More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The Senate confirmed Cecilia Rouse as chair of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers—the first Black leader of CEA and the fourth woman in 75 years.
“I went into economics because I wanted to use the tools of economics to generate positive social change,” Rouse said. “I love asking questions and turning to data to use evidence to understand the world, and challenge my own understanding of it.”
Now, we celebrate the women that came before us, fought for voting rights, expanded opportunities for women, and broke political, education and social barriers. At the time their contemporaries often criticized these women for being too ambitious.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm will be getting to work immediately, helping President Biden carry out his ambitious green energy plan, which proposes to spend $2 trillion over four years on clean energy projects and end carbon emissions from power plants by 2035.
When President Biden announced Linda Thomas-Greenfield as his pick for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, he lauded her as a “seasoned and distinguished diplomat with 35 years in the foreign service who never forgot where she came from growing up in segregated Louisiana.”
On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed Thomas-Greenfield by a vote of 78-20, marking a return to a career of foreign service where she excels.
Every Friday, Ms. executive editor Kathy Spillar breaks down the week’s biggest stories, offering commentary. This weekly letter from the editor recaps critical developments in U.S. and global feminism—alongside the latest Ms. must-reads—right as they unfold.
A sexist storm of double standards and hypocrisy is brewing, with Office of Budget and Management (OMB) nominee Neera Tanden at the center, putting her confirmation to lead the government agency in serious jeopardy.
Rep. Marcia Fudge, 58, says it is “an honor and a privilege” to be asked to join President Biden’s Cabinet. If confirmed, Fudge will follow in the footsteps of her Delta sorority sister, Patricia Roberts Harris, the first Black woman to lead HUD under the Carter administration.
Many of the women President Biden has nominated into various federal positions in his record-breaking administration have yet to be confirmed—including the three women Biden has picked to lead core elements of the Department of Justice: Kristen Clarke, Vanita Gupta and Lisa Monaco.
If confirmed, Deb Haaland will become the nation’s most powerful Native American leader in our 243-year history. She will lead the Department of the Interior, the very department “whose centuries of broken promises and benign neglect has contributed to the slow erosion of Indigenous culture.”
When our leaders believe that there is no longer a gender representation problem because we’ve elected “more women than ever before” or “we have a woman vice president,” they fail to contemplate the nuanced failures that lack representation of Black women in the U.S. Senate and AAPI women in the core 15 executive agencies represent.
