Meet the Voices

• Ellen Sweet, a former senior editor and writer for Ms. who coordinated the magazine’s historic nationwide study of campus date rape in the 1980s. Read her work in Ms.
• Jane Caputi, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University, the author of The Age of Sex Crime. Read her work in Ms.
• Vanessa Tyson, Chair of the Department of Politics and Associate Professor of Politics at Scripps College and author of Twists of Fate: Multiracial Coalitions and Minority Representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. Follow her on Bluesky.
• Victoria Nourse, the Ralph V. Whitworth Professor in Law at Georgetown Law. Follow her on Twitter, and read her work in Ms.
• Debra Katz, a founding partner of Katz Banks Kumin LLP. Follow Debra on Twitter and Bluesky and KBK on Instagram.
• And your host, Carmen Rios, feminist superstar and Ms. consulting editor. Follow her on Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky and read her work in Ms.

Bonus Content From This Episode

• Gender-Based Violence Is Everywhere. What Will It Take to Break the Cycle?
• ‘We Have to Be Relentless’: #MeToo Champion Debra Katz Is Confident ‘There Will Be Wins’ for Survivors in the Days Ahead
• Victoria Nourse Helped Write the Violence Against Women Act. She Knows Policy Change Matters in the Struggle to End Gender-Based Violence.
• “When and Where Do We Get to This Place Called ‘Fair?’” What Political Scientist and Survivor Vanessa Tyson Wants the Feminist Future to Look Like
• ‘A Patriarchal, Male-Dominated, Use-of-Violence Society Is Not Good for Anybody’: Ellen Sweet on the Historic Ms. Study of Campus Rape, 40 Years Later
• ‘We Have to Disbelieve in Patriarchy’: What Feminist Scholar Jane Caputi Believes History Can Teach Us About Taking on Male Supremacy—and Building a Future Without Femicide

Further Reading From the 50 Years of Ms. Collection

Get a copy of the book.

• “Joan Little: The Dialectics of Rape,” by Angela Davis. June 1975.
• “The Seven Warning Signs of Testosterone Poisoning,” by Alan Alda. October 1975.
• “Battered Wives: Help for the Victim Next Door,” by Judith Gingold. August 1976.
• “Sexual Harassment on the Job and How to Stop It,” Karen Lindsay. September 1977.
• “Date Rape: The Story of an Epidemic and Those Who Deny It,” by Ellen Sweet. October 1985.
• “Finding Celie’s Voice,” by Alice Walker. December 1985.
• “Femicide: Speaking the Unspeakable,” by Jane Caputi and Diana Russell. September/October 1990.
• “A Day in the Life: Dispatches from Nome, Alaska, to Virginia Beach,” by Rita Henley Jensen. September/October 1990.
• “A Cruel Edge: The Painful Truth About Today’s Pornography—and What Men Can Do About It,” by Robert Jensen. Spring 2004.
• “Jailing Girls for Men’s Crimes,” by Carrie N. Baker. Summer 2010.
• “Court-Martialing the Military,” by Molly M. Ginty. Spring/Summer 2012.
• “Aftermath of Isla Vista,” by Donna Decker. Fall 2014.
• “A Case for the Equal Rights Amendment,” by Victoria F. Nourse. Fall 2021.

Further Reading From the Ms. Archives

Explore our coverage of Violence and Harassment, including reporting on violence against women and VAWA, domestic violence and sexual violence, campus sexual violence, workplace harassment and the #MeToo movement.

• “The Ms. Special Report on Men,” Guest Editor, Jackson Katz. Summer 2025.
• Rape is Rape Campaign. Spring 2011.
• “The #MeToo Legal Revolution,” by Carrie N Baker. Winter 2020.

More Links & Resources

• Read Victoria Nourse’s law review article about what activists can do at the state level to prevent and confront gender-based violence.
• Learn more about the Democratic Women’s Caucus and their work on violence against women, watch the full Bipartisan Domestic Violence Working Group Day of Action Press Conference, and stay connected with the DWC.
• Explore bonus content from every episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, including full interviews with every guest!
• Want to dig deeper? You can explore an interactive timeline of Ms. history.

Episode Transcript

[THEME MUSIC ]

Carmen Rios: Welcome to the fourth episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, a Ms. Studios podcast that traces the intertwined history of Ms. magazine and the feminist movement it has given voice to for over 50 years — and explores where the fight for gender equality must go next. 

I’m your host, feminist superstar and Ms. consulting editor Carmen Rios.

Today, we’re going to take on the epidemic of gender-based violence in all of its forms — and explore how feminists, for decades, have attempted to break the cycle.

[Transition Music]

Carmen Rios: On December 6, 1989, at the University of Montreal, a male shooter stormed the school of engineering on campus, separated out the female students, and opened fire — killing 14 women and wounding nine women, as well as four men, before turning the gun on himself.

The shooter, who was unable to complete his own application to the school, “felt humiliated by the women he defined as ‘feminists’ because they had entered traditional male territory,” Jane Caputi and Diana Russell explained in the September/October 1990 issue of Ms. “His response to the erosion of white male exclusivity was a lethal one,” they wrote. “It was also an eminently political one.”

In their piece, Caputi and Russell observed that, although the shooter had explicitly framed his acts as anti-feminist, the mainstream media downplayed the misogyny of his rampage and played up mental illness. But “in a racist and sexist society,” Caputi and Russell argued, “psychotics as well as the so-called normal frequently act out the ubiquitous racist and misogynist attitudes they repeatedly see legitimized.”

“For most women,” Rita Henley Jensen wrote in a separate article in the same issue of Ms., “December 6, 1989 was another day of the routine, terrifying acts of daily and nightly violence against women and female children.” As proof, she offered stories collected from women’s shelters, rape crisis centers, and law enforcement officials across the country about what happened in the lives of other women the day of the Montreal massacre.

In Eugene, Oregon, a woman called for help. “My husband,” she explained, “is trying to kill me.” In Cheyenne, Wyoming, a mother of three calls a helpline after her husband beats her, looking for shelter until her order of protection against him can go into effect. In Honolulu, Hawaii, workers at a shelter for abused spouses and children notice that the jaw of the mother with three children seeking their help has been wired shut. 

In Houston, Texas and in California’s Sacramento Valley, two 14-year-olds called for help after being raped by older friends and family members. One told a helpline counselor that she was afraid to tell her father, because he might beat both her and her attacker. At University of California at Irvine, a young woman received a notice warning that a student had been raped at knifepoint in a campus parking lot.

