More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Abortion does not harm women’s mental health: Ninety-five percent of women who had an abortion say it was the right decision for them five years later, according to the Turnaway Study, groundbreaking research that documented the outcomes for women who received and were denied an abortion.
“Our failure as a society to acknowledge the sacrifice that pregnant people make when they have a baby is misogyny, ignorance and misogyny,” said Diana Greene Foster, the study’s lead researcher.
Award-winning multimedia journalist Maya Golden’s searing but redemptive memoir, The Return Trip, takes readers on a harrowing journey. The book offers a no-holds-barred look into the sexual abuse that began when Golden was 5 and charts her course through a troubled adolescence and young adulthood. Along the way, she probes the long-term impact of repeated sexual violation and zeroes in on the ways religious institutions, educational systems, and familial denial continue to intersect and allow the perpetuation of violence.
Golden spoke to Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader before The Return Trip’s Nov. 14 release. Their wide-ranging conversation touched on the book as well as the work of the 1 in 3 Foundation, a group Golden founded to support survivors of sexual assault.
Both Elisa Lees Muñoz and Cindi Leive have built their decades-long careers creating and uplifting reporting by and for women. In this back-and-forth conversation, the two journalists discuss the risks women in the news face, the importance of women-centered and feminist reporting, and how we can best protect press freedom.
(This essay is part of the “Feminist Journalism is Essential to Democracy” project—Ms. magazine’s latest installment of Women & Democracy, presented in partnership with the International Women’s Media Foundation.)
CNN Newsroom anchor Fredricka Whitfield has a lot to be proud of. As the 2023 Women’s Media Center’s Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Whitfield’s three-plus decades as a radio and television journalist have included stints across the country, where she has covered both domestic and international issues.
Eleanor J. Bader sat down with Whitfield to learn more about her incredible story.
“My work honors the people on whose shoulders I stand. I know that I have not had it as difficult as my parents or predecessors. They had to endure so much to create the path I walk. I refuse to be deterred. I’m mindful that even on my toughest days I have it better than the people who came before me.”
When I heard the title of Elizabeth Silver’s new book, The Majority, I knew the lone word in the title held layers of resonance.
The novel’s main character is reminiscent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or “The Notorious RBG,” and the reader follows her arduous, yet steady, ascending legal career. The novel reveals an intergenerational weave of feminists still trying—sometimes in impossibly constricted ways—to break down doors, laws and spaces to effect change. In this book, we see a composite of personal and professional challenges that reflect the path of one character but represent so much more beyond just her.
This fall, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in U.S. v. Rahimi, a case about a Texas law that prevents individuals subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. In a country where an abuser’s access to a firearm makes it five times more likely that he will kill his victim, where gun ownership continues to increase and where domestic violence and mass shootings are fundamentally entwined, a ruling overturning the Texas law (and making similar laws impermissible) would be disastrous.
“I believe America stands for the proposition that you can walk down the street and not get shot,” Kris Brown, president of Brady United Against Gun Violence, told Ms. “And I’ll never stop fighting for that.”
“Cultivating the dignity of one woman is what continues to drive me,” said Megha Desai, president of the Desai Foundation, which leverages menstrual education for the empowerment of women in India.
“Bessie was not raised to be a beauty queen,” said Bessie novelist Linda Kass of Bess Myerson, the only Jewish Miss America. “She sought to have a voice, to make a difference.
“Antisemitism, racism and sexism were virulent, and homophobia was taken as a given. The arguments voiced then are similar to what we’re hearing and seeing today.”
In colleges and universities across the U.S., right-wing donors endow “chairs” and departments, set up free-market boosting thinktanks, and get themselves on college boards, to ensure that progressive influences are limited, if not outright eliminated.
“Koch Industries and the entire Koch network are willing to fund projects for many years. They understand the importance of deep investment. The progressive sector needs progressive funders who are willing to mirror the philanthropy of the right.,” said Jasmine Banks, executive director of UnKoch My Campus, a national organization devoted to disrupting hidden corporate influence on U.S. college campuses.
The movement for gender equality has been sustained by a steady drumbeat of activists and leaders pushing for progress and fighting side by side. It is powerful when these feminist leaders take time to reflect together on the lessons, the losses, the wins, and the road ahead. This conversation between Gloria Feldt and Kathy Spillar offers just that.
Feldt and Spillar, along with hundreds of other feminists, will convene on Women’s Equality Day—Saturday, Aug. 26—for the Take The Lead Conference at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center in Los Angeles. The program will be dedicated to sharing solutions to help the U.S. reach intersectional gender parity in leadership—at work, in politics, and in life.
