Herstory Archives - Ms. Magazine https://msmagazine.com/category/departments/history/ More Than A Magazine, A Movement Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:24:20 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://msmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-ms-logo-32x32.jpg Herstory Archives - Ms. Magazine https://msmagazine.com/category/departments/history/ 32 32 ‘We’re 53 Years Ahead of Where They Were Then’: Looking Back at 50+ Years of Ms.—and Looking Forward to a Feminist Future https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/29/ms-magazine-feminist-history-archive/ Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:20:40 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=390780 In a new bonus episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, Ms. executive editor Kathy Spillar, consulting editor Carmen Rios, Ms. Committee of Scholars co-chair Janell Jobson, and legendary author, activist and professor Loretta Ross explore how the stories of our past can continue to inspire us—and give us hope in the fight forward.

"I don’t believe that the assault on women and women’s rights can be extracted from the overall dysfunction of all societies."

"We have to keep rewriting history and reclaiming history, especially knowing that the forces out there are doing what they can to erase us."

"There’s a long lineage of people who have been fighting this fight, because they know that we deserve justice."

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Rest in Power: The Women, Feminists and Movement Builders We Lost in 2025 https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/15/women-feminists-died-2025-obituary/ Mon, 15 Dec 2025 16:17:37 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=389970 Tierra Walker. Cecile Richards. Patty Berne. Melissa Hortman. Jane Goodall.

As 2025 comes to a close, we look back on the feminists and movement builders we've lost this year.

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Women in Politics Weekly Roundup: Miami’s First Woman Mayor; Congress Moves to Reform How We Vote; Forbes Ranks World’s 100 Most Powerful Women https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/12/women-in-politics-weekly-roundup-miamis-first-woman-mayor-congress-moves-to-reform-how-we-vote-forbes-ranks-worlds-100-most-powerful-women/ Fri, 12 Dec 2025 20:45:41 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=389954 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:
—A seachange in New Mexico's new women-majority legislature.
— The Ranked Choice Voting Act has been introduced in Congress, which would require RCV for all primary and general congressional races beginning in 2030, allowing voters to express their ranked support for multiple candidates.
—Eileen Higgins is elected as Miami's first woman mayor. She ran on a platform of structural reforms: affordable housing, climate resilience, improved municipal governance and expanded representation.
—Australia enacts a nationwide ban on social media accounts for children under 16.
Forbes 2025 ranking of the world’s 100 most powerful women spotlights an increasingly diverse and influential generation of female leaders across business, politics, technology, media and culture.

... and more.

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2025’s Top Feminist Moments in Pop Culture https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/11/2025-feminist-pop-culture-liberation-ai-black-women-aja-wilson-nike-beyonce-cowboy-carter-hamnet-gilded-age-k-pop-demon-hunters/ Thu, 11 Dec 2025 17:56:13 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=389847 Another year of feminist struggles, another year of feminist triumphs. Our pop culture pushed back and provided many glimpses into feminist resistance throughout the culture.

This year’s top feminist moments reveal how artists, storytellers and creators confronted regressive politics with imagination, joy, righteous anger and expansive visions of humanity.

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Octavia Butler Saw This Coming https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/09/octavia-butler-archive-biography-susana-morris/ Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:25:58 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=389654 The Huntington Library, located in San Marino, Calif., launches a new exhibit, Stories from the Library: From Brontë to Butler, on Dec. 13, 2025. This collection is especially renowned for its extensive archive on the personal writings and stories pertaining to science fiction author Octavia Butler, who died too soon at age 58 in 2006 due to a fall outside her home. The prolific writer and MacArthur Grant recipient leaves behind several series of novels and other works of fiction.

Janell Hobson spoke with Black feminist scholar and Butler biographer Susana M. Morris, who relied on the vast archive available at Huntington for her latest book, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, which came out earlier this year.

"With Octavia Butler, we get cautionary tales. We could have just listened to her."

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A Feminist Historian’s Year-End Reading and Viewing Guide https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/07/what-to-watch-read-feminist-end-of-year-plays-books-liberation-bess-wohl-molly-jong-fast/ Sun, 07 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=389305 As the year winds down, I find myself returning—as I always do—to the stories, performances and ideas that have shaped my teaching and thinking. Feminism’s past is never really past; it’s a living archive we carry with us, full of unresolved questions, missteps, breakthroughs and beautiful, complicated people. This year’s reading and viewing list reflects that sensibility.

Liberation forces its contemporary narrator—and its audience—to reckon with the impossible expectations we’ve placed on small groups of women in church basements.

Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir presses on the tender, maddening ties between feminist foremothers and the daughters who grew up in their shadow.

Sarah Weinman’s study of spousal rape laws exposes just how recently the law stopped treating wives’ bodies as open territory—while showing how fiercely survivors and advocates have had to push for change that should never have been controversial.

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Seventy Years After Rosa Parks’ Arrest: How We Commit to Carrying the Work Forward https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/05/women-politics-representation-rosa-parks-claudette-colvin-bus-boycott/ Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:04:09 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=389504 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:
—The 2025 elections prove that voters across the country want women as their leaders.
—Democratic leaders are exploring ranked-choice voting for the 2028 presidential primaries.
—In a Tennesee special election, Democratic nominee Aftyn Behn surpassed electoral expectations for her congressional district.
—Fort Collins, Colo., elected Emily Francis as mayor in its first use of ranked-choice voting.
—College student Any Lucía López Belloza was deported in Massachusetts on her way home to Texas for Thanksgiving.

... and more.

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Sex, Power and Impunity: Epstein’s Legacy in Historical Perspective https://msmagazine.com/2025/12/03/trump-epstein-files-history-evelyn-nesbit-kennedy/ Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:29:33 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=389382 The scandal that has preoccupied much of mainstream U.S. politics has, been, at one level, delightful: We have seen extremist Republicans—Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Thomas Massie and Nancy Mace—break with their party and its president in an effort to force into light the U.S. Department of Justice files on convicted sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. 

The story is almost irresistible for critics of the current national administration, feminists among them: Will we finally get to items from Epstein like the CD labeled “girl pics nude book 4”? What might these materials reveal? And whose misbehavior might they reveal?  

Fire the starting gun on analyses from every liberal, left, critical corner. Claims abound of shifting coalitions, changing tides, pages turned, a president’s authority shredded. 

But there are still as many questions stirring in the Epstein pot as there are answers. Why did these particular Republicans break from the pack? Is this a contemporary Republican version of feminism? 

And beneath them all: What good does it actually do us—or Epstein’s particular victims, or the scads of other victims of sexual coercion, trafficking and other mistreatment—to raise the heat so high on this particular scandal?

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Feminists vs. Authoritarians: Honoring Leaders Holding the Line https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/19/ms-magazine-awards-feminist-majority-foundation/ Wed, 19 Nov 2025 23:07:33 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=388654 Greetings from Los Angeles—on the heels of a very special evening to celebrate the heart and soul of the democracy movement. On Tuesday night, Ms. paid tribute at the Global Women’s Rights Awards to bold leaders operating at the intersection of media, the law and storytelling—recognizing these as the essential trifecta for toppling authoritarianism. And, importantly, for fueling a feminist future.

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A Landmark Self-Defense Case in the Age of Mass Incarceration: A New Documentary Tells Joan Little’s Story https://msmagazine.com/2025/11/13/joan-little-documentary/ Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:33:08 +0000 https://msmagazine.com/?p=388528 A new documentary short chronicles Little's groundbreaking case—and her historic victory as the first U.S. woman acquitted for using deadly force to resist sexual assault.

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