In Virginia Beach, jurors were questioned before the trial of a man charged with murdering his mother and sister. In Queens, New York, five gang members – four of them teenage boys – were indicted for raping and robbing a woman they knew from a local bar. In Chicago, Illinois, a 31-year-old doctor was committed to a mental institution after hacking his wife to death and drowning their daughter.

And yet, in Montreal, gun shops reported being overwhelmed by requests for the same rifle used in that day’s massacre. Some stores had even sold out.

“Early feminist analysis of rape,” Caputi and Russell asserted in their piece, “exposed the myths that it is a crime of frustrated attraction, victim provocaton, or uncontrollable biological urges, perpetrated only by an aberrant fringe. Rather, rape is a direct expression of sexual politics, an assertion of masculinist norms, and a form of terrorism that preserves the gender status quo.” 

“Like rape,” they observed, “the murders of women by husbands, lovers, fathers, acquaintances, and strangers are not the products of some inexplicable deviance. Murder is simply the most extreme form of sexist terrorism.” Writing that “a new word is needed to reflect this political understanding,” Caputi and Russell offered one: “femicide.” 

For 50-plus years, Ms. has continued to give language to what Caputi and Russell called “the unspeakable” — the terror of violent male supremacy, and the ways it shapes women’s lives.

Rep. Gwen Moore: I too, have had a gun to my head, so I know what it’s like to fear for my life. And sadly, I am not an unusual case. 4.5 million women live today who can report that an intimate partner used a gun to threaten them.

Carmen Rios: That’s U.S. Representative Gwen Moore, speaking during a press conference marking the Bipartisan Domestic Violence Working Group Day of Action. Her remarks were a form of protest to cuts in the so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” rammed through Congress by Trump’s cronies and signed into law on July 4 that slashed funding for gender-based violence prevention and survivor support. They were also a reminder of how widespread intimate partner violence remains across the country — and how many women, for decades if not centuries, have been made to shroud it in silence.

When Ms. first appeared on newsstands, “sexual harassment” and “domestic violence” were not part of our lexicon. 

In 1972, every single state in the country had laws on the book exempting husbands from being charged with rape by their wives — and a survivor’s sexual history and reputation could legally be presented as evidence to a court in a rape trial. Colleges and universities routinely got away with covering up campus sexual assault, and Title IX, passed the same year, hadn’t yet been interpreted to protect students from sexual crimes. Sexual harassment was not recognized as a form of sex discrimination or as a criminal act, and sexual violence wasn’t yet defined as a federal crime. Only a handful of rape crisis centers and shelters for abused women and children had opened their doors.

In the December 1985 issue of Ms., Alice Walker reflected on controversy that had swirled around her book The Color Purple when one mother objected to its use in public schools in Oakland, California. “I feel I know what Mrs. Green was objecting to,” Walker wrote — “the pages that describe the brutal sexual violence done to a nearly illiterate Black woman-child, who then proceeds to write down what happened to her in her own language, from her own point of view.”

Walker’s brutal language was purposeful. “Even I found it almost impossible to let her say what had happened to her as she perceived it without euphemizing it a little,” Walker explained, “because once you strip away the lie that rape is pleasant, that rapists have anything at all attractive about them, that children are not permanently damaged by sexual pain, that violence done to them is washed away by fear, silence, and time, you are left with the positive horror of the lives of thousands of children (and who knows how many adults)…who have been sexually abused and who have never been permitted their own language to tell about it.”

Ellen Sweet: In 1982, Ms. published an article, and it was the first article identifying something that we call date rape, as far as I know, the term really had hardly ever been mentioned or used, and we had an enormous response to it from our readers, which led us to want to do a study of the phenomenon and say more about it.

Carmen Rios: That’s Ellen Sweet, who coordinated the historic nationwide study of campus date rape, or acquaintance rape, commissioned by Ms. in the 1980s — the first national study of its kind. It was directed by Mary P. Koss at Kent State and funded by the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape. 

Ellen Sweet: We ended up interviewing more than 7,000 students in 35 schools and universities. We wanted it to be as inclusive as possible and accurate as possible, and the results that came out of it, well, were that, one — and this was the big kind of shocker — one in four students who were surveyed had been either raped or victims of rape or attempted rape, and 84% of them knew their attackers. 90% didn’t think that their rape, that it was rape at the time, or that it was a crime. The wisdom had been that rape was what happened with a stranger in a dark alley or some kind of home invasion, and people just didn’t believe it could happen between people who knew each other on a date or whatever, an acquaintance, someone they knew.

Carmen Rios: In the October 1985 issue of Ms., Sweet shared the results of the three-year study of college-aged women and men. 

Some other shocking findings? That 52 percent of all the women surveyed had experienced some form of sexual victimization; that one in every 12 men had admitted to having committed rape or attempted rape, yet virtually none of them identified as rapists; and that over one-third of the women raped did not discuss their experience with anyone.

“Statistics alone will not solve the problem of date rape,” Sweet explained in her piece, “but they could help bring it out into the open.”

Ellen Sweet: Professors in colleges all over the country wrote and asked for permission to use my article in sociology classes, health education classes, psych classes, women’s studies classes. Student activism really picked up, too. It reinforced and encouraged students to organize. It was a spur for action.

Carmen Rios: Mary P. Koss ultimately concluded that, quote, “at least ten times more rapes occur among college students than are reflected in official crime statistics.” And yet, campus officials, law enforcement, and even students didn’t talk about it. Many outright resisted confronting it.

“Everybody has a stake in denying that it’s happening so often,” one woman, Martha Burt, told Sweet. “For women, it’s self-protective… if only bad girls get raped, then I’m personally safe. For men, it’s the denial that ‘nice’ people like them do it.”

As Sweet asserted in her coverage, “as long as such attacks continue to be a ‘hidden’ campus phenomenon, unreported and unacknowledged… the problem will persist.” And in the last 40 years, she’s been proven right. Today, nearly one in four undergraduate women experience sexual assault or misconduct. 

Ellen Sweet: you have to keep pushing the university to be more transparent and more willing to recognize the problem, and parents can do that and students can do that. Students have to be willing to stand up; if you see something, say something. If the school feels that it can put the problem under the carpet, it will do so.

