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Gloria Steinem Never Lost Hope Or Purpose. Neither Can We.
Gloria didn’t believe that history’s pendulum automatically swings back on its own. It swings because people organize, build movements, and refuse to give up.
Sep 16, 2026
“How can I be of service?”
That was the phone message Gloria Steinem kept leaving at the office of the African National Congress Parliamentary Women’s Caucus in Cape Town, South Africa in 1997.
I had arrived in the country a year earlier, working as a young staffer for some of the first women elected to lead South Africa’s new democracy. When they asked if I wanted to call that American woman back, I jumped at the chance.
Soon Gloria was on her way to Cape Town, and I was assigned to pick her up at the airport.
As this global icon—something she hated to be called—stepped into my rusted car, the first thing I remember is asking her to keep her head near the window as exhaust crept in through a hole in the floor. (She didn’t flinch.)
When she turned to me, she was both generous and matter-of-fact: “How can I help?”
The road ahead will not be easy. It will require new leadership and new lessons. But we do know how to begin.
With that, I became one of countless women who would become part of Gloria’s ever-expanding circle. For the next three decades, a group of us would be invited into the colorful living room of her New York brownstone to share updates on our work and to inevitably be asked once again: “How can I help?”
After Gloria’s death, we—and millions of others—are left reflecting on the lessons of her life. How can we make sense of a time when our politics seem to be the very opposite of her life’s work?
She wouldn’t have allowed me to ponder that question for long.
In the dark days following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, I went to visit her. My group chats with women I’d spent my career working alongside were blowing up. My nieces called me, furious and worried. All of us were terrified and angry.
When I walked into that familiar yellow living room on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the grief I expected to find was nowhere in sight. “It’s okay, the pendulum is swinging one way now, but it will swing back. We will get through this.”
Along with wit and humor, Gloria’s most defining characteristic was her optimism. She called herself a “hope-a-holic.”
Years of bitter backlash to the feminist movement didn’t make her cynical, it made her hopeful. She had seen the other side of backlash: the progress that suddenly emerges after years where nothing seems easy.
She also understood intuitively that despair was a political weapon, and she refused to supply it.
Adversaries of the feminist movement would change over time. Whether it was Phyllis Schlafly or Jerry Falwell, Rush Limbaugh or that guy at the end of the bar, they still seemed to have something in common. They were counting on us to feel hopeless and helpless. Their power depended on us questioning our own.
With Donald Trump as our bully-in-chief, that’s a lesson we should remember now. We’ve seen him before.
Gloria didn’t believe that history’s pendulum automatically swings back on its own. It swings because people organize, build movements, and refuse to give up.
Perhaps one of her most important lessons was also her most prescient. As we face the most misogynist administration in my lifetime, we also face the most racist, with relentless attacks on civil rights; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); and the truth about US history. Gloria understood deeply that there could be no gender justice without racial justice. As she said in 2017, “If it’s White, it’s not feminism—by definition, it includes all women.”
She acted on that commitment by ensuring that Black women and women of color spoke with her side by side, including brilliant activists like Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Florynce “Flo” Kennedy. She was also canny and practical about her power as a white woman. She saw that she could reach other white women, get them into a room, and open a conversation about upending racism and sexism together.
Ever the organizer, Gloria was also deeply practical. Inviting another leader to speak by her side meant you could get twice the audience. Movements are built in crowded rooms.
Donald Trump’s entire project can be summed up in one word: division. He knows that sowing mistrust is key to consolidating power at the top. As long as we are fighting with each other, we won’t see how much we have in common.
It’s the exact opposite of the ethos that came to define Gloria’s worldview, which she often summed up as, “We are linked, not ranked.”
Her death comes just as a multiracial, multigenerational coalition is required to defeat authoritarianism. Gloria’s principled—and practical—approach to movement building is now a road map. The bigger the movement, the further and faster the pendulum will swing.
A decade ago, a reporter asked Gloria if she was ready to pass the torch to the next generation of activists.
“I’m not giving up my torch, thank you very much,” she replied. “I am using it to light other people’s torches.”
As we raise our own torches, we light up a world in immense crisis. The road ahead will not be easy. It will require new leadership and new lessons.
But we do know how to begin. Now it’s our turn to ask: “How can I help?”
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We All Stand on Gloria Steinem’s Shoulders
Those who don’t know the full history of the feminist icon have little understanding of how far we have come, how we got here, and what still needs to change to make America more livable, humane, democratic, and inclusive.
Sep 13, 2026
Gloria Steinem, who died September 2 at ninety-two, was the leading voice and public face of second-wave feminism that began in the 1960s. Thanks to the tireless work of Steinem and others, America is today a more inclusive society for women in both attitude and practice. It is a credit to her generation of activists that later generations now embrace feminism’s goals that were once considered radical, impractical, or even a violation of human nature. Steinem “awakened a vast and often skeptical public to problems like domestic violence, the lack of affordable child care, and unfair hiring practices,” President Barack Obama said in 2013 when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “She also changed how women thought about themselves.”
Today, 75 percent of Americans (including 64 percent of Republicans) think Congress should guarantee twelve weeks of annual paid family and medical leave to all employees. Almost three-quarters support government-funded universal childcare. Also, 57 percent want Congress to pass legislation to codify nationwide rights to abortion, contraception, and in vitro fertilization and 62 percent think it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage – a long-time part of feminism’s agenda.
Americans also support equal pay for women and strong protections against and punishment for sexual harassment and rape. They believe that couples should share housework and childcare. They don’t think that gender should limit a person’s ability to enter professions once dominated by men, such as law, engineering, medicine, construction, journalism, and military service.
There are more Americans who embrace these goals than there are self-identified feminists. This might be a good thing. It means that many feminist ideas have become so mainstream that Americans take them for granted. But it could also mean that our society may not appreciate—or even know about—the struggles that previous generations of women endured to change attitudes and practices and win rights.
