the current messy complexity.” She cites “Bread and Roses,” a protest song dating back to 1912: “As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days / The rising of the women means the rising of the [human] race.”