Carmen Rios: In 1976, Ms. became the first magazine not only to address the epidemic of domestic violence in its pages, but to put it on the cover, forcing consumers across the country to confront the issue at a time when there were no laws criminalizing domestic abuse. The August 1976 issue of Ms. featured a close-up of a woman’s bruised face, with a headline screaming: “BATTERED WIVES: HELP FOR THE SECRET VICTIM NEXT DOOR.”

“In every state,” Judith Gingold explained in her groundbreaking cover story, “it is against the law to physically attack another person, but if the assailant is married to his victim, the law is unlikely to be enforced.” Gingold documented the ways police had been trained to dismiss and minimize domestic disputes — noting that, quote, “though ‘domestic trouble’ complaints constitute the majority of all calls for police assistance, police policy dictates that these calls result in few arrests.”

In one instance, a social worker told Gingold, “The cops asked the husband to walk around the block and cool off. The husband walked around the block. When he came back, he murdered his wife.”

A little over one year after the battered wives cover, Ms. put a puppet on the cover — with her boss’ fuzzy hand down her blouse. The November 1977 cover story by Karen Lindsey, “Sexual Harassment on the Job and How to Stop It,” once again named and confronted a widespread phenomenon of gender-based violence. The phrase “sexual harassment” had been coined just two years earlier, and Ms. was the first magazine to put it on the cover—nine years before the Supreme Court would recognize it as a crime, and nearly 15 before Anita Hill’s historic testimony.

“I could have written that Celie enjoyed her abuse,” Alice Walker wrote in that piece for Ms., “and done it in such pretty, distancing language that many readers would have accepted it as normal. But to do this would have been to betray Celie… For it is language more than anything else that reveals and validates one’s existence, and if the language we actually speak is denied us, then it is inevitable that the form we are permitted to assume historically will be one of caricature, reflecting someone else’s literary or social fantasy.”

Jane Caputi: Language is so important. It breaks through the denial as well as the lies that have been told. There are so many different lies, right? There are so many different so-called myths about rape, which is that, this is just some kind of normal or natural occurrence; that these men, they’re psychopaths, we don’t know where they come from; et cetera. Just a complete denial that, basically, masculinity associates men with violence.

If you’re going to institute male supremacy, you have to have a system of control that relies on two things, both actual force and violence, to, you know, terrorize, intimidate, as well as to silence those you are subjecting to oppression, but you also have to condition everybody to accept it as normal. The ubiquity of it shows how intent they are at maintaining a patriarchal system, but then they flip it to say—actually, this shows just how natural this is. It’s just the order of things as they are.

Carmen Rios: That’s Jane Caputi, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University, the author of The Age of Sex Crime, and the co-author, with Diana Russell, of that 1990 piece on femicide published in Ms. after the Montreal massacre. 

Caputi and Russell wrote that femicide — which they define as “the murders of women by men motivated by hatred, contempt, pleasure, or a sense of ownership of women” — was, quote, “the ultimate end of a continuum of terror” that includes rape and sexual assault, torture, sexual slavery, incest and child sexual abuse, physical and emotional violence, sexual harassment, FGM, forced sterilization, forced motherhood, medical experimentation, and other cultural atrocities. 

“If all femicides were recognized as such and accurately counted,” they added, “if the massive incidence of nonlethal sexual assaults against women and girls were taken into account, if incest and battery were recognized as torture…. If the patriarchal home were seen as the inescapable prison it so frequently becomes, if pornography and gorenography were recognized as hate literature, then this culture might have to acknowledge that we live in the midst of a reign of sexist terror comparable in magnitude intensity, and intent to the persecution, torture, and annihalation of women as witches from the fourteenth to seventeenth century in Europe.”

Jane Caputi: We read the newspaper about this killing in Montreal, and it was just speaking exactly to what we were most concerned with, most completely outraged by.

There already had been activism against femicide. Diana had introduced that word that she first heard in Europe at that conference in 1975 against violence against women. We knew that we had to make it our job to really put out there. I mean, it was so explicit. He says, “I am going after feminists.” We knew that all of the gender-based violence was, ultimately, about silencing and socially controlling women, and this was just the most explicit.

Carmen Rios: “Most people understand that lynchings and pogroms are motivated by political objectives: preserving white and gentile supremacy,” Caputi and Russell wrote. “Similarly, the aim of violence against women – conscious or not – is to preserve male supremacy.” They called out a “femicidal culture” as, quote, “one in which the male is worshipped… through tyranny, subtle and overt, over our bruised minds, our battered and dead bodies, our co-optation into supporting even batterers, rapists, and killers.”

Jane Caputi: I think that was one of my contributions to the piece. I had just read a poem by Alice Walker. It was called “Each One, Pull One,” and she was talking about how there’s always this attempt to look back and then desecrate the memory of African-American literary figures or civil rights activists and things like that, and that we really had to refuse that. She says, “we will not worship you.” This is not the only thing we have to do, but it’s part of it. We have to disbelieve in patriarchy. We have to withdraw our energy. 

Carmen Rios: We must continue, as Caputi and Russell urged readers, to, quote, “demand an end to the global, patriarchal war on women.” Because gender-based violence isn’t just the result of a patriarchal culture. It’s a key component to upholding it at all costs. 

Jane Caputi: People think you could never get rid of violence, but not all human cultures have had that. Just on this continent, prior to the genocidal conquest of America by Europeans, what is now called America, you had gender egalitarian cultures, and as Paula Gunn Allen wrote in The Sacred Hoop, she says “the genocide was also a gynocide.” It was really furthered not only by rape and murder of women, but it was to destroy an alternative to patriarchy.

This whole system of sexist terrorism operates so much on the individual, the group, the social, all the way up into really maintaining the culture in the largest kind of sense.

Carmen Rios: More than one decade before Caputi and Russell’s piece, trailblazing activist and scholar Angela Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, wrote a landmark piece for Ms. on “the dialectics of rape,” pushing activists to recognize and name the historical precedents for racialized and sexualized violence in the U.S. — and to see it as a continuation of the same sociopolitical warfare that has impacted women at the intersections for centuries.

In the June 1975 issue of Ms., Davis reported on a movement building in support of Joan Little, who was charged with first-degree murder with the threat of the death penalty after she resisted a violent sexual attack from a prison guard in Beaufort County Jail by stabbing him with an ice pick — a weapon he had brought into her cell.

