More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris did not lose to Donald Trump because they were women; Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows announces run for governor; it’s looking increasingly likely that a woman may be elected in 2026 in Alaska; women will disproportionately feel the effect of Trump’s tariffs; and more.
A few years ago, I went searching for Pauli Murray. By that point, the poet, civil rights activist and pioneering legal scholar had been dead for 35 years. But in researching her life for the book I was working on, I’d learned about the profound impact that her work had had on the very fabric of America and particularly on the country’s legal system. I was convinced that because of everything Murray had done—the extent to which she had shaped movements and laws and lives—she would have to be remembered prominently and publicly. It was probably just my own fault, I reasoned, that I hadn’t previously heard of her.
Like millions of others around the world, I have spent the last few weeks oscillating between fear, anger and sadness as I’ve watched the new U.S. administration neglect the core values of democracy and wreak havoc with the systems that have propped up this country for centuries. With no way of changing the mind of a morally bankrupt megalomaniac, I’m concentrating on what I can do. Since I’ve learned of her remarkable life, I’ve loved telling people about Murray; about the unlikely against-all-odds battles she faced head-on—public wars she waged while simultaneously grappling with her own often-debilitating private troubles. If the federal government chooses to ignore those upon whose shoulders we all stand, those of us who recognize the indignity of this will simply have to make up for it by telling their stories loudly, telling their stories often and then repeating them over and over and over again. It is, after all, what Pauli Murray would do.
An excerpt from King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South:
“Women have been the backbone of the whole civil rights movement,” Coretta Scott King stressed in a 1966 interview with New Lady magazine. The national media, like most politicians and pundits of the time, had trained the spotlight on the male leaders like her husband, missing the many women that had envisioned, led and organized the movements burgeoning around the country. They could not conceive of Coretta Scott King as Martin Luther King’s political partner. She later lamented how she was “made to sound like an attachment to a vacuum cleaner, the wife of Martin, then the widow of Martin, all of which I was proud to be. But I was never just a wife, nor a widow. I was always more than a label.”
Betrayal would be the simplest way to describe the Trump administration’s open disregard for the Department of Education and its Office for Civil Rights.
A betrayal of the department’s initial mission to advance education equity, a betrayal of the vital oversight the department was built to provide, and—perhaps worst of all—a betrayal of the countless students, families, and communities who continue to entrust the department to respect and protect students’ rights and well-being.
Our collective work remains anchored in the powerful vision and strategies we’ve been building for decades. Communities across the country are simultaneously defending vital protections while implementing transformative approaches to schooling that center belonging, equity and student well-being.
The Trump administration is trying to gut the Department of Education and divert funds to charter, private and religious schools that won’t be held accountable. This move threatens the progress we’ve made through civil rights efforts, especially in making schools more integrated and fair. The dismantling of key federal protections and funding will disproportionately hurt low-income students, students with disabilities, and communities already struggling.
We need to stand up, demand better resources for public schools, and refuse to let these harmful changes happen. We’ve fought for this before, and we can do it again.
At a time when civil and reproductive rights are under constant attack, there remains at least one bright light: the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), a relatively new law that grants landmark protections to pregnant and postpartum individuals in the workplace. The PWFA offers protections of which everyone should be aware, especially those who are or ever plan to become pregnant.
Here are four need-to-know elements of the law.
(This essay is a part of Ms. and A Better Balance’s Women & Democracy installment, all about the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act—a groundbreaking civil rights law ensuring pregnant and postpartum workers have the right to reasonable workplace accommodations. Bipartisan, pro-family and boldly feminist, the PWFA is both a lesson in democracy and a battleground for its defense against antidemocratic attacks.)
In late January, Target announced an end to its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program in response to external political pressures and as a preemptive measure to avoid potential legal or financial repercussions under the Trump administration’s executive orders cutting DEI from the federal government.
Now, in the season of Lent, Black faith leaders are calling for a 40-day “fast” from Target, urging people to boycott the retail giant to protest its caving to the federal government’s anti-diversity rhetoric. So far, more than 100,000 shoppers—many involved with Black churches—have joined the pledge to abstain from shopping at Target for 40 days. Target stock is already down 57 percent.
Sixty years after the Selma to Montgomery marches, the lessons of Bloody Sunday remain urgent. The brutal attack on marchers fighting for voting rights in 1965 exposed how laws can be weaponized to uphold inequality—a reality that persists today. From efforts to suppress voting rights to attacks on academic freedom, the struggle for justice continues. As history warns, democracy and the rule of law must be actively defended, not just written on paper.
Republicans’ proposed Medicaid cuts would strip healthcare from millions, including half of U.S. children, one in five Americans, and 40 percent of all pregnant women.
With so much at stake for America’s women and families, representatives in Congress should be working to strengthen and expand Medicaid and the coverage it provides, rather than decimate a program that touches the lives of over two-thirds of this country. The fact that these cuts are even proposed, let alone have passed, is a sign that we are in an unprecedented moment of extremism.
A number of prominent U.S. publishers, including the “Big 5”—Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster and Sourcebooks—along with several best-selling young adult authors, parents, teens and a library district, filed a lawsuit last week against an Idaho bill that restricts access to books accused of inappropriate “sexual content.”
The lawsuit is the latest in an ongoing battle against right-wing book bans, which often target LGBTQ+ content under the guise of “protecting children.”