Born in 1934, Steinem had a peripatetic childhood. Her family dealt with challenging financial circumstances, which may explain why she viewed women’s issues through the lens of class as well as gender. Her father, Leo, was a Jewish itinerant antiques dealer routinely on the precipice of financial ruin. Her mother, Ruth, was a former journalist born to a Presbyterian family. After her parents divorced when she was eleven, she and her mother moved into a condemned farmhouse. Her mother suffered from depression, and Steinem became her caretaker, cook, and housekeeper.
Part of what gave her the resilience to persevere was the example of her paternal grandmother, Pauline Steinem, who was president of the Ohio Suffrage Association from 1908 to 1911, a leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education. In a testimonial to her grandmother, Steinem noted that in her campaign for the school board, “she was elected on a coalition ticket with the socialists and the anarchists.” In the 1930s, Pauline helped rescue many members of her family who lived in Germany from the Nazis. Although Pauline died when Gloria was five, she left her what Gloria later called vivid “sense memories” of her strength, courage, and intelligence.
Gloria was raised without much religious involvement; ironically, it was her Christian mother who taught her to be proud of her Jewish heritage, educating her daughter about the horrors of the Holocaust. “Never in my life have I identified myself as a Christian,” Steinem once said, “but wherever there is antisemitism, I identify as a Jew.”
In 1956, Steinem graduated from Smith College, where she majored in government and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. After a few years living on a fellowship in India, where she was inspired by the nonviolent movement led by Mahatma Ghandi that overthrew British colonialism, she moved to New York City to pursue a career as a journalist.
No sooner had she died when some social media warriors started attacking her as a one-time CIA agent. The reality is more complicated. Around 1958, she worked for the Independent Research Service (IRS), which was set up to recruit American college students to attend World Youth Festivals sponsored by the Soviet Union and countries in its orbit. It was the height of the Cold War and the goal was to have liberal non-Communist voices at those events. The IRS was covertly funded by the CIA through foundations, as were many liberal nonprofit organizations and publications at the time, including the National Student Association - a connection that Ramparts magazine exposed in 1967. Steinem never denied her work for the IRC and was not ashamed of it, although it is likely that she did not know where the money came from. She was not involved in the CIA’s nefarious activities of overthrowing democratic governments, which came to light long after she spent three years with the IRS in her twenties. These attacks on Steinem’s work for the IRS are a cheap shot, meant to discredit her feminist and progressive credentials.
Steinem came of age in the 1950s, when women were treated like second-class citizens in almost every aspect of society. When she returned to the U.S., she had to overcome many gender barriers to make her way in the world of journalism. (The National Press Club didn’t allow women members until 1971). She worked for a new magazine of political satire, Help!, and contributed short articles to women’s magazines such as Glamour and Ladies’ Home Journal. After writing several pieces for Esquire without being credited, she finally published her first bylined article in the men’s magazine in 1962. The article, published a year before Betty Friedan’s pathbreaking manifesto, The Feminine Mystique, was about the then-new contraceptive pill. She examined the fact that women often had to choose between a career and marriage. “The only trouble with sexually liberating women,” Steinem ended the article, “is that there aren’t enough sexually liberated men to go around.” The following year, Steinem made a big splash with “A Bunny’s Tale” in Show magazine. Steinem got a job working at a Playboy Club for the article, which exposed the decidedly unglamorous working conditions faced by the club’s waitresses, who were required to wear a corset, rabbit ears, cotton tails, and high heels.
Steinem made a living as a freelance writer, profiling celebrities and writing about popular culture for major publications. But she could not persuade editors to assign her serious political subjects. Eventually she began writing a column for New York, which she helped launch in 1968. There she covered a variety of topics: Ho Chi Minh’s years living in New York, wounded veterans returning from Vietnam, neighborhood battles over childcare centers, antiwar demonstrations, migrant workers, the New York City mayoral race, and the 1968 presidential campaign.
Two articles in the magazine established her as a feminist spokesperson. In 1969, she was outraged by what she heard at a “speak out” of women discussing how their illegal abortions made them feel like criminals. Later that year, Steinem, who had an abortion in England in 1957, wrote her first explicitly feminist essay, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” which profiled the burgeoning women’s movement. The second was a 1970 essay in Time called “What It Would Be Like if Women Win.” There Steinem predicted that feminism would liberate men as well as women. If women could have equal power, she argued, if homosexuals had the right to marry and women could refuse to have sex, then men would no longer be “the only ones to support the family, get drafted, bear the strain of power and responsibility.”
Although Steinem wrote hundreds of articles and eleven books and gave thousands of speeches, her most significant accomplishments involve the creation of two influential institutions -- the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) and Ms. magazine.
In 1971 Steinem joined a bipartisan group of women—including Friedan, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, former Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, and Dorothy Height (president of the National Council of Negro Women)—to launch the NWPC. They believed that by increasing women’s participation in politics, it would be easier to pass legislation to eliminate sex discrimination and to bring about greater legal, economic, and social equality.
“This is no simple reform,” Steinem said at the group’s founding convention. “It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.”
Ms. was the first modern feminist periodical with a national readership. From its start in 1972, it challenged conventional wisdom in articles like “How to Write Your Marriage Contract,” “Can Women Love Women?” “The Black Family and Feminism,” “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” and “Down with Sexist Upbringing.” In its first year, Ms. made history when it published the names of fifty-three prominent women, including Steinem and tennis star Billie Jean King, who acknowledged having had abortions when it was still illegal in most of the country, before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. Its 1976 cover story on battered women—which featured a photo of a woman with a bruised face—was the first major exposé of the problem of domestic violence.
The magazine pioneered investigative stories about overseas sweatshops, sex trafficking, the wage gap, the glass ceiling, women’s health (and the medical establishment’s sexism), sexual harassment, and date rape. It explained and advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment, rated presidential candidates on women’s issues, reported on feminist protests against pornography, exposed the influence of sexist advertising on women’s self-images, and acknowledged race and class differences within the feminist movement. Ms. injected these issues into the political debate at a time when they were considered too radical for the mainstream media to cover—or at least to cover fairly.