Davis called Little, who was 20 at the time, the “cultural grandchild” of Cordella Stevenson, a Black woman who, 60 years earlier, had been raped and lynched by a mob with impunity. She had committed no crime, but, as Davis wrote, “She was Black and that was reason enough. She was Black and a woman, trapped in a society pervaded with myths of white superiority and male supremacy.” 

Little was the only woman imprisoned at Beaufort County Jail at the time, an injustice in and of itself — and Davis chronicled, in her piece, the myriad acts of judicial bias, media misinformation, and carceral violence that continued to deny Little justice. Her charge was tied to the threat of an automatic death sentence, but her motion to have the court cover expert witness fees was denied, and her lawyer was unable to gain access to critical evidence. Although one of the jailer’s relatives sat on the grand jury that indicted her, her request to have the trial moved was denied. And despite being indigent, her bail — which was granted only after national outcry — was a whopping $115,000. 

“And so she is being tried,” Davis wrote, “by the same state whose supreme court decided, in the nineteenth century, that no white man could be convicted of fornication with a slave woman.”

Vanessa Tyson: We live in a culture that has always been highly patriarchal, highly white supremacist. I don’t think anybody who has studied history and has looked at this would think otherwise. 

Carmen Rios: That’s Vanessa Tyson, Chair of the Department of Politics and Associate Professor of Politics at Scripps College. Tyson, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, spent years fighting for survivors as an advocate and political staffer — and, in 2020, ran for a seat in the California State Assembly on an explicitly pro-survivor, anti-violence agenda.

Vanessa Tyson: My concern in terms of politics is the fact that if the voices aren’t in the room, if the voices aren’t in the political debate about what our priorities should be. We need at least some diversity, right, to improve the deliberation and the quality of policy outcomes in this country. 

Carmen Rios: Davis remarked in her piece that, quote, “over the last rew years, widespread concern about the increasing incidence of sexual assaults on women has crystallized into a militant campaign against rape.” But she added that “it is essential to place the specific incident in its sociohistorical context. For rape is not one dimensional and homogenous but one feature that does remain consistent is the overt and flagrant treatment of women, through rape, as property.” 

Davis offered, for example, the fact that “humiliating and violent sexual attacks” were a feature of Black women’s daily lives less than two centuries ago—and that rape served not only as a device to reinforce authority and tyranny on behalf of white, slave-owning men, but to terrorize Black communities.

Vanessa Tyson: I don’t have fond memories of the Reagan Era, right. I have memories of terms that were developed like crack whores. I remember Ronald Reagan talking about welfare queens. This was all a means of trying to denigrate women who didn’t have money, who had never been offered stability. Particularly for women of color and Black women, this was a way to demonize us, to act as if this country wasn’t built upon our serving as chattel. 

There has been a tendency amongst civil rights scholars to not centralize the Black women’s experience, to subjugate it and never talk about the dynamic of raping Black women’s bodies and the fact that we’ve never truly had control.

Carmen Rios: “The oppression of women is a vital and integral component of a larger network of oppression,” Davis wrote. “Just as class exploitation, racism, and imperial subjugation of peoples abroad serve to nourish this larger system and keep it functioning, so male supremacy is essential to its smooth operation.” The larger system, she told readers, is monopoly capitalism.

“It is in the interests of the ruling class to cultivate the archaic patriarchal domination of women,” Davis explained. “As long as women are oppressed, enormous benefits accrue to the ruling class.” Those benefits, she noted, include labor exploitation and low wages and the outsourcing of the social responsibility for childcare and housework to women exclusively.

Thus, a cycle reveals itself — one in which sexual violence begets institutional violence.

Vanessa Tyson: We have a society that allows particularly women, persons who have been victims of trauma, to fall through the cracks. 

There is no one-size-fits-all to this. It is an amalgam of gross inequality that has only been exacerbated by the realities that people in power are okay with horrible atrocities happening to someone else, just as long as it’s not happening here, just as long as I don’t have to see it. I’ll drive on the freeway, so that I don’t have to see poverty. I’ll take the long route because, oh, that might be a dodgy neighborhood. Maybe it would help if you actually saw the dodgy. Maybe it would help if you actually had to confront the discomfort of knowing and witnessing the pain of others. 

Carmen Rios: Karen Lindsey’s November 1977 cover story on sexual harassment noted that, quote, “the women who are hit hardest by sexual harassment on the job are waitresses, clerical workers, and factory workers, women who are poorly paid to begin with and who cannot afford to quit their jobs and are often heads of families, supporting themselves and their children on small salaries), or do not have the resources to pursue costly court cases. Their economic vulnerability,” she added, “is played on by their male bosses.”

Carrie N. Baker’s coverage in the Summer 2010 issue of Ms. of teenage victims of sex trafficking—some as young as 12 and 14— being charged for prostitution, similarly observed that, quote, “society’s treatment of these girls is rife with double standards: we care about abused girls abroad but not at home, we prosecute underage girls but not the adults buying and pimping them, and we charge some young girls with prostitution while protecting others with statutory rape laws.”

Rachel Lloyd of GEMS, an organization providing support for girls and young women who have experienced sexual exploitation and trafficking, told Baker that, quote, “the young people who are impacted by this in this country are young people who live in poverty, they are young people who are in the child-welfare system or the juvenile justice system, and they are just not highly valued by society on many levels.”

In the Spring/Summer 2012 issue of Ms., Molly M. Ginty reported on the widespread dismissal of survivors of military sexual assault and trauma. From 2001 to 2011, 200,000 soldiers were assaulted by their comrades. Ginty’s piece focused on 38 of them who had come forward to sue the military for mishandling their cases. 

In one case, eight plaintiffs charged the DoD, navy, and marine corps for “exhibiting high tolerance for the crime but zero tolerance for those who report it.” In another, a plaintiff explained that she had been sexually harassed with such severity that she had requested to be reassigned to a war zone—but her superiors determined she had ‘welcomed’ the behavior by wearing shorts and makeup. In one case, a plaintiff was accused of ‘conduct unbecoming of an officer’ after her commanding offer knocked her unconscious and raped her. And in yet another, a female cadet reported being retaliated against by her rapist at West Point, and a second said she was discouraged from reporting an assault by an official military academy counselor. A district court judge, when faced with one of these cases, ruled that rape was an ‘occupational hazard’ of military service. 

“Joan Little might not only have been the victim of a rape attempt by a white racist jailer,” Davis wrote. “She has truly been raped and wronged many times over by the exploitative and discriminatory institutions of this society.”

