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.

The post A Feminist Historian’s Year-End Reading and Viewing Guide appeared first on Ms. Magazine.

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?

The post Sex, Power and Impunity: Epstein’s Legacy in Historical Perspective appeared first on Ms. Magazine.

As Trump’s second term intensifies anti-gender rhetoric, sociologist Laurie Essig draws chilling parallels between rising U.S. authoritarianism and decades of state-sponsored repression in Putin’s Russia.

"One of the things we can learn from Russia is just how important resistance is. There were moments when things could have gone differently. They didn’t, but I don’t think that was pre-ordained. ...

"Every strongman, every dictator we look at, had anxiety about masculinity."

The post ‘Feminism, Fascism and the Future’: Sociologist Laurie Essig on Dissolving Democracies in Russia and the U.S. appeared first on Ms. Magazine.

We the Men tells the stories "of so many women who deserve to be remembered," said Hasday. It also explores the ways in which forgetting women’s ongoing struggles for equality has perpetuated injustice and promote complacency. Remembering women’s stories more often and more accurately can help the nation advance toward sex equality.

The post On America’s 250th Anniversary, Let’s Remember Women’s Stories: The Ms. Q&A with Jill Hasday appeared first on Ms. Magazine.

This is a terrible breach of civil libertarian principles and university cultures of critique and dissent. Immigration and naturalization are being pulled back, it seems, into an early-20th-century mode in which ambiguous standards of what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable political speech become grounds for admission or deportation from the U.S.

The post Trump’s Detention of Pro-Palestinian Protester Marks Dark Turning Point in U.S. Jewish History appeared first on Ms. Magazine.

The post Doctors, Lawyers, Activists and Justices: The Coalition That Built Roe v. Wade appeared first on Ms. Magazine.

Though difficult to sit through, the two-plus hours of argument in United States v. Skrmetti—a challenge by trans youth, their families, the ACLU, Lambda Legal and the Biden administration to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors—was a nearly perfect distillation of this moment in our gender politics.

The post Conservative Supreme Court to Rule on Right to Be Trans, Medical Care, Parents’ Rights, Constitutional Sex Discrimination—and the Right to Be Different appeared first on Ms. Magazine.

Let’s equip ourselves with the intellectual tools that will help us understand how would-be tyrants use gender to divide us.  

The post Stop Trashing Trans People. Get Smarter About Gender. appeared first on Ms. Magazine.

The post How Black Leaders Formed the Reproductive Justice Movement appeared first on Ms. Magazine.