As 2025 comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to honor the wins—large and small—that reminded us progress is still possible. Here are a few feminist victories worth celebrating.
New York
Ms. Magazine’s Top Feminists of 2025
In a year marked by democratic backsliding, cultural reckoning and organized resistance, these feminists reshaped power, through law, leadership, art and collective courage.
A Feminist Historian’s Year-End Reading and Viewing Guide
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.
Where ACA Premiums Could Spike Most in 2026 if Congress Lets Enhanced Tax Credits Expire
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) offers premium tax credits to help make health insurance more affordable. Under original Affordable Care Act provisions, an income cap for premium tax credits was set at 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Above that threshold, federal financial assistance was not available, creating a “subsidy cliff.”
Enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of this year. Enrollees currently receiving premium tax credits at any level of income will see their federal assistance decrease or disappear if enhanced premium tax credits expire, with an average increase of 114 percent to what enrollees pay in premiums net of tax credits.
The impact will be greatest for those whose unsubsidized premiums are highest: older Marketplace enrollees and those living in higher-premium locales.
War on Women Report: Antiabortion Extremist Charged in S.C. Shooting; Army OB-GYN Accused of Abusing Over 85 Women Patients
MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide—the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.” We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.
Since our last report:
—North Dakota’s Supreme Court reinstated a total abortion ban, making it the 13th state with a near-total ban on abortion.
—Trump ordered Catherine Lucey, a woman reporter for Bloomberg, to be “quiet, piggy.”
—The U.S. moved to categorize countries with state-sponsored abortion and DEI policies as violators of human rights.
—Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has sued Planned Parenthood over allegedly “misrepresenting the safety” of abortion pills.
—On Thursday, Dec. 4, an unprecedented law banning doctors from shipping abortion pills takes effect in Texas.
—”The country’s most respected newspaper hosted a conversation about whether women’s equality and freedom was a mistake.”
—Doctor Maj. Blaine McGraw, an OB-GYN at Fort Hood military base in Texas, the third-largest base in the country, is under investigation for sexual abuse against patients. As of Monday, 85 victims have come forward.
—With Jeffrey Epstein survivors watching from the gallery above, the House agreed in a near-unanimous vote to force the release of all files related to the investigation of the convicted sex offender.
… and more.
Actually It’s Good That Fewer High Schoolers Want to Get Married
High schoolers, and especially high school girls, are less likely than ever to say that they want to get married someday, according to new research from Pew Research Center. While boys have stayed fairly stable in how many of them say they want to marry, girls have gone from overwhelmingly wanting marriage to being even less likely than boys to want to wed.
Conservative groups and writers have met this new survey with some panic. If 12th graders don’t want to get married, I guess the logic goes, then they won’t get married, and America’s declining rates of marriage and childbearing will continue and will eventually destroy society. To them, this new survey indicates a broader social shift away from marriage and childbearing, which is bad, because in their view, the nuclear family is the good and necessary backbone of any moral and functional culture.
But actually, it’s great that far fewer high school girls are even thinking about marriage.
The teenage girls who are thinking about their weekends instead of their weddings? They’re doing something right.
Fear, Privilege and the Illusion of Safety in ‘Only Murders in the Building’
As Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building unfolds, safety begins to look less like locked doors and more like open conversation.
The friendship among Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) is where this transformation starts. Mabel—young, Latina and less financially secure—doesn’t fit the Arconia’s image of who belongs. But through her, Charles and Oliver begin to question the false comfort of wealth and privacy. Together, they build a kind of safety grounded in trust and shared vulnerability.
By its later seasons, Only Murders has redefined what security means. It’s no longer about who can afford to keep others out—it’s about who’s willing to let others in. The show suggests that real safety comes not from walls, locks or property values, but from empathy, care and connection.
A Brighter Day in the United States: Feminist Lessons from Election 2025
Tuesday’s election results allow us to recalibrate with bold vision.
As the political pundits do their thing across the airwaves, here is yet another hot take on it all—feminist style.
2025’s Pink Wave: Election Night Marks Historic Wins for Women’s Representation
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:
—Elections in Virginia and New Jersey make history for women’s representation in the U.S.
—Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces she will not seek reelection, marking the close to one of the most consequential careers in modern American politics.
—New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announces his transition team will be led entirely by women.
… and more.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Foiled in Scheme to Extend Texas Abortion Ban to New York
The battle over abortion rights crossed state lines last week when a Hudson Valley judge refused to enforce a Texas abortion ban in New York state. On Friday, Oct. 31, the judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton against a New York clerk who refused to accept papers to enforce a Texas judgment against Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a New York doctor who provided telehealth abortion services to a Texas woman.
“The New York judge’s dismissal of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s frivolous lawsuit is welcomed but expected,” said the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine.
“Our shield law exists to protect New Yorkers from out-of-state extremists, and New York will always stand strong as a safe haven for healthcare and freedom of choice,” said Attorney General Letitia James.