Rep. Debbie Dingell: I’ll never forget, taking a gun, getting in the middle of a gun between my father and my mother, keeping my father from killing my mother, and hiding in closets, praying to god: Please let us live. Please let us live. Calling the police when it was really bad, and nobody coming. Being trapped in a situation where you know you’re going to die and nobody is coming to help you. That’s not okay in America — and it should never, ever, ever happen again.

Carmen Rios: That’s U.S. Representative Debbie Dingell, speaking also at the Domestic Violence Working Group Day of Action Press Conference — and delivering a searing indictment of the continued institutional failure to protect and support survivors of gender-based violence, and to break the intergenerational cycle of a violent, patriarchal culture. 

The policy solutions feminists lawmakers, lawyers, and advocates have crafted over the years to address those failures have played a critical part in the struggle to end violence.

Victoria Nourse: The culture shift should not be diminished. It’s been tremendous. People didn’t want to know, because it’s a really intimate and hard issue, that the people you love are doing you damage, or claiming that they love you, claiming that they like you, are doing damage. And that’s a very difficult thing to get your mind around. People didn’t want to look at it, and so, we kind of ripped the Band-Aid off and said, no, this is a public policy matter. 

Carmen Rios: That’s Victoria Nourse, the Ralph V. Whitworth Professor in Law at Georgetown Law whose background as an attorney spanned work in the White House, the Department of Justice, the Senate, and private practice. 

In the 1990’s, Nourse found herself playing an integral role in crafting the original Violence Against Women Act — which, in 1994, became the first comprehensive federal law specifically addressing issues of gender-based violence and harassment. 

Victoria Nourse: I was a very young lawyer in Washington, and I was standing in the Senate Judiciary Committee. I’d been hired to be an expert on something completely unrelated, and I happened to be the woman in the room when Joe Biden asked me to do something on women regarding the crime bill.

Victoria Nourse: there were women staffers on the judiciary committee, and he had always had women staffers for a very long time, but there were only two women senators. So, a number of issues that you might’ve expected women to pursue just weren’t pursued because there was no body of people who might have a special interest in it, and he had a lot of power. I did something that only a future law professor would do, which is I went to the library, and what did I do? I found a lot of things that I thought were wrong with the law, were obviously wrong. I was not trained as a feminist, in any way. But I found things that just didn’t make any common sense, that really deserved a change and had gone overlooked in the law, both with respect to sexual assault and battering.

Carmen Rios: VAWA established the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women — which now distributes funding for research and services for survivors, including shelters, culturally specific support, and prevention efforts. Over the years, VAWA has been expanded through various re-authorization packages to address more forms of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking along the continuum of violence, and to provide specific services for immigrant and undocumented survivors, Indigenous survivors, and LGBTQ+ survivors.

Nourse noted, in a piece in the Fall 2021 issue of Ms., that Title VII only gave some survivors of harassment the right to sue — they had to be employees, for example, and the sexual assault or harassment had to happen within the workplace, and their employers had to have more than 15 people on staff. VAWA established across-the-board policies that governed the legal and civil response to gender-based violence for survivors across experiences.

But most importantly, VAWA shifted culture. The impact of institutionalizing work that confronted gender-based violence was borne out in the statistics: Between 1993 and 2022, rates of domestic violence dropped by 67 percent and there was a 56 percent decline in rapes and sexual assaults.

Victoria Nourse: there are difference of opinions about how to handle this, whether this really does affect women’s equality. There are difference of opinions about how and what kind of remedies women should have when they are injured and how it should play out on college campuses, how it should play out in various different locations in the country. But culturally, I think it’s solidified opinion about the importance of this issue for women. 

When we were working on this, there was one senator who said, oh, battered women’s shelters, they’re indoctrination centers for runaway wives. Ronald Reagan was disputing various things about whether battering existed. People didn’t even think it existed. And oftentimes, they blamed the victims.

The bill actually was a coalescing point for that cultural change. It was really a concentrating point for that bigger and very important social movement.

Carmen Rios: Across the National Mall, less than 10 years prior, Debra Katz, a founding partner of Katz Banks Kumin LLP, was one of the women in the room when another historic victory in the fight to end violence was won at the Supreme Court — the 1986 decision in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, which, nearly 10 years after Ms. put sexual harassment on the cover, finally made sexual harassment illegal across the country.

Debra Katz: When I went to law school, I had an extraordinary opportunity to get a women’s rights and public policy fellowship through Georgetown focused on women’s rights. And the year of my fellowship, the Meritor Savings case went before the US Supreme Court.

It was an enormous victory, and I got to see, very directly, the power of the courts to make a sea change, to make the world a little bit more equitable, as it did in that case, and to protect the rights of women in the workplace, from quid pro quo harassment, sexually hostile work environment. 

Carmen Rios: Katz went on to set up a two-person firm focused on civil rights, women’s rights and sexual harassment claims, and whistleblowers. 40 years on, Katz continues to do that work at KBK—and she’s become known as “the feared attorney of the #MeToo movement” for her work representing, among other clients, women who sued Harvey Weinstein for harassment and assault; and Christine Blasey Ford, who testified at his confirmation hearing that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school.

What Katz has learned, after decades of changing the narratives of women’s lives using the law, connects right back to the importance of language — and the power of naming our experiences and telling our stories.

Debra Katz: We represented women who would come forward, and the companies would respond by saying, ‘You’re not telling the truth. You need to leave, the harasser stays.’ It just became the cost of doing business. And then, everything shifted when the #MeToo movement happened. When people came forward, and told their truth, it became undeniable that this is a societal crisis, structural crisis, in our system, that victims of harassment have not been taken seriously. That they have been discredited, and now it was undeniable, because everybody was acknowledging that this was their experience, and what they saw in the workplace, and sexual violence outside of the workplace, was endemic. 

We can look at what happened in the Weinstein trial. He was just retried. He was convicted on one count, acquitted on one count. Whereas in the first trial, he was readily convicted on those counts. So how do we look at that? Well, juries are still willing to convict, even though explicitly his lawyers argued that Harvey Weinstein was the victim of the #metoo movement. That his assaults of these women were what the women signed up for in trying to advance their careers. It was an incredibly offensive argument, but they made it explicitly, and brazenly, because they felt that the environment had so shifted that a jury would readily say, oh yeah, she went to his hotel room. Of course, she expected to be raped, and that was the cost of doing business for her. That is the casting couch culture. He’s not a predator, and now, he is being falsely accused by this #metoo. Movement. Well, a jury carefully deliberated. After a six-week trial, they looked at the evidence, and they still convicted him. He is still a convicted rapist, predator, both in California, and now, here. It’s more complicated, but we will still get wins.