During her first several decades as a public figure, Steinem had to endure media portrayals that called her as the “pin-up girl of the intelligentsia” or a “willowy beauty, 34-24-34.” She also had to deal with some feminist leaders, particularly Friedan, who resented her visibility in the media. But more than any other figure, Steinem was the public face of modern feminism, a constant presence on college campuses at union halls and protest rallies, on TV talk shows and in media profiles.
Steinem often used outrageous ideas to shake up her readers and audiences. In 1971 she stunned parents and alums at the Smith College graduation by quoting her friend Flo Kennedy’s observation that “there are only a few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina.” She once told an audience of CEOs that a fair society would eliminate all inheritance. She compared marriage to prostitution and said that unpaid housework “is the definition of women’s work, which is shit work.” In speeches, she frequently drew on the theme of her 1978 essay “If Men Could Menstruate.”
She continued to use her voice for social justice into her eighties. At the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., she rebuked President Donald Trump for his divisive rhetoric. “The Constitution doesn’t begin with, ‘I, the president’,” she said. “It begins with, ‘We, the people.’ So don’t try to divide us!” Later she blasted Trump’s proposal to force Muslims to register in a government database. “If you force Muslims to register, we will all register as Muslims,” Steinem declared. In 2018, she raised money for Planned Parenthood and joined a successful effort to save the last abortion clinic in her hometown of Toledo.
Steinem’s work was not limited to the United States. She was an outspoken advocate for peace and human rights around the world. In 1984 she and two other activists were arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. for protesting the country’s apartheid regime. In 2010, Steinem and Pramila Jayapal (then an immigrant rights activist and since 2017 a congressperson from Seattle) coauthored an article linking women’s and immigrant rights issues. In 2015 Steinem joined a delegation of thirty female peace activists from fifteen countries who made a rare crossing of the dangerous demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
Despite her many successes, Steinem made some missteps. In 2016, for example, while campaigning for Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries, she made a rare political blunder. When asked why so many young women were supporting Bernie Sanders rather than Clinton, she said “When you’re young, you’re thinking, where are the boys?” The backlash to this quip was merciless and she quickly apologized.
Not all of the goals of Steinem’s generation have been achieved, and patriarchy has not disappeared, yet there’s been significant progress. More men take responsibility for housework and childcare, although it is still not shared equally. The U.S. gender pay gap has narrowed: According to the Pew Research Center, women’s pay has increased from roughly 65 percent in 1982 to 85 percent by 2024. Among married female-male couples, women’s financial contributions have grown steadily over the last half century. The share of women who earn as much or more than their husband has roughly tripled from 16 percent to 45 percent since the early 1970s.
Another area of progress is women’s participation in sports. Students in my college courses, including most women, are shocked to see charts showing that in 1971, the year before Congress passed Title IX, only 300,000 girls (less than 4 percent) participated in high school sports. Today, 3.6 million (43 percent) do. The number of women playing college sports has also mushroomed. These trends have laid the groundwork for the growing popularity of women’s professional sports, including soccer, tennis, and basketball. This summer witnessed the inaugural season of the Women’s Professional Baseball League, the first since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (the inspiration for the 1992 film A League of Their Own), which lasted from 1943 to 1954.
Feminism has also helped break the professional glass ceiling. Watching the documentary RBG, my students are stunned to learn that when Ruth Bader Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School in 1956, she was one of only nine women in a class of 500. As recently as 1971, women constituted only 3 percent of American lawyers. Today, women represent about 56 percent of all law students. The proportion of women among college students has also increased from 42 percent in 1970 to 57 percent in 2025.
Women have made significant advancements in politics. In 1969, only half of all Americans said they would vote for a woman for president. By 1999, according to a Gallup poll, 92 percent of Americans supported the idea. At the start of the women’s liberation movement, no woman had ever been the presidential nominee of one of the two major political parties. That is no longer the case. The idea of a woman president is no longer a distant dream. In 1969. there were only ten women in the House of Representatives and one in the Senate. In the current Congress, 125 women (29 percent) serve in the House and twenty-six (26 percent) in the Senate, the highest total figure in history. Nor is this only a phenomenon at the federal level: 28 percent of the nation’s governors are women, up from only two in 1980. Roughly 34 percent of state representatives are women. and forty-one of the one hundred largest cities have women mayors.
College students today take for granted that they can take courses in women’s history, literature, and other subjects, but the first women's studies courses didn’t appear until 1969, when Cornell University offered a class in response to student demands. By 1975, that number exploded to over 1,000 courses at hundreds of colleges and universities. Now they are a staple on almost every campus, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine them as part of its assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Women’s and gender studies departments employ over 2,000 full- and part-time faculty members.
To Steinem’s generation of feminists, these statistics are a sign of progress. Subsequent generations, however, are more likely to see in them a sign of how far we have to go before women achieve equity in many areas of American life. A YouGov poll conducted in July and August found that nearly half of Americans (46 percent)—including 54 percent of women and 36 percent of men—say the country has not gone far enough in promoting gender equality, compared with 17 percent who think it has gone too far. While there is still far to go, Steinem’s life and legacy provide valuable lessons about overcoming obstacles and challenging the status quo.
Steinem’s feminism was rooted in a critique of capitalism and big business, which pitted women against men for jobs, pay, promotion, rights, and respect. She frequently spoke at gatherings of 9 to 5, the working women’s group, and certainly agreed with Dolly Parton’s song, “9 to 5,” that “It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it. And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet.”
