Three recent developments reveal how private equity—and Cerberus Capital Management in particular—has gained influence inside the Trump administration’s Pentagon, from defense leadership to procurement to a new $200 billion investment initiative.
Donald Trump and the Trump Administration
The History of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1600 to Present
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.
War on Women Report: Abortion Access, Academic Freedom and Trans Rights Under Fire
MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide—the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.” We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.
Since our last report:
—President Trump lost his latest appeal effort against paying New York writer E. Jean Carroll an $83.3 million defamation judgment.
—The government is using family separation as an antiabortion tactic via Child Protective Services.
—The House passed HR 2616, the so-called Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act, with support from eight Democrats; if enacted, the bill would bar federally funded public elementary and middle schools from acknowledging transgender students and require educators to notify parents if a student identifies as transgender at school.
—A reminder: People can order abortion pills from all 50 states, no matter what the courts decide.
… and more.
Buckle Up, the Primaries Are Coming: From New Mexico to California, Women’s Representation Is on the Ballot
Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment!
This week:
—June primary contests will take place in 18 states.
—Concerning trends are taking place for women’s representation in New Jersey.
—The American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall is at risk.
—All 15 men in Donald Trump’s original Cabinet remain, but four of its seven original women are now left.
… and more.
Your Tax Dollars Are Funding the Trump Administration’s Patriarchal Family Agenda
“One in three Americans are under-babied,” declared Trump’s Medicare and Medicaid chief Dr. Mehmet Oz last week, echoing JD Vance’s contempt for “childless cat ladies.”
Guided by evangelical supporters, the Trump administration is eroding longstanding civil rights protections, restricting access to contraception and abortion, and weakening support systems for single mothers and their children. The goal is clear: to pressure women into marriage and motherhood while making the patriarchal family the center of American life.
The administration’s policies closely track the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, which seeks to incentivize what it calls “natural marriage”—a heterosexual household with a breadwinner father, stay-at-home mother and biologically related children.
Meanwhile, the administration’s new Moms.Gov website directs pregnant women to antiabortion organizations that that have been widely criticized for their misleading information about options and for their collection of patients’ sensitive personal information.
Taxpayer dollars are increasingly being used to advance a vision of society rooted in patriarchal family structures and reproductive coercion.
Three Ways Trump’s Weird Fixation on DEI Is Hurting Women
The Trump administration’s obsession with diversity, equity and inclusion has moved far beyond rhetoric. It is now reshaping how women’s stories get told, whose health crises are allowed to be named, and what kinds of research are permitted to survive.
Across history, healthcare and science, women are watching decades of hard-fought progress become collateral damage in a culture war designed to erase people in real time.
That damage is already visible.
Republicans derailed long-awaited progress on the American Women’s History Museum by inserting provisions policing which women count as women and handing Trump appointees sweeping control over the museum itself.
Meanwhile, the newly reintroduced Momnibus legislation—created in response to the maternal mortality crisis devastating Black women and families—has been forced to strip much of the word “Black” from its language in order to survive politically under an administration openly hostile to DEI initiatives.
And the consequences are not abstract: NIH grants focused on women’s health have reportedly dropped by 30 percent, while words like “women” and “gender” themselves are becoming liabilities in funding proposals.
Women’s health was already chronically underfunded and misunderstood long before Trump returned to office. But the administration’s escalating war on DEI is accelerating that neglect—and making clear just how much is at stake when political ideology begins dictating whose lives deserve to be studied, protected and remembered.
The Trump Administration Isn’t Just Ignoring Violence Against Abortion Clinics—It Wants to Fund It
The numbers are staggering: Between 2024 and 2025, death threats against abortion providers more than doubled. Stalking incidents more than doubled. Clinic blockades surged by 500 percent. There were four arsons. A planned assassination attempt against a Montana provider. And in the background of all of it, a federal government that has made unmistakably clear whose side it’s on.
Now, in an unprecedented move, the Trump Administration may be about to start writing checks to fund violent extremists. As part of a settlement to resolve his $10 billion lawsuit against his own Department of the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” The Fund is framed as compensation for people who claim they were targeted by politically motivated prosecutions under previous administrations, excluding Republican administrations.
Where to Watch ‘Ask E. Jean,’ a New Documentary on the Wit, Fury and Fearlessness of E. Jean Carroll
E. Jean Carroll—the colorful author and advice columnist who beat Donald Trump in court twice—is finally getting the documentary treatment in Ask E. Jean, a film that is as poignant as it is entertaining.
Director Ivy Meeropol first reached out to Carroll after reading the devastating yet vibrant New York Magazine piece in which Carroll accused Trump of raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room decades earlier.
Carroll’s initial response: “I’d rather eat my shoe.”
But Meeropol persisted, eventually convincing Carroll she wanted to tell the fuller story of her life—not just the trials, but her remarkable rise during the heyday of glossy magazines and New York media culture.
The resulting film traces Carroll’s evolution from Indiana cheerleader to professionally fabulous Manhattan raconteur, weaving together archival footage, legal depositions and deeply personal interviews.
Some of the documentary’s most powerful moments come from previously unseen deposition footage, where Carroll recounts the 1996 assault while enduring invasive questioning from Trump attorney Alina Habba. Even in those moments, Carroll remains irrepressibly funny.
Meeropol says the footage reveals “what really happens when someone who’s brought a charge of rape or sexual abuse is deposed,” while also exposing the broader misogyny women confront “from the minute we’re born.”
Meeropol also describes struggling against “The Trump Effect”—fear within the entertainment industry about supporting projects that could provoke retaliation from Trump or his allies. Distributors hesitated, some producers reportedly asked not to be credited, and the film was repeatedly stalled despite strong festival reviews.
But Ask E. Jean is now expanding into theaters nationwide, bringing Carroll’s story to audiences at a moment when the politics of gender, power and public accountability remain impossible to ignore.
Women’s Health Is a Democracy Issue—and a Midterm One
It is critically important to keep reproductive health and the chaos at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) front and center in the headlines. Why? Two words: midterm elections.
Last week, within 48 hours of each other the Supreme Court issued an emergency stay pausing the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to let Louisiana negate the FDA rule that allows telehealth provision and mail delivery of mifepristone, and FDA commissioner Marty Makary announced his immediate resignation after rumors that President Trump was planning to fire him.
Though Makary’s antipathy toward deregulation of flavored vapes appears to have triggered his fall from grace, and the rest of the chaos is perhaps business as usual, the Trump administration’s tip-toe approach to mifepristone is the real story.
The Justice Department’s litigation approach seemingly has been to wait until October when the FDA’s so-called “safety review” is due—ordered despite the mountain of evidence proving mifepristone’s safety and efficacy. But reports indicate that study has not even begun and is mired in data delays caused by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Foot-dragging? Finger-pointing? Old-fashioned incompetence? Who can tell anymore. But it surely hews to Republicans’ favor to keep the entire endeavor out of public sight, given that the vast majority (68 percent) of adults in this country oppose banning mifepristone.
The Frisco Test: What Happened in One Texas Suburb Signals a National Shift
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.