It’s just a constant battle to keep these stories in front of the public, and to continue to point out abuses where they occur, and to really know that we sink or swim together. That these issues are all connected. We have to work in coalition. We have to be relentless.

We just have to be resolute and choose our battles carefully and there will be wins.

Carmen Rios: In 2011, Ms. led a groundbreaking campaign to change the FBI’s 82-year-old definition of rape, demanding that all survivors have access to justice. The definition used by the agency—“the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will”—excluded nonconsensual oral and anal sex, attacks with fingers, fists, and other objects, assaults where the victim was unconscious or otherwise unable to consent, and all male and non-binary victims. Because of its own limited definition, the FBI had undercounted rape claims by hundreds of thousands in crime reports, and survivors had been denied justice if their experiences didn’t fit in a narrow box.

Ms. responded the way it does best: By inviting survivors to be part of a storytelling campaign, launching a petition directed at the DoJ and FBI, and putting the issue on the cover. In Spring 2011, three simple but groundbreaking words filled that glossy page: RAPE IS RAPE.

“When it’s clear that those in power just don’t get it, the fight against rape seems endless,” Andrea Harris, a Ms. reader, wrote to the magazine after the campaign. “In 2011, lawmakers reminded us that they didn’t get it when they quietly tried to affirm the FBI’s distinction of real rape as ‘forcible.’ Yet also in 2011, Ms. reminded us that anti-rape work has not been in vain. Survivors aren’t alone anymore; those who abuse power – in the back of a car or from behind a government desk – will be called out.”

Vanessa Tyson: I was a little obsessed when I was a kid with this concept of fairness, because fairness on who’s terms? When and where do we get to this place called fair? Because it sounds like a lovely utopia, but so far I haven’t  really seen it.

So many of us were very devastated by the fact that an adjudicated sex offender, a convicted felon, was re-elected to the presidency of the United states. How are individual citizens expected to survive in a society that is grossly unfair, grossly unequal? 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? What would a world look like where victims of violence aren’t simply here to survive, but are here to thrive?

[Transition Music]

Carmen Rios: “History itself allows only the naive to honestly claim these last sixty years as a time of unequivocal progress,” Davis wrote in her 1975 piece, “especially when the elimination of racism and male supremacy is used as the yardstick.”

Fifty years since her piece was published in Ms., the sentiment rings truer than ever. 

According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, one in five women in the US has survived rape or an attempted rape; more than half report being raped by an intimate partner and more than 40 percent report being raped by an acquaintance. One in three of those women were between 11 and 17 when they were victimized. 

All told, 81 percent of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault—and recent CDC data found that nearly one in two women experience abuse from a partner in their lifetime. 

According to the National Domestic Violence Helpline, nearly 3 in 10 women in the US have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by a partner; 81 percent of them have reported significant impacts, and nearly 15 percent have been injured as a result. 1 in 4 have been the victim of “severe physical violence” at the hands of an intimate partner, and almost half of all women have experienced emotional abuse. According to Everytown, more than 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner on average every month. 

Jane Caputi: There’s still so much denial and cover-up and refusal to recognize this as systemic terrorism against women and femmes. It is institutionalized misogyny that has this kind of criminal expression, that not only injures, maims, and kills individual women, but all women know that we are, therefore, identified as prey, as object, and that this can happen to us.

Carmen Rios: Donna Decker —professor at Franklin Pierce University and author of the novel DANCING IN RED SHOES WILL KILL YOU, about the 1989 Montreal Massacre— wrote a piece for Ms. in the aftermath of the May 23, 2014 shooting spree in Isla Vista, California targeting sorority sisters. 

The shooter in Isla Vista, much like his counterpart nearly 25 years before in Montreal, was explicit in his mission, honed through his relationships with other users in sexist online groups. In a 137-page manifesto he published online, he wrote that he wanted to wage a “war on women” — his words! — to “punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex.” He encouraged men like him to, quote, “start envisioning a world where WOMEN FEAR YOU.” And in a YouTube video he posted the day before he killed six, injured 14, and took his own life, he declared that he would give the girls who rejected him “what they deserved.” 

A male blogger, Harris O’Malley, noted to Decker that the shooter was “drowning” in a world that celebrated, quote, “Manhood by violence. Manhood by force. Manhood by sex.” 

And yet, in her Fall 2014 piece, she lamented the familiar failure—of the mainstream media, of politicians and people in power, of our culture—to connect the dots between misogyny and violence.

Jane Caputi: I don’t doubt men are in pain, They would be in pain with this kind of gender role and these kinds of expectations. Men commit suicide more. Men are the victims more of violence.

It is important that we have every kind of gender equity, as well as the breakdown of this terribly difficult, hard-lined binary that demands that we fit into one of these two oppositionally, hierarchically-defined genders.

Carmen Rios: Actor Alan Alda, in the October 1975 issue of Ms., confronted that hard line in a satirical piece on so-called “testosterone poisoning” in men. “Does violence play a big part in your life?” he asked readers. “Before you answer, count up how many hours you watched football, ice hockey, and children’s cartoons this year on television. When someone crosses you, do you wish you could stuff his face full of your fist? Do you ever poke people in your fantasies or throw them to and fro at all? When someone cuts you off in traffic, do violent, angry curses come bubbling out of your mouth before you know it? If so, big fella,” he wrote, “you’re in trouble.”

50 years later, in the Summer 2025 issue of Ms., scholar and activist Jackson Katz guest-edited a special report on men and masculinity. In an excerpt from his book Every Man, he asserted that, quote, “too many people tend to regard gender-based violence as something unfortunate that happens to women, rather than something men do to them.”

In the Spring 2004 issue of Ms., professor Robert Jensen asserted that, quote, “in a culture where the dominant definition of sex is the taking of pleasure from women by men, rape is an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not a violation of those norms.” 

More than 20 years later, Katz added that, quote, “Any real hope of achieving dramatic reductions in the enormously high rates of men’s violence against women requires a radical revision of the very way in which we understand this vexing topic.” 