She was also an early advocate of what today’s activists call intersectionality—consistently injecting issues of race and class into the women’s movement. “The truth was (and still is) that in the United States, as in almost every country, categories of work are less likely to be paid by the expertise they require—or even by importance to the community or to the often mythical free market—than by the sex, race and class of most of their workers,” she wrote in a 1994 essay “Revaluing Economics.” She pushed other white middle-class feminists to embrace the concerns of working-class women and women of color. In a 2017 interview with The Grio, she praised Black Lives Matter activists for creating “a more inclusive movement.”
Steinem always viewed working- and middle-class men as potential allies in the struggle for equality. She built bridges between feminism’s radical and liberal wings and between the women’s and labor movements. She believed that unions were a vehicle for promoting gender parity and often join their picket lines. She was not only a cofounder of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, but also an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America in the 1980s and 1990s, long before it mushroomed into today’s influential force in American politics.
Steinem believed that the struggle for equality was ongoing and that activists could never give up the fight. There has been backsliding on abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the federal constitutional right to an abortion. Some evangelical ministers in the MAGA orbit want to repeal women’s suffrage. We’ve also seen the rise of a “manosphere” culture epitomized by Joe Rogan, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and others in Trump world. It may be having an influence: A 2018 survey of boys in the eighth and tenth grades found that 84 percent believed that women and men should have the same job opportunities. By 2023, that figure had slipped to 72 percent.
But these gender reactionaries are fighting a rearguard battle. We all stand on the shoulders of earlier generations of reformers, radicals, and idealists, like Steinem, who challenged the status quo of their day and transformed radical ideas into common sense. Those who don’t know this history have little understanding of how far we have come, how we got here, and what still needs to change to make America more livable, humane, democratic, and inclusive. Steinem’s 1970 prediction “If Women’s Lib wins, perhaps we all do” is not yet a reality. But many Americans, including a majority of those under fifty, now embrace the once-radical tenets of modern feminism. And that, like Steinem’s life, is a victory worth celebrating.
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Honor Life of Gloria Steinem (1934-2026) 'By Organizing' for Rights, Equality, and Freedom
"Thank you, Gloria, for showing the world what it means to speak up for women’s equality."
Sep 03, 2026
Progressive advocates, lawmakers, veteran journalists, labor leaders, and champions of feminism on Thursday are mourning the death of trailblazing women's rights activist and author Gloria Steinem, who has passed away at the age of 92.
Steinem, regarded as an icon of the second-wave feminism that emerged in the 1960s and 70s and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, was known for decades as a leading voice on reproductive rights, women's equality at work, and gender equity across society.
According to her representatives, Steinem died Wednesday at her home in New York City, surrounded by loved ones. An exact cause of death was not given.
"It is a moment of remembrance and celebration of this extraordinary woman. And it is too a moment of reflection." —Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International
"Gloria’s near-century on earth was years well-lived, and she continued working for equality until the very end," read a message posted to her Instagram account.
"Gloria’s greatest gift was her ability to listen to others, to make others feel seen and heard,” the message continued. “Her words, actions, and example gave people permission to be their truest selves. Gloria lived true to her independent spirit, always with curiosity and a great sense of humor.”
"Oh no," declared Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, upon learning of Steinem's passing.
"It is a moment of remembrance and celebration of this extraordinary woman. And it is too a moment of reflection," Callamard said. "The fight for gender justice and women’s equality is at a critical juncture. The advancements of the last decades are attacked, threatened, mocked. We resist, fight back, build anew."
The progressive advocacy group Our Revolution said that Gloria Steinem "understood that liberation is not something handed down from the powerful. It is something ordinary people organize and fight for."
For more than 50 years, the group added, "she fought for women to have power over our bodies, our work, our lives and our futures. And she understood that the struggle for women’s liberation could never be separated from the struggles for racial justice, economic justice and human dignity. At a moment when women’s rights and fundamental freedoms are once again under attack, the best way we can honor Gloria is not simply by remembering her. It is by organizing. Rest in power, Gloria Steinem."
According to the New York Times:
Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.
For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.
A prolific writer, Steinem started her career as a journalist in the 60s and in 1972 she co-founded Ms. Magazine, a publication focused on women's issues with the idea of translating "a movement into a magazine."
Steinem, wrote CNN's chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour, "will go down in history as one of the most important activists of all time, leading a movement for the equality of half the world: its women."
"She lived a long and passionate life dedicated to this vital and basic cause," Amanpour continued. "She did it with intellectual precision, emotional awareness, humor and beauty. May she rest in peace and may the cause thrive."
In a video posted to social media, Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) said that Steinem "always understood that gender equality was absolutely bound up with economic equality and racial justice and that has to continue to be our North Star."
Rest in power, Gloria Steinem. pic.twitter.com/z6f7MMNOVq
— Rep. Becca Balint (@RepBeccaB) September 3, 2026
In 2017, after the first election of President Donald Trump, Steinem was one of the key leaders behind the Women's March, which kicked off opposition to the far-right Republican, with marches in cities nationwide that helped galvanize resistance to the destructive policies to come.
At the time, Steinem warned that Trump's arrival in the White House represented "disaster and a danger," but added that the upside of his ascendancy could be the force brought together to galvanize against him.
“He’s made us see that everything is connected,” she said. “I’m a hope-aholic, nonetheless. I feel we’re beginning to approach the end of one structure and the beginning of another. It’s a time of both danger and possibilities.”
As the Associated Press reports:
On Jan. 21, 2017, when hundreds of thousands of women gathered in Washington in their pink “pussy hats” for the historic Women’s March, it surprised nobody that the keynote speaker, and the most rousing, was Steinem.
“We are linked,” she told the crowd. “And this is a day that will change us forever because we are together.”
For many women, Steinem was the galvanizing voice that day. She would go on to advocate fiercely. But, though many saw her as a singular figure in history, she often liked to say that if she hadn’t come along, someone else would have accomplished the same things.
By the same token, she said, it was less important that younger people listen to her, and more important that they listen to themselves.
“The primary thing is not that they know who I am,” she said, “but that they know who THEY are.”
