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.
‘Liberation’ Play
2025’s Top Feminist Moments in Pop Culture
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.
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.
‘Liberation’ Playwright Bess Wohl on Theater as Resistance: ‘Theater Is Dialogue. Autocracy Is a Monologue.’
At the Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.) Global Women’s Rights Awards on Nov. 18 in Los Angeles, FMF honored the team behind the Broadway smash hit Liberation: playwright Bess Wohl, director Whitney White and Lisa Cronin Wohl, an OG Ms. writer from the 1970s.
“Theater is made up of dialogue. Autocracy is a monologue. Theater is about community: We watch a play together. Autocracy seeks to isolate us. Theater is about curiosity: A good play asks a question. Autocracy is not interested in questions, only in control.
“So, thank you, because in honoring this play, you honor the role of dialogue, community and questions in creating social change.”
‘Liberation’ Opens on Broadway—And Ms. Magazine Is at Its Heart
The feminist revolution has taken center stage. Liberation, written by Bess Wohl and directed by Whitney White, officially opened on Broadway on Oct. 28, 2025, at the James Earl Jones Theatre, following a critically acclaimed Off-Broadway run earlier this year.
In an interview with Vogue, Wohl said she was inspired by her mother’s work as an editor at Ms.: “The arc of history is so much longer than we realize. Already in 1970 women were feeling frustrated, like, ‘When is this gonna happen?’ … And I think that that urgency really powers so much of the story of the play.”
‘Liberation’: A Play About Love and Freedom in the Trump Era
Liberation—running off-Broadway through April 6—offers a timely exploration of feminism, generational divides, and the persistent struggle for women’s rights, showing how much has changed … and yet how much remains the same.