Unfortunately, manhood by violence, and manhood by force, and manhood by sex, are now instead concepts being modeled in the halls of power. 

Protestors: Who do we believe? ANITA HILL! Who do we believe? CHRISTINE FORD! If women suffer? SHUT IT DOWN! If women suffer? SHUT IT DOWN!

Carmen Rios: Those are the voices of survivors of sexual assault who gathered outside the US Supreme Court before the Senate’s final vote in 2018 to confirm Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the bench. 

After Kavanaugh was reported to be on Trump’s short list for Supreme Court nominees during his first term, Christine Blasey Ford courageously came forward with allegations that he and a friend had sexually assaulted her at a party when they were teenagers. After Blasey Ford shared her own story, more women spoke out, accusing Kavanaugh of similar sexually inappropriate and aggressive behavior. 

After Blasey Ford came forward, she was forced to uproot her entire family and relocate because she began to receive threats on her life. But Kavanaugh, despite widespread feminist outrage, was given a lifetime appointment to one of the most powerful positions in the U.S. government. 

The anti-feminist, anti-survivor agenda embodied in Trump’s nomination of Kavanaugh didn’t stop there.

During Trump’s first term, he rolled back protections for survivors, appointed anti-woman judges to benches across the country, and made excuses for men accused of gender-based violence. This time around, he’s initiating funding cuts, firings, and purges of government data and information that The 19th reports “have destabilized the infrastructure that helps victims of abuse.”

The President has frozen funds for domestic and sexual violence programs, putting thousands of domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers at risk of having to shutter critical services. His administration has also cancelled grants that were issued by the office on Violence Against Women’s Office of Justice Programs, disrupted grant cycles, and made major changes to eligibility parameters — banning programs that, quote, “frame domestic violence or sexual assault as systemic social justice issues.” 

Trump’s escalating attacks on immigrants—including his disregard for “sensitive zones,” like shelters, free from immigration enforcement, have also put women seeking asylum from violence, or escaping violence within the US, at incredible risk. 

And when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency laid off federal employees and shuttered some departments completely, the CDC’s team working on domestic and intimate partner violence was done away with completely.

None of this, of course, should surprise us. Trump was an alleged sexual offender the first time he ran for president, with dozens of accusations against him, and by the time he ran for re-election, he had been found guilty of sexual abuse. A close friend of Jeffrey Epstein’s, Trump has also been named in the Epstein Files, which he is now refusing to release—and has admitted to having knowledge that Epstein “stole” women from his resort properties for his trafficking operation. 

Jane Caputi: After that Access Hollywood video came out, with now President Trump boasting about I’m going to grab women by the pussy, there actually were some interviews published with women who actually switched their allegiance to Trump after this, saying it made me sure he was a man.

This ideology of the strong man and of this profoundly oppositional gender binary, in which women are weak and men are strong, in which men have to be heterosexual and LGBTQ people are despised, all of this justifies not only the strong man taking power, but the hierarchy, the use of domination to control people, to make it seem an honored, worshipful trait, not something that is an atrocity.

Carmen Rios: Trump himself has no hesitancy to worship such atrocities. He has consistently appointed and hired men who have allegations of gender-based violence and sexual misconduct, and he has empowered them to make decisions about policy and law that will impact survivors. 

Katz and Nourse both warned of changing tides for survivors, in the courts, in Congress—and in the minutiae of government administration.

Debra Katz: Violence against women, and sexism, and misogyny is deeply ingrained in our culture. And when you have the president, and those around him, who hate women or are hateful toward women, that sends a chilling message, and it infuses every aspect of public life.

We have seen the court deliver, at times, and make the world provide for rights, and make the world fairer. Unfortunately, we’re in an incredibly alarming, repressive time, where the Supreme Court has been packed by Trump nominees, and the rights that we held inviolate have been stripped from us.

It remains to be seen whether this court will protect the rights of workers, will protect the rights of women, will protect the rights of LGBT people, because this administration is hell bent in stripping us of every right that we have, and sending us back decades, maybe centuries.

Victoria Nourse: I don’t expect that this administration is going to do anything positive for this issue, in large part because it’s just not part of the traditional agenda. They have a traditional agenda of family first. That was the Ronald Reagan agenda, led many people to say, oh, this is a private affair, this is not something the government should take care of, or it should go back to the states.

Carmen Rios: For years, lawmakers across the aisle blocked the re-authorization of VAWA in order to keep what advocates call the ‘boyfriend loophole,’ which allows certain convicted abusers to keep firearms, wide open. Despite data showing that the presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increased the chance of murder of the woman by 500 percent, VAWA’s re-authorization in 2023 didn’t contain the provision.

Now, Nourse predicts further attempts to chip away at the promise of VAWA are coming down the pike.

Victoria Nourse: I expect that there will be cuts in funding for the Violence Against Women office. A lot of funding for these shelters comes from the Victims of Crime Act. When the federal government prosecutes rich criminals, who have extorted millions of dollars from consumers, or revealed private information, the Justice Department gets a settlement, and they’re often billions of dollars and a percentage of that goes into this Victims of Crime fund. 

If you don’t prosecute billionaires and millionaires, then there’s less funding, and this happened during the last Trump administration. The VOCA fund went precipitously down.

[Transition Music]

Carmen Rios: Like the other issues we’ve explored in this show, the struggle to end gender-based violence has not been linear. And right now, it can be frustrating to see so much backsliding. But the experts I spoke to — women who have been in this movement for decades — balanced their impatience for progress with their optimism for what comes next and their fervent hope to make a new reality possible.

Victoria Nourse: I think we will see slow progress on gender violence as we go forward. It won’t be easy, particularly not in the current environment. We need to maybe take a pause about grand schemes and recognize that change often comes from fixing nuts and bolts and listening, of course, to survivors, but it has to be an all of the above strategy. We need to have a big vision of equality at the top. We need to have people working on legal remedies, as well as taking care of survivors.

At Georgetown, we say law is the means, justice is in the end. Justice is a hard road. It always…you go forward, one step back, two steps, one step back, two steps.

Carmen Rios: When it comes to the nuts and bolts, Katz and Nourse are looking to the states.

Debra Katz: At the state level, there are definitely gains to be made, and there are some states that are just committed to trying to fill those gaps, and we should be working with state legislators to pass progressive laws right now. From lowering the standard for proof in sexual harassment cases, to increasing damages, and getting rid of caps, to allowing us to go after individual harassers, to not allowing certain defenses that are just readily taking place at the federal level.

