Racial Justice

For the People: The Case for a Cabinet-Level Department of Democracy

PUBLISHED 6/18/2026 by

For 250 years, women and marginalized communities have fought to expand democracy, yet the institutions of government still were not designed with their full participation in mind. That is why I propose a Department of Democracy: an independent, permanent institution dedicated to protecting voting rights, safeguarding civic participation and holding government accountable to the people it serves.

Just as the federal government maintains departments devoted to national defense and economic stability, it should establish a Department of Democracy with the authority to enforce voting rights protections, monitor threats to democratic participation and ensure every citizen has meaningful access to the ballot box. The goal is not to navigate a flawed system, but to redesign and strengthen democracy so it reflects the people who have always sustained it.

Through a Department of Democracy, we can build a durable safeguard against democratic erosion and create a government that is more representative, responsive and accountable for the next 250 years.

(This is part of a new miniseries FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special Ms. series examining the next chapter of American democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the series explores how women and marginalized communities have shaped democratic progress, what lessons history offers for the challenges ahead, and how a more inclusive, representative and equitable democracy can be built for the next 250 years.)

Join Ms. Magazine and Get Our Landmark FEMINIST 250 Print Issue for This Pivotal Moment in American History

PUBLISHED 6/16/2026 by

As the U.S. prepares to mark its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026, questions loom over the celebration: Whose America gets remembered, whose gets erased—and how do we imagine and build a democracy that includes all of us? 

In the Summer issue of Ms., we revisit the nation’s founding through a feminist lens, reclaiming the stories too often left out of the official narrative: women who challenged the authors of the Declaration of Independence and later the U.S. Constitution for deliberately writing women out of America’s founding documents, Black women who resisted oppression from the start, Indigenous societies built around women-led governance, queer lives in revolutionary America, Asian women’s struggles for belonging and the long fight to make disability visible in our history.

We also look back at 54 years of feminist reporting from the pages of Ms.—proof that the battles for bodily autonomy, equality and democracy did not begin yesterday—and forward to the bold new ideas that could shape a freer, fairer future for the next 250 years.

Get a year of Ms. for just $20 (a 43 percent discount off our usual price) when you join today!

Texas May Eliminate a Critical Tool for Preventing Maternal Deaths

PUBLISHED 6/11/2026 by and

Texas is considering whether to continue one of its most important tools for preventing maternal deaths.

The state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC), which investigates pregnancy-related deaths and identifies ways to prevent them, is currently undergoing Sunset review—a routine process that determines whether state programs will continue operating. If lawmakers fail to reauthorize the committee, Texas will lose a critical source of information about why mothers are dying and what can be done to save lives.

The stakes are especially high for Black women. In Texas, Black women are nearly four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes. Texas’ maternal mortality rate also exceeds the national average, and approximately 80 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are considered preventable.

As public health researchers who have studied women’s health and health disparities in Texas for decades, we know that meaningful progress depends on understanding what is driving these deaths and holding systems accountable for addressing them.

Maternal mortality review committees are one of the most effective tools states have for doing exactly that.

My Women’s Studies Department Is Closing. The Need for Feminist History Isn’t.

PUBLISHED 6/9/2026 by

In August, the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin will close. I joined the department last year after leaving the University of Iowa’s Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies department, which also closed this year. As programs in women’s studies, ethnic studies and Black studies disappear across the country, I’ve found myself reflecting on how I became a feminist historian—and why this work matters now more than ever.

Back in 2005, as an undergraduate student at San Francisco State University, I took a course on feminist activists and read Angela Davis’ Women, Race, and Class. Davis argued that the experiences of Black women could only be understood through the intersecting forces of race, gender and class—and that confronting racism, misogyny and poverty was essential to liberation. From that moment, I knew a feminist view of history could transform how I understood present-day inequality and how I wanted to teach those ideas to future students.

For years, I brought that framework into the classroom, helping students connect the histories of voting rights, reproductive justice, racial discrimination and gendered violence to the challenges they see unfolding around them today. As feminist studies and ethnic studies programs come under increasing attack, I remain convinced that this work is indispensable. Nearly 45 years after Davis historicized the triad of women, race and class, we still need that critical lens to understand our world—and to defend human dignity and justice within it.

What Do Most Female Prisoners Have in Common? They Are Actually Victims.

PUBLISHED 6/8/2026 by

When I first began reporting on incarcerated women, I was fascinated by studies that showed that showed that upwards of 70 percent of women in jails and prisons were subjected to intimate partner violence before they were incarcerated.

But as I covered more stories on the topic, I started to see that, more disturbingly, many women I interviewed had been incarcerated because they responded to violence perpetuated against them.

Again and again in my research, I came upon cases in which a woman claimed that she had acted in self-defense, or had followed orders from an abuser because she didn’t want to die, or had protected a loved one — and she was subsequently charged with murder, convicted, and locked away, sometimes for life. This is the little-known phenomenon termed “criminalized survival.” I wanted to understand how common it was.

A (Brief) History of Women’s Rights, 1600 to Present

PUBLISHED 6/3/2026 by and

From the Haudenosaunee women who successfully challenged warfare in the 17th century, to today’s feminist organizers defending democracy, reproductive freedom and civil rights, the struggle for women’s equality has never been a straight line. It is a story of persistence, resistance and collective action spanning centuries.

