Caregiving Is Extremely Difficult in America. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way.

PUBLISHED 11/25/2025 by

For many Asian and immigrant families, caregiving is a way of life, with generations living and caring for one another under the same roof as part of daily life. My Iranian grandparents lived in a multi-unit dwelling in Tehran, where they cared for each other through illness and aging, cooking and sharing meals with their children and grandchildren in what seemed to me a seamless synchronicity. When my Pakistani grandmother emigrated from Karachi to the U.K. in the 1970s, she moved in with my uncle’s family, sharing a bedroom with her youngest grandson until she died. Now, that grandson lives in the same house with his own children and aging parents. 

However, here in the U.S., caregiving takes on a very different form, even for families raised on the belief that caring for another is simply what we do.

Are We Ever Off Work, or Just Out of Office? The OOO Messages Exposing America’s Care Crisis

PUBLISHED 11/25/2025 by

A new public awareness campaign, “Out of Office for Care,” launched this week invites employees to set their “OOO” automated email replies to accurately reflect the array of care responsibilities that pull them away from work, and then share those messages publicly.

People across industries—artists, founders, caregivers, cultural influencers, nurses, educators, nonprofit leaders, small business owners and parents—can give the country an unfiltered look at why they step away from work, and what it costs to do so without paid leave.

OOO replies range from clever to catastrophic. Some name the person they are caring for; others reveal the exhaustion of trying to do it all. All together, they show a country exerting caring in every direction and a policy landscape that hasn’t caught up.

Among those making the rounds:
—”I’m OOO because inexplicably school ends at 3 and work ends at 5 at best. … I can’t keep up, I need sleep, I’m getting a cold, everything is expensive and unnecessarily hard, and the holidays are coming.”
—”I’m OOO because my parents are getting older and I can’t manage their RX and 500 unread emails at once. In-home care is $60K and I have limited PTO. WiIl get back to you ASAP!”
—“Hi, sorry to miss you! I’m OOO because I just gave birth, but like 1 in 4 women in the U.S. I’ll be back at work in a couple weeks.”

‘Liberation’ Playwright Bess Wohl on Theater as Resistance: ‘Theater Is Dialogue. Autocracy Is a Monologue.’

PUBLISHED 11/25/2025 by

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.”

Survivors Know the Signs of Abuse—And Marjorie Taylor Greene Finally Sees Them in Trump

PUBLISHED 11/24/2025 by

Many survivors have recognized Donald Trump’s abusive behavior for years. Now, remarkably, Marjorie Taylor Greene says she sees it too.

Her recent break with the president is a study in what it takes to leave an abusive relationship: recognizing the harm, planning for the fallout and relying on a network of support. Greene believed Trump’s promises, endured his public berating and faced an avalanche of threats when she dared to oppose him. Yet she left anyway—because her constituents told her they had her back. Survivors understand that moment well: the instant when the fear of staying finally outweighs the fear of leaving. And in this political season, their hard-won wisdom offers a roadmap not only for those trapped in abusive homes, but for a country grappling with a leader who uses the same tactics to consolidate power.

What to Know About the CDC’s Baseless New Guidance on Autism

PUBLISHED 11/24/2025 by

The rewriting of a page on the CDC’s website to assert the false claim that vaccines may cause autism sparked a torrent of anger and anguish from doctors, scientists and parents who say Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrecking the credibility of an agency they’ve long relied on for unbiased scientific evidence.

The revised CDC webpage will be used to support efforts to ditch most childhood vaccines, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine. “It will be cited as evidence, even though it’s completely invented,” she said.

A Bill Criminalizing Abortion Failed in the South Carolina Senate, But S.C. Prosecutors Have Long Treated Pregnancy as a Crime

PUBLISHED 11/24/2025 by

We have to talk about South Carolina.

Last week, what could have become the most punitive abortion law in the U.S., SB 323, failed in the South Carolina Senate. The bill proposed banning abortion in almost all circumstances, criminalizing people who sought abortion care, and removed any exceptions for rape, incest or fetal anomaly currently written into the state’s already strict six-week ban.

The defeat of SB 323 is a victory that was won by dedicated and fierce advocates from across the state and across the country. But South Carolina has been actively engaged in policing the bodies of pregnant women, and in criminalizing pregnancy, for decades.

The prosecutorial “hold my beer” approach to criminalizing abortion shows us not only just broken the criminal legal system is, but also, just how little regard they have for the humanity of people with the capacity for pregnancy. 

Six Ways Masculine Stereotypes Are Still Limiting Boys

PUBLISHED 11/24/2025 by

Rigid norms of manhood—based in manly confidence and toughness, emotional stoicism, disdain for femininity and dog-eat-dog banter—are influential among boys and young men.

Between one quarter and one half of boys and young men endorse these norms. Over half feel pressure from others to live up to them, believing most people expect them always to be confident, strong and tough.

These are some of the findings from a new Australian survey of adolescents aged 14-18 years, conducted by The Men’s Project at Jesuit Social Services.

In a climate of heightened concern about boys and young men and violent masculinity, this study provides invaluable data on boys’ and young men’s own views. This includes the pressures they feel to live up to stereotypical masculine norms and the profound impact of those beliefs.

Novel ‘Truth Is’ Shows What It Really Takes for a Teen to Get an Abortion in 2025

PUBLISHED 11/22/2025 by

Truth Is is a pro-choice novel in every sense of the phrase. Truth’s choice to move forward with an abortion is made early on in the novel and the majority of the book focuses on her life and her choices after her decision.

I hope that years from now, a student picks up this book and reads about the challenges that the book’s main character Truth faces and goes, “Is that really how it was back then?”

For adults who engage with Truth’s story, I want us to consider the limitations we sometimes unknowingly put on young people. I want us to consider the heights young people could reach if they were granted opportunities and community support, the way Truth ultimately does in the novel.

What Boys Learn When Powerful Men Face No Consequences

PUBLISHED 11/21/2025 by

For decades, Donald Trump has modeled a version of masculinity rooted in entitlement, impunity and the casual degradation of women—and he has done so from one of the most visible platforms on Earth. That visibility matters. When the most powerful man in the country repeatedly evades consequences for misogynous acts, it sends a potent cultural message to boys and young men about what manhood looks like and what women’s lives are worth.

This is why the stakes of the Epstein files extend far beyond Trump’s personal exposure. His ability—or inability—to finally face accountability is inseparable from the broader crisis of male socialization and the normalization of men’s violence against women.

At the same time, focusing solely on Trump risks missing the larger system that made Jeffrey Epstein’s predation possible. As feminists have long argued, these abuses were not aberrations but expressions of a patriarchal network that exploited girls and women with impunity. The Epstein saga is not simply a story of individual bad actors; it is an indictment of the cultural, financial and political institutions that protected them. Whether the public and political leaders confront that reality—or once again look away—will reveal as much about our collective values as it does about the men at the center of this scandal.

The Resistance Is Everywhere

PUBLISHED 11/21/2025 by | UPDATED 11/24/2025 at 1:41 P.M. PT

These past 10 months have been tough. Every day a fresh outrage, more trampling of the Constitution and a new attack on common decency. Taking a page from Hollywood, Trump and his administration seem to have embraced a strategy of “everything, everywhere all at once.” 

But, unfortunately for them: The resistance has also been everywhere all at once, too.

There is no doubt that when historians look back on this sordid moment in history, they will conclude that it was women, and feminists, who led the way out of it.