As news of Steinem's passing spread on Thursday, others offered their reflections on her life and accomplishments.
"Thank you, Gloria, for showing the world what it means to speak up for women’s equality," said the National Organization for Women (NOW) in a statement. "Thank you for fighting for our rights so that every woman and every person can live with dignity, freedom, and equality."
Democratic New York State Rep. Jessica Ramos said Steinem "spent her life refusing to accept a world where women were expected to settle for less."
"She organized, challenged power, and helped turn women’s equality into a movement that changed America," Ramos said. "We honor her legacy by refusing to go backward."
"Gloria Steinem did not simply advocate for women; she changed what women believed was possible," said Victoria Mancinelli, a member of the labor movement in Canada, in response to news of Steinem's death.
"She confronted a world that expected women to remain quiet, accept less, and wait patiently for progress. Gloria refused. Through her journalism, activism, and unrelenting pursuit of equality, she helped transform deeply personal struggles into a powerful collective movement and forced institutions to recognize women as leaders, decision-makers, and agents of change."
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Trump Is Making the Women Disappear
This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge.
May 13, 2026
It’s been a tough couple of months for women officials in Washington—or, more accurately, in Trumpland. In early March (Women’s History Month, by the way), in a Truth Social post, the president fired Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the second woman ever to hold that title. Weeks later, also in a social media post, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, the third woman ever to serve as head of the Department of Justice.
While in the first year of his first presidency, Trump 1.0 had fired numerous officials, this time around, Bondi and Noem, who ran the two largest law enforcement agencies in the country, were the first cabinet officials to be dismissed. Both—no surprise—were replaced by men. And just as I was writing this piece, President Donald Trump removed another female cabinet official, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Meanwhile, speculation lingers about the possible firing of a fourth female cabinet member, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the second woman to hold that job. And whether or not Gabbard is formally dismissed, she has recently been effectively sidelined, as her absence from White House meetings on the war in Iran suggests.
Notably, Noem, Bondi, Chavez-DeRemer, and Gabbard are, of course, all women. As Jasmine Crockett, a Democratic House of Representatives member from Texas, recently tweeted, “Well… first it was Kristi Noem, now it’s Pam Bondi… it would be too much like right that Pete [Hegseth] be next. I see a theme. He [Trump] will throw the incompetent women under the bus a lot faster than the incompetent men.”
Equal Opportunity Failure
Crockett has a point. Pete Hegseth’s leadership at the Department of Defense (now all too appropriately retitled the Department of War) has erased time-honored rules and norms in staggering ways. He has, for instance, drastically reduced media access to the Pentagon, purged employees who disagreed with him, as well as those he deemed to be DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) appointees, and is now exerting his leadership in a war against Iran for which the exit strategy seems elusive at best, despite his assurance that, as The Guardian reported, “the US would not get bogged down in the conflict.” The US operation, he insisted, was not a “democracy-building exercise,” adding that ‘this is not Iraq. This is not endless.’”
It’s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew in the coming months. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm.
Hegseth’s behavior has led Arizona Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari to file articles of impeachment against him on six charges. They include the commission of war crimes, especially the killing of at least 165 people, including many children, at a girls’ primary school in Iran hit by a US missile; negligence with sensitive information; and conducting an unauthorized war without congressional approval. In the Senate, Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren has followed up with a letter to US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins asking for an investigation into whether Hegseth attempted to profit from his financial investments in the run-up to the war in Iran.
Crockett might just as easily have highlighted the wayward behavior of FBI Director Kash Patel, recently exposed in a piece in The Atlantic describing “excessive drinking” that interfered with his job (an article over which Patel immediately filed suit for $250 million in damages), or the trashing of health standards by Health and Human Resources Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
But whatever the future of those reprehensible men in cabinet positions, it’s unfortunately difficult to defend either Bondi or Noem for their actions while in office. Like their male counterparts, both defiantly tossed professionalism and decency to the winds. Under Noem, with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) leading the way, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was weaponized and transformed into President Trump’s version of a homeland militia. It’s hardly a stretch to make the comparison to Hitler’s Brownshirts.
So far, in Trump’s second term in office, ICE has terrorized schools and businesses, while cruelly imprisoning migrants without due process of any sort. It has held children in detention centers under abhorrent conditions, attacked peaceful protesters, and killed citizens on the streets of America. Worse yet, Noem appropriated tens of millions of dollars to cover the costs of a pro-ICE ad featuring herself riding a horse in front of Mount Rushmore saying, “Break Our Laws, We’ll Punish You.” (Nor should we imagine that things will get any better without her.)
Bondi’s ouster followed failures of a different order—namely, her stumbling, wildly inept efforts to fulfill Trump’s agenda. She proved unable even to make the case of Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein go away, while what she had to say when releasing documents related to him led to accusations that her statements were riddled with falsehoods. Meanwhile, prosecutions under her watch of New York State Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, high-priority items for the president, fell apart.
And when called before Congress to explain herself, her rank lack of civility resembled the behavior of a spoiled teenager berating her teacher, knowing that, since her parents wielded power over the school, she should fear no reprisals. Under Bondi, the sacrosanct mission of the Department of Justice as an agency independent of the White House was summarily tossed aside (as the roof-to-ground-floor Trump banner that hung from its office building demonstrated).
Female Purges
Focusing on Noem and Bondi, however, misses the larger point. This first year of Trump 2.0 has seen women, one after another, summarily gone from their posts (some fired, some resigning) as part of a larger DEI purge. As I pointed out in a TomDispatch piece in January, the military has led the way with a full-scale attack on women. And that trend started on the administration’s very first day in office when Trump removed Linda Fagan, the first female commandant of the Coast Guard.
Fagan was, in fact, the first woman ever to serve as a military service chief and, among other things, she had exposed “Operation Fouled Anchor,” a previously covered-up investigation into sexual harassment and assault in the Coast Guard. Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired as well. Both have now—no surprise—been replaced by men. As it stands, there are no longer any four-star women generals in the military. And only this month, we learned that Secretary of War Hegseth had reportedly removed two women from a promotion list to become one-star Army generals.
