Women in Journalism

The History of the Women’s Rights Movement, 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.

Where to Watch ‘Ask E. Jean,’ a New Documentary on the Wit, Fury and Fearlessness of E. Jean Carroll

PUBLISHED 5/23/2026 by | UPDATED 5/29/2026 at 7:39 A.M. PT

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.

May 21 Virtual Event: Tackling Patriarchy and Power (With Anna Malaika Tubbs, Aisha Becker-Burrowes and Danielle Robay)

PUBLISHED 5/20/2026 by

The Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. have partnered with Women’s Foundation California to invite you to a national virtual conversation with Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs that turns our attention toward the system that has kept us from achieving true democracy for the last 250 years: patriarchy. 

Drawing from her latest book (and New York Times best-seller) Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us, Tubbs traces the ruthless logic that has organized American life for 250 years—always bound to race, always rooted in a binary that decides who counts and who does not.

The event is Thursday, May 21, 2026 at 5:30 p.m. PT / 7:30 CT / 8:30 ET. RSVP today!

Tubbs will be joined in conversation by Aisha Becker-Burrowes, co-founder and co-executive director of FEMINIST—a nonprofit media company serving a global community of over 6 million—and interviewed by TV host, journalist and content creator, Danielle Robay.

To the Men Who Send Women Hate Mail

PUBLISHED 5/15/2026 by

I am not alone in receiving unsolicited emails—especially as a professor, public writer and thinker, and woman who dares to speak her mind. Often, the emails are thoughtful, engaging and sometimes deeply moving expressions of gratitude that warm the heart. However, from time to time, there are the crude, crass and obtuse intruders, thrusting insults and even threats into our inboxes. These expressions of masculine fragility and anger—whether intended to or not—chill the receiver’s speech and cause women to silence themselves.  

Here, then, is my response to Mr. Sawyer—but also, in many ways, a response to the countless men who insert themselves into women’s inboxes with condescension, hostility and misplaced certainty. Women in public life know these messages well: the unsolicited lectures, the attempts at intimidation, the casual cruelty masquerading as critique. Consider this every woman’s letter to the crass and crude male intruder in her inbox. I hope you enjoy.

Keeping Score: Supreme Court Blow to Voting Rights Will ‘Silence Our Voices’; Conservative Judges Try to Restrict Mifepristone; Moms Worry About Putting Food on the Table

PUBLISHED 5/14/2026 by | UPDATED 5/22/2026 at 9:28 A.M. PT

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, slashing protections against racially discriminatory voting laws.
—A record high amount of books were censored from libraries in 2025, often due to LGBTQ characters or plotlines addressing racism.
—A third of moms living on low incomes have gone into debt or skipped meals so their kids could eat.
—Just 22 percent of American voters have significant confidence in the Supreme Court.
—In 2025 the number of abortions in the U.S. remained stable, but more patients in states with bans turned to telehealth services instead of traveling out of state.
—The Department of Justice announced plans to expand the use of the federal death penalty.
—An Epstein-Maxwell survivor, who asked to remain anonymous, laments, “I kept my identity protected as Jane Doe. I woke up one day with my name mentioned over 500 times. While the rich and powerful remain protected by redaction, my name was exposed to the world.”
—The Trump administration launched a Moms.gov site on Mother’s Day that refers pregnant people to unregulated crisis pregnancy centers.
—A Ms. piece on solitary confinement by Kwaneta Harris and her daughter Summer Knight won Kwaneta second place in the Collaboration category of the Stillwater Awards for prison journalism.
—Liberation, a play about 1970s feminism by Bess Wohl, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. Wohl was inspired by her own life: Her mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, was an early Ms. contributor.

… and more.

Banned From Talking About Third-Trimester Abortion Care at a Texas Medical School: The Ms. Q&A with Dr. Shelley Sella

PUBLISHED 4/23/2026 by

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) cancelled Dr. Shelley Sella’s scheduled campus talk in January about her recent book Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care, which she had been invited to give by the Texas Tech chapter of Medical Students for Choice (MSFC) in collaboration with MSFC’s Board of Directors. The administration told right-wing outlet Texas Scorecard that it decided hosting her was “not in the best interest of the university.” The decision to ban Sella from campus was made after days of coordinated activism by the Turning Point USA chapter at Texas Tech in conjunction with two antiabortion activists: Mark Lee Dickson and Jim Baxa. 

The cancellation of Sella’s talk was not “an anomaly,” as Jessica Valenti of Abortion, Every Day writes, but part and parcel of the “antiabortion snitch culture” on college campuses—”part of the broader conservative attack on academia that’s gained steam over the last few years.”