In the aftermath of the #MeToo movement, many states changed their laws to make it easier for victims of harassment, and sexual violence, to come forward, and change the standard of proof to prove a sexually hostile work environment claim federally, you have to show that the harassment is either severe or pervasive. But what we found was in the federal courts, that was really a Rorschach test. You could take the same facts in one court, where you had a conservative judge, and they would say it’s neither severe nor pervasive, and another judge would say, yes, grabbing somebody five times, hitting on somebody, discussing sex in the most vile terms, ogling somebody’s body, clearly, sexually hostile work environment, because it’s a very subjective standard. Many states have done away with that standard because it was an unworkable standard. There is still very important work to be done to make the laws easier for individuals to achieve justice. In the federal laws, you can’t hold individual harassers responsible. Title 7 claims are brought against companies, and there are caps on damages. The value that Congress put on those claims for compensatory and punitive damages has diminished by, I think, 60% of their value from when they were passed in 1991. There has not been an increase on those damages. Many states and jurisdictions, like where I practice, DC, New York, California, there are no caps on damages, and you can bring claims against individuals. That is crucially important. It’s what everybody who advocates on these issues should be pressing for.

Victoria Nourse: It turns out that the common law of sexual assault has not rid itself of all of the things that we still think of as stereotypes, like blaming the victim. States could go a long way. Everything from process-based, statutes of limitations issues, to defenses that are often raised that you can legislate against. You can define consent in particular ways. You could change evidentiary rules. A lot of it is very much in the weeds. But it’s worth taking a go at that. Changing the rules can make a difference. 

Carmen Rios: Nourse is also adamant that the persistence of gender-based violence is just one more piece of proof that we need an Equal Rights Amendment.

Victoria Nourse: Something as basic as this kind of assault, which is disproportionately affecting women, to a high degree, it’s like 90 percent. It’s something that we need to treat through an equal protection lens.

The equal protection component in the ERA is important because Congress could then have power to pass a federal remedy, so that it wouldn’t matter whether you’re in Alabama, Mississippi, New York, California, Montana.

A constitutional amendment prevents you from backsliding from a normative base that is widely shared across the country. That’s why to keep pushing in the states. If you’re in a state that has an ERA, great, If you’re in a state that didn’t vote for it, you should try to get it ratified. 

Carmen Rios: Tyson, Sweet, and Caputi, although just as eager to see tangible policy change — and constitutional and political equality— also stressed the urgency of building the world we want, however we can, whenever we can — in our own lives, in our own communities, and in our own movement.

Vanessa Tyson: We’ve got to stop being perfect and start being awesome. We have to figure out our true north and start following it. We need to focus on long-term realities.

Ellen Sweet: My generation, feminist mothers and fathers, produced children and those children have now become feminist mothers and fathers. I’m very hopeful that more and more women and men are starting to realize that a patriarchal, male-dominated, use-of-violence society is not good for anybody.

Jane Caputi: We’re in the middle of this terrible backlash because patriarchy does feel so threatened, and I do mean white supremacists, capitalists, heterosexual, patriarchy, right?

It’s terrible, and it’s getting worse, but it’s because we have been so successful so far. We’ve gotten laws against rape in marriage, against sexual harassment. For years, these were just thought of as normal occurrences, impossible to legislate. 

There really has been so much opened up in terms of a transformation, not only of consciousness, but of society. There is a serious backlash, but if we learn from women’s history, that’s when we have to keep pressing on.

We have to keep showing that there is another way, and living that way.

Carmen Rios: For more than 50 years, Ms. has given feminists the language to confront the reality of our everyday lives inside of rape culture, patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. The feminists who have shared their stories and strategies in the pages of Ms. have been committed, as Caputi and Russell wrote in 1990, to, quote, “face horror in ways that do not destroy but save us.”

In this trying moment for women, survivors, and feminists across the country, we must confront the violent culture that dictates our lives — and hold on to the lessons in our collective history that remind us another way forward is possible. We can make the tomorrow we want take shape — if we come together in struggle and create new ways of being.

[Transition Music]

Carmen Rios: Thank you so much for tuning in to the fourth episode of LOOKING BACK, MOVING FORWARD: a podcast celebrating 50 years of Ms. and what’s yet to come as we carve out the second half of this feminist century.

If you liked what you heard today, you know the drill: Be sure to subscribe to this show wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can also find more from every episode, including my full interviews with our incredible guests and episode notes, at ms magazine dot com and ms magazine dot com slash podcast.

Be sure to stay in touch between episodes, too! You can follow Ms. on Facebook at msmagazine, at ms underscore magazine on Instagram and Threads and via msmagazine dot com on BlueSky, and you can find me at carmen fucking rios dot com and on social media everywhere at carmen rios, with three s’s — thats c a r m e n r i o s s s. 

Looking Back, Moving Forward is produced by Ms. Studios. Our executive producers are Michele Goodwin and Kathy Spillar. Our Supervising Producer, Writer, and Host is yours truly, Carmen Rios. Our episode producers are Roxy Szal and Oliver Haug. This episode was edited by Emersen Panigrahi. Art and design for this show are by Brandi Phipps.

Ms. is a non-profit, reader-funded magazine. Head to msmagazine dot com and hit JOIN to become a member or sustaining member today. You’ll get every issue of the magazine in print and in the Ms. app, access special member-only newsletters, discounted and early access to our community events, and special supporter gifts! 

You can dive deeper into the history of Ms. by ordering your copy of the collection 50 Years of Ms: The Best of the Pathfinding Magazine That Ignited a Revolution at bookstores and online at ms magazine dot com slash book. And now, for the first time, you can explore the entire digital collection of Ms. magazines, 1972-present, at your public or university library through ProQuest! Ask your librarian to add the new Ms. Magazine Archive to their collections if you can’t find it.

Thanks to the Democratic Women’s Caucus for permission to use audio of Rep. Gwen Moore and Rep. Debbie Dingell. 

Audio from the video “Survivors Speak Out Against #Kavanaugh Confirmation” by alchymediatv is licensed under Creative Commons. To watch more from the video, go to youtube dot com slash at alchymediatv — a-l-c-h-y-media-tv.

Our theme song is stock media provided by ProClips via Pond5.

Until next time, readers.

[THEME MUSIC FADE OUT]