More Than A Magazine, A Movement
From the Summer 2010 issue of Ms.: “In 10 years, we will look back and consider it ludicrous that we ever prosecuted children for prostitution.”
(For more ground-breaking stories like this, order 50 YEARS OF Ms.: THE BEST OF THE PATHFINDING MAGAZINE THAT IGNITED A REVOLUTION, Alfred A. Knopf—a collection of the most audacious, norm-breaking coverage Ms. has published.)
Abortions are sought by a wide range of people for many different reasons. There is no single story. Telling stories of then and now shows how critical abortion has been and continues to be for women and girls. (Share your abortion story by emailing myabortionstory@msmagazine.com.)
In this edition of Our Abortion Stories, women share how abortion has shaped their lives and how abortion restrictions in Mississippi have created challenging work environments for providers.
The anti-feminist Independent Women’s Voice/Forum (IWF/V), backed by billionaires and anti-abortion zealots, is poised to use its leaders’ identities as women to convince voters that the GOP will protect Americans’ rights and freedoms, like access to birth control and the ability to choose if and when to have children. IWF/V’s past positions, the known agendas of their funders and their membership to Project 2025 belie their true intentions.
Black women are often in the crosshairs of abusive discourse driven by social media. That recent targets are often public figures suggests that social media abusers find it profitable to attack high-profile Black women who have become symbolic avatars for the group as a whole.
(This article originally appears in the Spring 2024 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)
The 16th annual Global Women’s Rights Awards, hosted by the Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.), convened Tuesday evening in Los Angeles. This year’s awards celebrated the activism to secure final ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and the bravery of both U.S. and Afghan women in the face of misogynistic laws and leadership.
The evening recognized three honorees in particular who have contributed greatly to advancing the rights of women and girls: Former U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, Dr. Austin Dennard, and the Bread and Roses documentary team, including director Sahra Mani.
In the rap battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, serious accusations of violence against women and girls were repeatedly reduced to punchlines in these diss tracks.
We don’t deserve to see our experiences, especially our most painful ones, turned into punchlines.
The Texas Supreme Court is considering whether to take up a case that could have Alabama-esque impacts on in vitro fertilization in Texas.
What began as a Denton divorce has grown into a larger battle over whether a frozen embryo can be defined as a person. The court has not yet said whether it will take up the case, which centers on three frozen embryos created by Caroline and Gaby Antoun.
Earlier this year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos qualify as people under the state’s wrongful death statute, leading fertility clinics to halt their work until the legislature stepped in and granted temporary protections. While the details are different, legal experts and fertility doctors say the results of this Texas case could be similar.
Rowena Chiu began working for Harvey Weinstein in 1998, assisting in the London office with his European film productions. Later that year, at the Venice Film Festival, she found herself at a late-night meeting with the producer. There, she recalls, Weinstein told her “he’d never had a Chinese girl” before attempting to rape her.
After signing a nondisclosure agreement, Chiu spent nearly two decades in what she describes as “constant fear”—“fear of Harvey’s abuse, control and power; that the story would come back to haunt me; that I would inadvertently slip up on my promise to never speak of this.” She was finally inspired to speak out by the powerful testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, whose decision to “speak up” about Brett Kavanaugh in September 2018 made a lasting impression.
“I can briefly glory in the relief that I am no longer sitting on a sickening secret,” she wrote.
Because of women, care has become a top concern among voters and a unifier across gender, race and party identification. And care issues are most powerful as a motivator for civic engagement when linked with other top priorities for voters—including reproductive rights, tax equity and kitchen table economics.
It is no coincidence that at the same moment U.S. democracy is facing existential threats, we are also witnessing profound assaults not only on the body politic but on our bodily autonomy.
One of the biggest threats to the consolidation of power is an empowered and engaged populace—particularly women, the LGBTQ community and people of color. Which is why anti-democratic leaders are doing all they can to limit and curtail the power of these communities. This moment requires progressive and pro-democracy funders to understand the attacks to reproductive freedom, LGBTQ liberation, and racial justice not as distinct or disparate—but as central to the attacks to our democracy itself, and to fund accordingly.
