We rang in Independence Day by demanding better.
Weekly Digest | July 6, 2019
Letter From an Editor
The latest issue of Ms. turned out to be a perfect fit for the Fourth of July. Inside its pages, we zero in on the fights for women's fundamental reproductive rights being waged across the country, explore the urgent need for more women's voices in U.S. peace-making processes and even call out the founding documents for enshrining gender inequality.
This week, we marked the holiday by rolling out some excerpts of the reporting inside that Summer issue, which I've included below. (JSYK: It's not too late to become a member to read the whole thing before it hits newsstands!) But our calls for freedom, of course, didn't end with excerpts.
This week at msmagazine.com, we told the stories of the Angry Tías and Abuelas taking action for immigrants in the Rio Grande Valley and celebrated generations of LGBTQ resistance. We called out the hypocrisy of so-called "pro-life" policies that put pregnant women in prison and amplified calls for real reproductive justice for women of color. We explored the potential power of cooperative economies.
We demanded and imagined a better country—one that lives up to its promise.
“We’re here for the duration," Joy Harjo, the first-ever Native American U.S. Poet Laureate, told us in this week's Ms. Q&A. "We have to continue, we have to keep going. We have to lift people up with our thoughts, actions, our work.”
That is the work we've always done here at Ms. Our latest issue—and all the issues before it—are proof of the power of that persistence.
Onward,
Carmen Rios
Managing Digital Editor, Ms.
More Must-Reads from Ms.
What is at stake today is more than the right to abortion; it is the ability of half of our population to be free from state surveillance and punishment, to make our own medical decisions, to have access to health care, to have our government protect and not violate our human rights. The anti-abortion movement has been working to create a framework that recognizes fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as separate “persons” under the law to be protected, even from the women who carry them. This framework has been utilized to prosecute; civilly commit to hospitals, treatment programs and mental institutions; and force medical procedures upon hundreds of pregnant women in the U.S.
A lot of people saw NOW’s signature brand of activism for the first time when, in February 1970, NOW leaders disrupted Senate hearings to demand that the Equal Rights Amendment be considered by the full Congress. It was time then, and it’s long past time now.
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Talks between the U.S. and the Taliban, part of the Trump administration’s exit strategy for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, have been viewed by many as an outrage since neither women nor representatives from the democratically elected Afghan government were invited to the negotiating table. Their exclusion—and the prospect of allowing the Taliban a key role in the governance of their country—has galvanized Afghan women around equal rights.
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