Outside of the Department of Defense, the resignations or firings of women in leadership positions have abounded across agencies ranging from the National Labor Relations Board to the Federal Trade Commission and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This widespread purge of women stands in stark contrast to their presence in office during the Biden years. Under President Joe Biden, women held just under 50% of all cabinet or cabinet-level positions. And let’s not forget Kamala Harris, the first female vice-president in American history. It’s worth noting as well that, under Biden, the deputy attorney general and the deputy secretary of defense were both women.
Trump is not unmindful of those statistics. Last year, he boasted about the presence of 8 women among his 24 cabinet officers, or a third of his cabinet. As Business Insider reports, he was “thrilled to say that we have more women in our Cabinet than any Republican president in the history of our country.” Following the removal of Noem, Bondi, and Chavez-DeRemer, however, women occupy just over one-fifth of the cabinet positions—admittedly an improvement on his first term when, after two years of resignations and firings, women held only 13% of all cabinet-level positions.)
Project 2025
It’s worth noting that the path to the current backlash against women, including all the purges and punishments we’re now witnessing in real time, didn’t come about by mere happenstance. In the run-up to the 2024 election, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published a Project 2025 report entitled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, a 900-plus page blueprint for overhauling the federal bureaucracy. It called for gutting DEI programs, eliminating and reducing the size of any offices that didn’t serve a conservative agenda, and enhancing the powers of the president. Among its many recommendations, Project 2025 touted an anti-female message, including removing “gender equality” language from government websites, emphasizing “family planning,” and recommending limitations on access to contraception and cuts to federal funding for abortions.
Although Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025, many of its recommended policies have indeed become our new reality, including matters affecting women. In the first months of Trump’s second term, images of women, as well as persons of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, were systematically erased from government websites. So, too, protections for women’s health were tossed to the winds. As the abortion rights group Reproductive Freedom for All has reported, as of January 2026, “53% of [Project 2025’s] policies attacking reproductive freedom are completed or in progress.”
The fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation’s progress in matters of race, gender, and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.
And now, there is a brand-new Heritage Foundation report devoted to the need to counter the declining birth rate and the fragility of the American family. Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 20 Years calls for the restructuring of incentives to promote childbearing and “revive the institution of marriage.” Signaling its message, the report makes the case for privileging marriage and children over career advancement and less traditional family arrangements caused by divorce and single parenthood. While the report underscores the family roles incumbent upon both men and women, the fact is that reforms aimed at incentivizing childbearing will fall primarily on women, while those aimed at privileging childrearing over career choices would likely fall most heavily on women as well.
MS NOW’s Ali Velshi and “Velshi” Segment Producer Amel Ahmed summed up the report well, pointing out that its overall takeaway is: “The freedoms fought [for] and won by America’s women aren’t progress; they are the problem.”
Of course, in the era of Donald Trump, none of this should come as a surprise, not when you consider the histories of the men who are now running the show: a president who, in addition to once touting the fact that he could “grab them by the pussy,” has been convicted in E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit over accusations of sexual abuse and defamation to the tune of $83.3 million in damages, a decision upheld by an appellate court. And let’s not forget that Trump’s first nominee for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name from consideration under a cloud of accusations of wrongful behavior, including sexual misconduct. Not to mention the shadow cast by the number of individuals within the current administration whose names are said to appear in the Epstein files. While no formal charges of sexual misconduct have been issued against them, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly being pressured to resign over his alleged ties to Epstein.
A Future Government Without Women?
It’s hard to predict which women will come under the axe from Trump and crew in the coming months. But the onslaught has understandably led women from both sides of the political spectrum to sound the alarm. Months before she announced her resignation from Congress, former Trump supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene had already expressed her own misgivings about the misogyny of the Republican leaders in Congress.
When Trump rescinded New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be the US Representative to the United Nations and replaced her with Michael Waltz (who had embarrassed himself by adding a reporter to a private Signal chat about possible future strikes against the Houthis in Yemen), Greene saw it as a sign of a general trend of sidelining women. She summed it up as a case where Stefanik “gets shafted,” while Waltz “gets rewarded.” For Greene, it was proof of an overwhelming Trump administration mood of: “She’s a woman, so it was OK to do that to her somehow.”
Greene’s dissatisfaction wasn’t just over Stefanik but over the general trend that has led to only one Republican woman chairing a committee in Congress. Notably, alongside Greene, Republican representatives Nancy Mace and Laurent Boebert signed a petition pressuring the Department of Justice to release information on the Epstein files.
The signs are everywhere. Expectations are disappearing that women will hold leadership positions inside the Trump administration or in the halls of Congress (unless the Democrats win decisively in November). If you didn’t realize it before, you really can’t hide from it now. The attack on diversity in government has become pervasive and (at least as yet) is undeterred, targeting with abandon females, as well as people of color, immigrants, and critics of the president. In other words, the fate of women leaders should provide us with an insight, however dispiriting, into just how quickly the values and assumptions that guided this nation’s progress in matters of race, gender, and ethnicity for decades have disappeared.
What once amounted to progress is indeed now seen as the problem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the exorcising of women from the halls of government.
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The Fertility Panic Is a Racist, Sexist Tool to Push More Austerity
Reporting that covers birth rate decline without the critical contexts of immigration policy, gender norms, and economic inequality masks the regressive ideologies behind the purported solutions.
May 05, 2026
If you haven’t heard the argument that civilization is about to collapse because women aren’t having enough babies, you haven’t been consuming much media.
“The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse,” announced The Atlantic (6/30/25). Business Insider (8/21/25) ran a piece titled “America’s Great People Shortage,” which opened, “America is about to tumble off the edge of a massive demographic cliff.” And NPR‘s Brian Mann warned on PBS (4/10/26) that, as a result of the birth rate decline, “many people say” that the US soon “will be unrecognizable.”
