Women’s History

Official histories have deliberately left important stories of women and marginalized groups out of textbooks, museums and elite institutions. Learning women’s history implores people today to acknowledge how long feminists have fought for equality—and the ongoing challenges they’re still resisting today.

The Curious Case of Afong Moy: Asian Womanhood and National Belonging In the U.S. 

PUBLISHED 4/6/2026 by

The Asian woman in America has long been both overnamed and erased—reduced to stereotypes that obscure her humanity while fixating on her image.

In Afong Moy, a teenage girl exhibited across the U.S. as “The Chinese Lady,” we see how fascination and domination intertwine: her body staged as spectacle, her silence misread as passivity, her personhood collapsed into an object for public consumption.

That same logic shaped the law. From Chy Lung v. Freeman to the Page Act of 1875, Asian women were treated as presumptively immoral, their bodies scrutinized and excluded based on racialized assumptions.

What began as spectacle hardened into policy—ensuring that Asian women’s belonging in America has never been fully granted, only contested.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism

PUBLISHED 4/2/2026 by

From Mary Wollstonecraft to Sojourner Truth, the fight for women’s rights emerged alongside—and was fundamentally shaped by—the struggle to abolish slavery and secure universal human rights.

On the 250th anniversary of the founding of the republic, it is timely to trace the history of American feminism, whose roots lie in the revolutionary era and are inextricably bound with the movement to abolish slavery. 

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Could This Be the Last Women’s History Month?

PUBLISHED 3/27/2026 by

Since 1987, the United States has celebrated Women’s History Month every March.

We have used this month to correct the record. To make sure that the women who built this nation—who are often systematically written out of history books and erased from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are—are named out loud and recognized. It is a national reminder that women are not a footnote to the American project. We are central to it.

But today, just shy of its 40th anniversary, Women’s History Month celebrations are quietly disappearing. Not because communities stopped caring—but because an administration decided that honoring women is a threat.

Harriet Tubman did not free herself and stop. Fannie Lou Hamer did not survive a Mississippi jail cell to just go home. Shirley Chisholm did not run for president, unbought and unbossed, so that we could sit down now.

It’s up to us now to saddle up and make sure that future generations of women and girls can not only know about the incredible shared history of the bad ass women that helped shape the world, but can feel the full freedom of it—which means we now have work to do. 

We ride at dawn.

She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance

PUBLISHED 3/26/2026 by

Ona Judge was one of at least nine enslaved people owned by George and Martha Washington. At the end of Washington’s presidency, the first family prepared to return to Mount Vernon, their Virginia plantation. Ona Judge prepared to flee and live free.  

She was not alone. Black women made clear, daily, that remaining in bondage was not their preferred state. And enslavers knew and acknowledged this readily apparent fact. Enslavers throughout Britain’s North American colonies passed laws and slave codes that instituted severe physical punishment for resistance and rebellion.

Still, Black women sued enslavers for their freedom. Sometimes, they poisoned, set ablaze, or found other means to murder their enslavers. They fled from their households and plantations, even if for only a short time. Black women slowed down work. They grew their own gardens. They helped sustain their communities despite the ever-looming prospect of sale. They raised children, their own and their enslavers’.  

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Juliana Stratton’s Big Senate Win, Kristi Noem’s Next Steps and the Origins of Women’s History Month

PUBLISHED 3/21/2026 by

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:
—Illinois primaries feature a big U.S. Senate win for Juliana Stratton.
—The IPU/U.N. Women Report on Women in Politics presents a sobering global snapshot.
—Mississippi will remain the only state that has never sent a woman to the U.S. House.
—Ranked-choice voting is being used for student elections at over 100 colleges and universities.

… and more.

They Dare, They Can, They Will: The History of Iceland’s Decades-Strong Women’s Strike Movement

PUBLISHED 3/21/2026 by

On Oct. 24, 1975, 90 percent of the women in Iceland refused to go to work, care for their children or cook for their families. Instead, thousands gathered in Reykjavík and villages nationwide to demand gender equality.

Schools closed. Flights were canceled. Businesses shuttered. Factories came to a standstill. Phone service was off.

Men called it “The Long Friday.” Organizers called it Kvennafrídagurinn: Women’s Day Off.

The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity 

PUBLISHED 3/19/2026 by

In the 1700s and 1800s in the U.S., women were presumed to be subordinate to men: naturally helpless, emotional, vulnerable.

Reading through the thousands of petitions submitted by revolutionary-era women to the state, one might get the impression that all women accepted their subordinate status to men with humility and grace.

But what if they didn’t? What if their engagement with the discourse of feminine dependence was merely a shrewd tool, effectively deployed to cater to precisely what their readers—white, male elites—wanted to hear? What if the radical act of seeking a divorce in the 18th century contradicted the conservative language they employed? 

In most cases, we’ll never be able to deduce these women petitioners’ true feelings on their social and legal status. Many women petitioners in the revolutionary era left no trail for the historian to follow. 

What we can know is that the employment of this discourse of dependence, cunningly constructed in a sympathetic narrative neatly packaged for a patriarchal audience, was immensely effective. For the most part, women who engaged with these tropes of feminine subordination saw their petitions granted. Those that did not—including those who rebuked men—largely saw their pleas rejected or ignored. 

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

Dissecting Trump’s (Short) Women’s History Month Statement, Line by Line

PUBLISHED 3/12/2026 by

When the White House issued a presidential message to kick off Women’s History Month, my first reaction was genuine surprise. Honestly, I did not think WHM was still recognized by the federal government.

President Donald Trump’s brief (four paragraphs) public statement doubled down on the administration’s regressive societal vision, casting women primarily as caretakers and pillars of the “American family,” while pointing to a slate of policies he claims empower them.

But a closer look at the statement reveals a familiar mix of culture-war signaling, selective policy claims, and omissions that obscure the real impacts of the administration’s agenda on women and families.

I think often about the role of the media at this moment—an obligation intrinsically greater than reporting the verbiage that comes out of the White House. It is on all of us to explicitly counter double-speak and lies and to leave a paper trail of truth for posterity. This week’s column does just that: It dissects Trump’s WHM proclamation line by line and tests each claimed reform against the record.

Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776

PUBLISHED 3/12/2026 by

The American Revolution can feel like a legacy that belongs to a select few. It has often been told as the story of wealthy white men—many of them enslavers, many of them beneficiaries of Indigenous dispossession—who rebelled in the name of liberty while denying it to most of the people around them. From this perspective, those who are most marginalized—including women, LGBTQ people and communities of color—may feel as if they are reinforcing political amnesia, or worse, complicity, in patriotic celebrations of 1776.   

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

ERA Road Tour: Weekly Road Diary (March 2-7)

PUBLISHED 3/9/2026 by

Inspired by the 1916 suffrage road trip that helped win women the vote, activists behind Driving the Vote for Equality are traveling across the country in the restored Golden Flyer II to build support for recognizing the Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment.

Each week, Ms. will share highlights from the road.

During its first week on the road, the Golden Flyer II carried the push for the ERA through the Mid-Atlantic. In New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Virginia, ERA advocates connected historic sites of feminist resistance with renewed calls for constitutional equality.