Women Writers

Find books written by women, largely about women and other underrepresented communities.

‘The Story Is Not Finished’: Robin Morgan, Feminist Pioneer and Former Ms. Editor in Chief, in Her Very Last Interview

PUBLISHED 10/8/2026 by

I had the privilege of interviewing Robin Morgan this summer. It turned out to be her last ever interview, as it was only a few weeks for her death.

On a hot afternoon in August, I arrived at Morgan’s New York home, situated on a tree-lined block. “Come in, come in!” she exclaimed, gesturing with her hands from her front door.

Then there were the rows upon rows of books lining nearly every wall, all neatly organized. There were no nooks and crannies in Morgan’s apartment, only books. “I wish I’d written more,” she said to me quietly, looking at her overstuffed shelves. “I should have written more. I know I’ll be on my deathbed thinking, ‘I should have written more.’”

As we walked outside, she smiled and gestured at the true source of her pride: her garden. I marveled at the lush greenery and took great pleasure sitting under the shade of a large, ancient-looking linden tree while listening to the gentle bubbling of a small water fountain.

“I used to sleep out here,” Morgan said, pointing to a reclining day bed and smiling wistfully. Parkinson’s disease had reshaped her body, her speech, the ability to travel freely and her relationships. She was trying to “make something of the disease, rather than what it would make of me.”

Her formal politicization, not surprisingly, was rooted in the liberal left—and then it was not. The left, like all ideological political groups in those days, was male dominated. She joined leftist movements believing in shared liberation and thinking the genders “were marching together toward freedom and we were all equal—but we weren’t,” she said.

“The women were doing all the shit work, and the men were running around being leaders and heroes. It made me furious.” Her fury lit a spark under her and she wrote “Goodbye to All That,” a direct name-naming attack on the male left.

You Deserve Better Menopause Care. Here’s How to Demand It.

PUBLISHED 10/5/2026 by

“As women we have become way too comfortable with suffering,” said menopause expert Dr. Sharon Malone, MD, at a New York City book launch event for Jennifer Weiss-Wolf’s When in Menopause. “Menopause is just the last on the long train of suffering stops we’ve had.”

Weiss-Wolf’s new book makes the case for changing that, from demanding better care in the doctor’s office to fighting for policies that take women’s health seriously. As she put it during the conversation: “We’re saying we demand to be seen. We demand to be heard.”

In the following excerpt, Weiss-Wolf offers practical guidance for becoming your own best champion and receiving informed, respectful midlife healthcare.

When in Menopause: A User’s Manual and Citizen’s Guide is out Tuesday, Oct. 6, from Sheldon Press.

October 2026 Reads for the Rest of Us

PUBLISHED 10/2/2026 by

Each month, Ms. provides readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.

I love autumn in the Midwest. It’s cooler, the leaves are turning and change is in the air. I also love reading horror and watching scary movies at this time of year, so you know I’ve included a couple spooky stories this month—and a couple nonfiction titles I think are particularly terrifying.

There’s memoir and history, stories and essays. Even the scariest are packaged in lovingly written prose that educates and entertains. And there’s a first: I don’t think I’ve ever featured the new releases of both a mother and a daughter in a single month. So there’s that. 

With further ado, here are the 13 titles I’ve chosen for the month. Read, reflect, learn, enjoy, resist and repeat.

In ‘Lotus Leadership,’ Kamini Ramani Explores What Immigrant Daughters Owe the Mothers Who Taught Them to Be Strong but Quiet

PUBLISHED 9/25/2026 by

Before any of it, there was a girl on a bus. Kamini Ramani grew up in Bombay, trudging through knee-deep monsoon water to board the Number 122 red double-decker while watching for men who would try to grope girls in the crowd. She was also raised on stories about goddesses—fearsome women who fought back.

Ramani is clear about what came with those stories: pressure to achieve, expectations that women be humble and meek, and rules about whom they could marry or love. Every Indian daughter is handed two things at once: goddesses who fight back, and a warning never to be one of them. Her new book, *Lotus Leadership*, treats the two as separable.

In the interviews I’ve done for this series and for a book of my own, the story that surfaces is often about a mother: whether she made a single refusal or still resents that she never did. Either way, the daughter is the one who finds out what it was worth—and which parts of that inheritance she wants to carry forward.

(This piece is part of an ongoing series, Redefining Power: How Indian American Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Leadership, Identity and Care. The series explores what it means to modernize without losing our roots—through candid conversations with Indian American women reshaping culture, power and possibility.)

Amid Reproductive Rights Rollbacks, a New USPS Stamp Honors Sarah Orne Jewett, Who Imagined Lives for Women Beyond Marriage

PUBLISHED 9/24/2026 by

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) issued a new stamp late last month honoring 19th-century writer Sarah Orne Jewett—putting a woman whose work centered on female independence and unconventional lives, into mailboxes and collection books across the country.

The stamp, the 35th in USPS’ Literary Arts series, was unveiled in Jewett’s hometown of South Berwick, Maine. Its portrait of Jewett appears against the Maine coast, a reference to her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs. USPS says renewed interest in Jewett’s writing has been driven partly by her strong female characters.