It’s repeatedly in the news in part because it’s a priority of the “pronatalist” right, which has prominent backers in the Trump administration. Vice President JD Vance has called the US birth rate decline a “civilizational crisis.” He said people with children should have “more power” at the polls, and “more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic” than those without.
Elon Musk, who regularly posts on the subject and has fathered at least 14 children, has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.” “There will be no West if this continues,” he said. And President Donald Trump has called for a new “baby boom.”
It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medals to (Aryan) women who bore many children.
The story generally goes like this: Fewer babies being born in the US leads to fewer working-age adults relative to retired adults, which means—as The Atlantic piece put it—”higher taxes, higher debt, or later retirement—or all three.”
But there’s a lot more to the story, and ignoring it masks the white nationalism, regressive gender ideals, and economic inequality driving the narrative.
Hidden Xenophobia
The numbers might look striking on the surface: As news reports pointed out (e.g., CNN, 4/9/26), the number of births and the fertility rate (births per 1,000 women) in the US have dropped to record lows. Both decreased by 1% from 2024 to 2025; the fertility rate has fallen by about 20% over the past 20 years.
In terms of births per woman, that’s about 1.6—well below the “replacement” rate of 2.1, which would be required to maintain a population without migration.
But that last detail is key. If you believe we need a certain number of working-age adults to support an aging population of retirees, there are—or at least were, until Trump’s brutal immigration regime—millions of people willing and eager to come to this country and help make up that deficit. Even with the declining birth rate, the US population grew by more in 2023-24 than it did in 2003-04.
Even so, immigration was conspicuously missing from too much of the birth rate coverage. For instance, in a long piece on Trump contemplating a “baby bonus,” CBS (4/25/25) reported:
A declining birth rate can spell long-term economic problems, including a shrinking labor force that’s financially strapped to pay for medical services and retirement benefits for an aging population.
It managed to go in depth on why the birth rate might be declining, what a baby bonus might look like, how much it would cost, and whether it could work. But it never mentioned immigration policy.
On CNN (4/18/26), anchor Michael Smerconish explored the falling birth rate with economist Melissa Kearney, who told him:
We’re now looking at, you know, being a society that’s aging, with fewer young people going to school, entering the workforce. This poses demographic headwinds for our economic growth and dynamism going forward.
They discussed the “threat posed in terms of the sustainability of Social Security” and ways to address the problem, but neither ever raised the impact of immigration.
When news outlets ignore that obvious facet of the issue, they hide the xenophobic assumptions underlying the claims of “crisis.”
‘To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism’
And then there’s the misogyny. Right-wing media are quick to blame women for this impending “crisis.”
A New York Post column (9/9/25) by Rikki Schlott, for instance, drummed up the “fear of a baby bust,” blaming it in particular on Gen Z (which is having fewer kids than previous generations at the same age) lacking “positive, empowering messaging that teaches you can prioritize marriage, family, and children while also valuing independence, career, and financial stability”:
“I don’t need a spouse” (or, for that matter, children) feminism has told left-leaning young women that pretty much everything else is more important than family.
That’s a very sad development.
Columnist Victor Joecks, syndicated from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (8/2/25; reposted in Daily Signal, 8/10/25), took things even further in a piece headlined “To Save Civilization, Reject Feminism and Honor Mother.” He opened by declaring, “The triumph of modern feminism has put society on the path to demographic collapse.”
Joecks further opined:
Society applauds women for becoming executives, not moms with kids. Reports on the mythical [sic] gender pay gap describe motherhood with the word “penalty.”… Modern feminism has left many women lonely and depressed. It has put the globe into a demographic downward spiral that’s going to be hard to reverse.
‘National Motherhood Medal’
Women-blaming in right-wing media is no surprise, particularly given the surge of pronatalism on the right. But centrist media coverage of that movement also sometimes boosts it.
The New York Times (4/21/25) ran an article on the pronatalist groups pushing the Trump administration on increasing birth rates, noting that “advocates expressed confidence that fertility issues will become a prominent piece of the agenda.” Among their ideas: a “National Motherhood Medal” awarded to women with six or more children, and tax credits to married—but not unmarried—couples with children that increase with successive children.
The gradually shifting worker-retiree ratio does start to become a bigger problem if productivity gains are siphoned off to only accrue to the rich. Which, as it turns out, they increasingly do.
It’s instructive to recall, as Vogue (5/3/25) does, that fertility was likewise central to the Nazis, who also offered medals to (Aryan) women who bore many children.
While the misogyny embedded in the pronatalist movement generally comes through loud and clear in the Times article, the paper insisted on normalizing it, calling the coalition “broad and diverse,” including both “Christian conservatives” who see a “cultural crisis” in need of more marriage and gender inequality, as well as those who “are interested in exploring a variety of methods, including new reproductive technologies, to reach their goal of more babies.”
‘Collapse of our civilization’
The New York Times repeated the economic collapse narrative in its description of the pronatalist movement’s
warning of a future in which a smaller work force cannot support an aging population and the social safety net. If the birth rate is not turned around, they fear, the country’s economy could collapse and, ultimately, human civilization could be at risk.
By making no effort to analyze that narrative, the Times lent it legitimacy.
Similarly, in a USA Today piece (3/10/26) on whether Trump’s effort to be known as the “fertilization president” was sparking a baby boom (“that question is complicated,” the paper concluded), reporter Madeline Mitchell quoted a pronatalist podcaster saying that the declining birth rate “is going to lead to the collapse of our civilization.”
That piece was part of a package that interviewed many women of varying ages to understand why they were or were not having children; those pieces included perspectives about the financial and existential struggles facing women who want to have children and feel they can’t afford to, or don’t feel the world is stable enough to bring children into.