“And it’s not just impacting a few schools or professors,” Valenti continues. “Antiabortion groups are determined to eradicate any iota of pro-choice speech on college campuses. Now is the time for us to make as much noise as possible and not back off one single inch.”

Taking seriously Valenti’s call to “make noise” rather than retreat in the face of escalating efforts to suppress pro-abortion speech, Ms. sat down with both Sella and Claire Surkis, a medical student in Connecticut who serves on MSFC’s Board of Directors, to explore the impact and implications of the university’s actions.

When Reporting Becomes a Crime: Georgia Fort on Her Arrest, Press Freedom and Black Media Representation

PUBLISHED 4/21/2026 by

The press release in Emmy-award winning journalist Georgia Fort’s inbox was vague, stating only that an event to honor Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s memory would be taking place Jan. 18 and asking people to assemble at 10 a.m.

Fort joined protesters in a car caravan that ended up at Cities Church in St. Paul. The site, she learned, had been selected because one of the church’s pastors, Rev. David Easterwood, was rumored to be working as the acting head of a local office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Fort, with camera and mic in hand, recorded everything that was taking place and live-streamed the action as it was unfolding—a routine part of her work as an independent TV and radio journalist. 

On Jan. 30, she was arrested (along with seven others including former CNN reporter Don Lemon) and charged with “conspiracy to deprive the church’s congregants of the right to worship.”

She spoke to Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader in mid-April about her work as a multimedia reporter, mentor for Black and brown youth, and critic of the government’s “strategic attack” on press freedom.

“About two dozen federal agents, including personnel from the Drug Enforcement Agency, arrived around 6 a.m. and pounded on the door to my home. … They were really aggressive. … My 17-year-old has been having nightmares, and my 8-year-old cries every day.”

‘First They Came for My College’: The Takeover of a Florida College and the Students Who Refused to Disappear

PUBLISHED 4/9/2026 by

When I told coworkers and friends I was going to see a documentary about the right-wing takeover of a small public Florida college, the reaction was immediate and unanimous: Why would you do that to yourself? Too depressing. I’d be too angry.

They weren’t wrong. Premiering at SXSW last month and directed by Patrick Bresnan, First They Came for My College is, at times, almost unbearable to watch—a slow, procedural dismantling of a public institution, carried out in meeting rooms and press conferences and budget lines.

But what stayed with me wasn’t only the anger—it was the stubborn, surprising insistence on community, joy and showing up anyway.

In Iran, Iraq and the U.S., Women Speak Out Against State Repression

PUBLISHED 4/4/2026 by | UPDATED 4/7/2026 at 12:13 P.M. PT

Internationally acclaimed Iranian human rights attorney and women’s rights advocate Nasrin Sotoudeh has been arrested by the Iranian regime. Her whereabouts are currently unknown. Our hearts are with Sotoudeh and her family, including her husband Reza Khandan, who has been detained in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison since December 2024 for supporting her work for women’s equality.

Meanwhile in Baghdad, an American freelance journalist has been kidnapped. Shelly Kittleson, who had built her freelance career reporting from the Middle East for years, is known among colleagues for her determined, on-the-ground reporting and willingness to go where others would not. On Tuesday, she was taken by two unknown men, after learning of threats to her safety from militias. 

Time and time again, it is women who speak out in the face of state repression—whether they are doing so as journalists speaking truth to power, lawyers fighting for the rights of the oppressed, or everyday women taking to the streets in defiance of regimes that seek to strip them of their autonomy and human rights.

I Want to Be Obsolete. Instead, I’m Afraid to Teach.

PUBLISHED 4/3/2026 by

I want to be obsolete. I want to walk into a classroom full of students excited to learn feminist histories and begin by marveling at how far we’ve come—how unthinkable it now feels that a president once demeaned women, faced dozens of credible accusations of sexual violence, and still rose to the highest office in the country. I want that version of this story to feel distant, resolved, finished.

Instead, I walk into my gender, women and sexuality studies classes scanning for signs of hostility—wondering who might be recording, who might be there to report me, who might see my teaching not as scholarship but as something to punish.

Teaching about marginalized communities, especially through a feminist, anti-racist lens, now carries real risk: of being surveilled, doxxed, harassed or silenced. Books are banned, curricula are targeted, and the very act of naming systems of power is treated as a threat.

And yet, I keep teaching. I keep showing students that what they are experiencing is not individual failure but the result of structural forces—and that those forces can be challenged. I tell them their voices matter, their rage is justified, and their histories deserve to be known.

I would rather be obsolete. But as long as these attacks persist, our work is far from done.