In 2025, Ms. selected Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade, edited by Karen Weingarten, as one of the most anticipated feminist books of the year. The published collection brings together literature documenting abortion before Roe v. Wade, including an excerpt from Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs.

Jewett never explicitly writes the word “abortion” in the published passage. Instead, one of the novel’s central characters, Mrs. Todd, is an herbalist who gathers plants and receives women who arrive privately at her door seeking remedies and whispered instructions. Weingarten said she included the passage because abortion exists in its subtext, reflecting a period when reproductive knowledge could be encoded in language about women’s networks of care.

That history makes the timing of Jewett’s stamp particularly striking. More than four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion remains banned outright in 13 states, with additional states enforcing early gestational limits. Battles over reproductive healthcare continue at both the state and federal levels—from access to medication abortion, to funding for family-planning services.

Jewett’s face is now traveling through a postal system caught up in that debate, across a country still contesting reproductive freedom. The stamp itself makes no claim about voting or reproductive rights. But there is something notable about a federal institution commemorating a woman whose work has become part of the literary history of abortion at the same moment reproductive autonomy is again being fiercely contested.

Tuesday, Sept. 22 in NYC: A Crucial Conversation on the Future of Feminist Journalism, Hosted by Ms. and Women’s Media Group

PUBLISHED 9/15/2026 by

Ms. magazine and Women’s Media Group will bring together leading journalists, writers and media executives in New York City on Tuesday, Sept. 22, for a timely conversation about the role of feminist journalism, and the power of women’s voices to shape news, culture and public policy.

“Feminist Journalism Today: Continuing the Crucial Conversation About Women’s Voices in Media” will explore where feminist journalism is thriving, which approaches are most effective, the challenges confronting the field and how women in media can steer the national discourse.

Who Should Decide Whether a Patient Needs an Abortion: A Doctor or an Opinion Columnist?

PUBLISHED 9/8/2026 by

In case you missed it, a Washington Post columnist published an op-ed late last month that can only be described as a whine-weary litany of complaints about blue states’ targeting of crisis pregnancy centers (its headline, “In Massachusetts, ‘reproductive freedom’ goes only one way”)—a response to the decriminalization of abortion care later in pregnancy in the Commonwealth this summer.

It is fatuous and lazy commentary, recycling antiabortion movement talking points and a tired victim narrative about crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). It reads like straight-up CPC industry PR—something you’d find in the right-wing Washington Examiner. An embarrassment, even to Jeff Bezos’ Post.

And yet: It’s notable that extremist talking points are platformed in such a mainstream outlet.

To set the record straight about the Massachusetts law: The Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act removed statutory restrictions that had limited abortion care at 24 weeks or later to specified medical circumstances. Providers and supporters of the repeal said those restrictions were so narrow and difficult to interpret that doctors and hospital attorneys feared criminal prosecution or civil liability for authorizing care, even in cases involving grave fetal diagnoses or serious threats to a patient’s health. As a result, some Massachusetts patients facing pregnancy complications had to travel to places such as Washington, D.C., Maryland or New Mexico for care.

The Post column flippantly describes the new law as allowing women “to terminate pregnancies until birth, for any reason, so long as doing so accords with a physician’s ‘professional judgment’” (the writer’s scare quotes).

If not a trained medical professional, then who should be empowered to make this healthcare decision with a patient? An opinion columnist?

Rest in Power, Robin Morgan—Ms. Editor, Poet, Feminist and Architect of the Women’s Movement

PUBLISHED 9/5/2026 by

Longtime Ms. editor and “architect of the contemporary women’s movement,” Robin Morgan died peacefully in her sleep on Sept. 5, 2026, just days after her friend and feminist partner Gloria Steinem.

Morgan called Ms. “a real family,” citing the depth and longevity of the relationships many people established through it. She would go on to found the Women’s Media Center alongside Ms. cofounder Gloria Steinem and actor and activist Jane Fonda in 2005.

“Robin Morgan was one of the architects of the contemporary women’s movement,” said Julie Burton, president and CEO of the Women’s Media Center. “Her global leadership for justice and equality, her work as a pioneering journalist who gave voice and visibility to women, and her fierce artistry as an internationally recognized poet and author of more than 20 books—these all constitute the legacy she has forged over decades of creative, cultural, and political work. 

How Can Feminists Advance Racial Equity in a Post-DEI World? Join Book Talk With Ralina L. Joseph [Sept. 10 @ Ms. HQ in LA]

PUBLISHED 9/2/2026 by

As attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion intensify across the U.S., how can feminists deepen their commitment to racial justice—and sustain that work without succumbing to exhaustion?

On Thursday, Sept. 10, at 6 p.m., Ms. will welcome author and scholar Ralina L. Joseph for a special evening examining the interconnectedness of race, equity and feminism. Joseph will discuss her new book, Racial Exhaustion: How to Move Through Racism in the Wake of DEI, in conversation with Sarah Banet-Weiser, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The event is at Ms. magazine headquarters: 433 S. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, Calif. RSVP today!