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.
Professor Melissa McCoul was dismissed in September after teaching LGBTQ+ themes in her children’s literature course at Texas A&M. Just this week, a faculty council determined McCoul’s firing violated her academic freedom.
But politicians and activists who oppose what they call “woke gender ideology,” are galvanized and doubling down, using this Texas A&M case to push for curricular reviews aimed at eliminating women’s, gender and sexuality studies from public colleges and universities across Texas.
Framed as bureaucratic oversight, conservatives seek to eliminate gender studies and related fields through procedural mechanisms that evade public scrutiny. The assaults on gender studies in Texas are not just a local issue; they are a national bellwether. They signal a coordinated effect to dismantle feminist and queer inquiry and remind us that silence, in the face of repression, is complicity.
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.
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.
“Sorry, but—”
I paused as the words flew from my mouth, forming an apology before I could even consider why I felt the need to begin my confrontation with one. A moment earlier, my friend had interrupted me during a heated debate, and I wanted to finish making the point I had been in the middle of.
“No worries, it’s all good,” he said with a smile, continuing with his argument. I sat stunned by how in a matter of seconds, I had been interrupted, then enabled to apologize for trying to address the interruption—all with the end result of my friend getting to speak over me.
These types of interactions happen to women all the time. Compulsive apologies, interruptions, mansplaining and emotional weaponization are all barriers that get in the way of women getting their point across, and being heard.
Communicating is already complicated enough, but it is even more difficult as a woman—so let’s talk about it.
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.
In the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “the feared attorney of the #MeToo movement” assesses the legal landscape facing survivors—and how activists can continue to hold people in power accountable.
Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “How Feminists are Breaking the Cycle of Gender-Based Violence and Harassment (with Ellen Sweet, Jane Caputi, Vanessa Tyson, Victoria Nourse, and Debra Katz)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
In the fourth episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, advocates and experts name the sociopolitical factors that fuel gender-based violence, and outline what it will take—in the courts, legislatures and our communities—to finally break the cycle.
“What does it mean that so many women, in particular, have to shoulder the burdens of violence and abuse in our day-to-day lives?”
“We’re in the middle of this terrible backlash because patriarchy does feel so threatened … It’s terrible, and it’s getting worse, but it’s because we have been so successful so far.”
Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “How Feminists are Breaking the Cycle of Gender-Based Violence and Harassment (with Ellen Sweet, Jane Caputi, Vanessa Tyson, Victoria Nourse, and Debra Katz)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
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.