Compiled by editors at Ms. and researchers from the National Women’s History Alliance, this women’s history timeline traces the interconnected histories of feminism, abolition, labor organizing, civil rights, reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ liberation and democratic participation.

No timeline can fully capture more than 400 years of feminist history, let alone every movement, leader, victory and setback that has shaped the ongoing fight for equality. Rather than offering a comprehensive account, this chronology highlights pivotal moments and turning points that help tell the story of how women have expanded the boundaries of freedom, democracy and human rights in the United States and beyond.

The timeline is part of Ms. magazine’s FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists project, a multimedia essay series marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by examining the women and feminist movements that have worked to make the nation’s founding promises more fully realized. Through reported features, essays, interviews and historical analysis, FEMINIST 250 explores not only where we have been, but where we must go next to achieve true equality.

FEMINIST 250’s Parts 2 and 3—Feminist Lessons and Feminist Futures—drop this month on MsMagazine.com.

Black Women Political Candidates Are Expected to Be ‘Likable,’ Qualified and Tireless. Men Aren’t.

PUBLISHED 5/28/2026 by

What I experienced during my 2014 run for office wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to me.

The year before, I had run for president of the Young Democrats of America (YDA), a national political party office role, against a popular opponent. The opponent was a Black man, so race wasn’t a factor in the election; however, gender was.

Before my campaign, I was vice president of YDA and had heard only good things about my service: my fundraising efforts, the partnerships I had engineered with progressive organizations, and programming coordination for the membership. However, when I decided to run for president, I instantly became ‘difficult to work with’ and ‘mean.’

Research on women candidates confirms that voters are less likely to vote for a woman if they don’t like her; by comparison, voters don’t need to like men to elect them. But when I was running as the Black woman candidate in a seven-candidate primary for public office, with two other women in the race, I noticed almost nothing about my being ‘difficult’ and more about my ability and work ethic.

My experience running for public office reflected the systemic bias and double standards not just for women candidates, but Black women candidates who dare to aspire to any sort of political leadership—and that needed to change.

We need more progressive Black women in public office for a myriad reasons, but we also specifically need the younger generation of Instigators in office, candidates who understand the times in which we live currently.

Electing more Black women will take real investment in changing the biases and attitudes (conscious and unconscious) of mostly white donors, media, campaign staff, consultants and institutional leaders to help shift the culture and systems. But this support needs to be substantively increased so that we can rebuild an inclusive, multiracial democracy with the leaders we want and need.

(Excerpted from The Instigators: How Black Women Have Been Essential to American Democracy by Atima Omara.)

The Frisco Test: What Happened in One Texas Suburb Signals a National Shift

PUBLISHED 5/21/2026 by

Earlier this month, an Indian slate ran for Frisco City Council and school board: Sreekanth Reddy, Vijay Karthik and others. Every one of them lost.

As it turns out, in America, you can be the most educated demographic in America and still watch a sitting member of Congress call your religious traditions “Third World.” You can have a $151,200 median household income and still feel unsafe wearing your cultural clothing in public. You can have a vice president whose wife is Indian American and watch the president repost a podcaster who calls your country of origin a hellhole.

The achievement is real. The immunity it was supposed to purchase is gone.

Political scientists describe three options for a dissatisfied constituency: Exit, voice or loyalty. Indian Americans are exercising none of them cleanly. They are not leaving—37 percent have never considered it. They are not organizing. Their attachment to either party is measurably eroding.

What they are doing is waiting: making individual calculations, reading the room, finding both parties wanting. When a diaspora adapts individually rather than responds collectively, both parties get to pretend the problem does not exist.

Five million people with nowhere to go is not a problem for Indian Americans. It is an opportunity for whoever figures out how to meet them where they are. So far, at the national level, nobody has shown up.

‘The South Belongs to Us’: Voices, Signs and Scenes From Montgomery’s Voting Rights Rally

PUBLISHED 5/19/2026 by

On the morning of Saturday, May 16, in Selma, Alabama, activists and organizers gathered near the Edmund Pettus Bridge before traveling to Montgomery for the “All Roads Lead to the South” national day of action protesting attacks on voting rights and Black political representation across the South.

The chants echoed through downtown Montgomery: “The power is with the people.” “We won’t go back.”

After Voting Rights Advocates Rally in Montgomery, Republicans Turn Their Sights on Southern Poverty Law Center

PUBLISHED 5/19/2026 by | UPDATED 5/20/2026 at 7:33 A.M. PT

Civil rights organizations are sounding the alarm ahead of a May 20 House Judiciary Committee hearing targeting the Southern Poverty Law Center, warning that the proceeding is part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans to weaponize the federal government against dissenting voices and nonprofit watchdog groups. The hearing is at Wednesday at 10 a.m. ET.

“Congressional Republicans are aiding and abetting the Department of Justice’s campaign of retribution against civil rights organizations and anyone who dares disagree with them,” said Fatima Goss Graves, board chair of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, warning the hearing will be “a spectacle designed to further harm an organization that has spent 50 years tracking hate groups, infiltrating extremist networks, and dismantling violent white supremacist organizations.”

The hearing also comes just days after thousands of voting rights advocates gathered in Montgomery, Ala.—the same city where the SPLC is headquartered—on Saturday, May 16, for the “All Roads Lead to the South” national day of action.