More Than A Magazine, A Movement
In a quiet regulatory maneuver with seismic consequences, the U.S. Department of Education—under the direction of Republican members of Congress—has proposed reclassifying all graduate nursing degrees as “non-professional.” What sounds like an obscure bureaucratic shift is, in reality, a direct attack on the women who make up nearly the entire nursing workforce and who hold together America’s fraying healthcare system.
When I saw the headline “Did Women Ruin the Workplace? And if So, Can Conservative Feminism Fix It?” in The New York Times Opinion section, my heart sank. It felt like a headline torn from another era—a provocation that had no place in 2025.
False accusations remain extremely rare—estimated at between 2 percent and 8 percent of reports—while roughly two-thirds of sexual assaults are never reported at all. The crisis is sexual violence, not accountability.
Yet, for centuries, women have been labeled “emotional” or “petty” to justify their exclusion from leadership and public life. Hearing these stereotypes revived in 2025—in The New York Times, no less—is disheartening. At a time when reproductive rights are being stripped away and women’s autonomy is under attack, we don’t need pseudo-intellectual nostalgia for patriarchy disguised as debate. We need truth, solidarity and progress.
The message from the writers is clear: Women should know their place. But women already do—it’s everywhere decisions are made, everywhere power is exercised, everywhere the future is being built. We’re not staying in our lane. We made the road. And we’re not going anywhere.
While writing my new book about the contributions Black women have made in the global struggle for human rights, I was humbled to see, over and over, how many of these women did not come from rich families, or hold positions of great power, or even have all that much education. But they did the hard and dangerous work required, day in and day out, because they believed in equal rights for everyone, around the world.
Since the Trump administration made diversity, equality and inclusion “immoral” and “illegal,” a large part of workplace discrimination in the country still remains to be experienced by women and members of racial minority groups. Now, these groups have less of a platform to make complaints about such discrimination.
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, sports and entertainment, judicial offices and the private sector—with a little gardening mixed in!
This week:
– Marking 105 years since the 19th Amendment certified women’s right to vote.
– Democrat Catelin Drey wins a special election in Iowa, breaking the GOP’s majority in the state’s chamber.
– Australia’s youngest-ever senator, Labor Senator Charlotte Walker, delivers her first speech to Parliament.
– Women’s Emergency Response Rooms in Sudan are signs of Democracy.
… and more.
On Nov. 7, 1975—more than half a year ago as you read this—the voters of New York and New Jersey defeated amendments to their state constitutions which said that men and women should be treated equally before the law. It was one of those old-fashioned political events that the rise of the pollster is supposed to have leeched from our body politic—namely, a surprise. It set off a period both of private introspection on the part of individual women who had previously taken ratification of the federal Equal Rights Amendment for granted, and public reconsideration on the part of the organizations and politicians to whom stewardship of the ratification movement had fallen.
Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “The Feminist Fight For The Equal Rights Amendment Is Far From Over—and More Urgent Than Ever (with Pat Spearman, Ellie Smeal, Carol Moseley Braun, Kathy Spillar, and Ting Ting Cheng)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Trump administration’s Department of Labor recently proposed a new rule that would directly take earnings away from the more than 1.5 million home care workers in the United States, more than 80 percent women, and their families.
Between 2019 and 2040, the population of adults ages 65 and older is expected to balloon from 54 million people to nearly 81 million people, comprising an estimated 22 percent of the U.S. population. That means that the direct care workforce is projected to grow at a faster rate than any other occupation over the next decade.
The renowned show’s newest season is carving a new, feminist path for recognition of women-led workplaces, in spite of a history of white, male dominance.
Cultural depictions of feminist leadership, even when fictional, can help us both imagine and demand better. We need not settle for egotistical, unpredictable, manipulative leaders who focus on personal gains and grievances.
Nadasen, who teaches history at Barnard College, offered lessons from the domestic workers’ movement for the current moment in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward. “We, as feminists today, like domestic workers in the 1970s and in the early 2000s,” she told me, “need to think outside the box.”
Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “Women Can’t Afford to Wait for a Feminist Economic Future (with Premilla Nadasen, Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino, Aisha Nyandoro, Gaylynn Burroughs, and Dolores Huerta)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Burroughs, the vice president of education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center, connected the dots between poverty, policy and culture change in the latest episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward. “Once you start seeing these problems as being problems that policy can solve,” she told me, “a whole world opens up.”
Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “Women Can’t Afford to Wait for a Feminist Economic Future (with Premilla Nadasen, Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino, Aisha Nyandoro, Gaylynn Burroughs, and Dolores Huerta)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.