It’s an important perspective, and interviewing women on this subject is something all outlets should be doing. But without addressing the question of whether a falling birth rate will, in fact, bring about imminent civilizational collapse, as the widely disseminated right-wing narrative claims, the framing pits women’s feelings and choices against the survival of civilization—hardly a fair contest.
Since birth rate is not a significant problem for the US in the foreseeable future unless you prevent immigration, the idea repeated in these pieces that “civilization” will collapse from a falling birth rate actually means “white civilization.” Pronatalists, you see, tend to share a lot in common with Christian white nationalists.
‘The Problem Is Teens’
Another New York Times article (2/27/26) headlined “The Birthrate Is Plunging. Why Some Say That’s a Good Thing,” pointed out that the drop in the US is mostly among teens and women in their early 20s, and reminded readers that
30 years ago, the growing number of teenage and single mothers was seen as a societal crisis, with poor economic and health outcomes for mother and baby. The most vociferous critics called these women “welfare queens” and said they were draining public coffers.
It is indeed whiplash-inducing to hear today’s right-wing mouthpieces, like Fox News‘ senior medical analyst Marc Seigel (4/10/26; Media Matters, 4/10/26), saying:
The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19, the fertility rate is down 7%, and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation.
In any case, despite its better gender framing, the Times still pushed the “not enough workers” economic narrative—and downplayed the administration’s xenophobia with euphemism:
If the birthrate drops too far for too long, it could eventually present problems, as the country needs workers to support an aging population. The population can grow through immigration too, but that issue has become politically sensitive, with numbers falling sharply under the Trump administration.
Vanishing Productivity
The economic doomsday argument being spread applies both in the US and globally. Declining fertility isn’t just happening in the US—it’s a worldwide phenomenon. In fact, the US’ “demographic cliff” is much less dramatic than in many countries. China, for instance, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, and that nation’s population is already beginning to shrink.
While some might think this slowdown (and even potential reversal, many decades from now) in global human population growth could be a positive development, there are plenty of media outlets looking to fearmonger about it. “The demographic cliff will end us, unless we act quickly,” declared Forbes‘ Alexander Puutio (6/9/25).
The Atlantic‘s Marc Novicoff (6/30/25) presaged that within a few decades “rich countries will all have become like Japan, stagnant and aging.” After arguing that United Nations population growth projections are overly optimistic, he addressed those who remain skeptical of doomsday warnings:
If you’re not sure why this is all so alarming, consider Japan, the canonical example of the threat that low fertility poses to a country’s economic prospects. At its peak in 1994, the Japanese economy made up 18% of world GDP, but eventually, the country’s demographics caught up with it. Now Japan’s median age is 50 years old, and the country’s GDP makes up just 4% of the global economy. Measured per hours worked, Japan’s economic growth has always been strong, but at some point, you just don’t have enough workers.
Who cares what percentage of world GDP a country produces? If you’re a resident of Japan, what you care about is your quality of life. As Novicoff acknowledges, Japan’s productivity hasn’t weakened. And if you look at the human development index, which measures gross national income per capita, years of schooling, and life expectancy, Japan continues to improve over time. So it’s entirely unclear on what basis he makes his claim that Japan doesn’t “have enough workers.”
But it is clear what readers are being primed for: Governments and companies cutting retirement benefits. As The Atlantic piece concludes:
If the birth rate continues to drop around the world at its current pace, economic growth and workers’ retirement prospects will go the way of those projections: adjusting every few years to a smaller, sadder, poorer future.
Productivity Swamps Demographics
That neoliberal push for austerity is the third ideological agenda that lurks behind many of these population crisis stories. Even those news outlets that acknowledged the role of immigration in a country’s economy often took it as further evidence that the economic outlook is bleak. NPR (4/9/26), for instance, told its audience that
many demographers and economists see the apparent shift toward smaller families and fewer children as a significant concern for the nation and its labor force, especially as immigration into the US has also plunged under the Trump administration.
What such economic warnings hide is that, just as population size isn’t solely dependent on the native fertility rate, economic growth isn’t solely dependent on the working-age population.
It’s true that increasing life expectancies mean that the ratio of the US working-age population to the retired population is slowly decreasing, even with a growing population. That can put pressure on things like Social Security, which operates like a social insurance program in which taxes from current workers go into a fund for current retirees. A shrinking, aging population does require some policy adjustments. But it doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Progressive economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 1/11/19) explains:
Even pulling out the impact of immigrants, the reality is that we have been seeing a fall in the ratio of workers to retirees pretty much forever. Life expectancies have been rising as people have better living standards and better healthcare. (Recent years have been an exception, where life expectancies have stagnated.) In 1950 there were 7.2 people between the ages of 20 and 65 for every person over the age of 65. This ratio now stands at just 3.6 to 1.
Over this 70-year period, we have seen huge increases in living standards for both workers and retirees. The key has been the growth in productivity, which allows workers to produce much more in each hour of work. (We also have a much higher rate of employment among workers between the ages of 20 and 65, as tens of millions of women have entered the labor force.) The impact of productivity growth swamps the impact of demographics.
Not enough babies? Too many billionaires
The US has experienced an average of over 2% annual productivity growth in the nonfarm business sector since World War II, and there’s no reason to expect that to end. The gradually shifting worker-retiree ratio does start to become a bigger problem if productivity gains are siphoned off to only accrue to the rich. Which, as it turns out, they increasingly do.
Look at Social Security, which is frequently pointed to as being in peril because of the aging population and decreasing birth rate. An op-ed in USA Today (8/21/25), advocating for “killing” Social Security, claimed that, “due to a collapse of the American birth rate, the program is expected to be unable to pay the full promised benefits to retirees within the decade.”
There are important policy conversations to be had about supporting people in having the size family they want to have.
An CNBC article (5/30/25) told readers that “fewer births mean fewer future workers to support programs like Social Security and Medicare, which rely on a healthy worker-to-retiree ratio.” (That idea was supported with a quote from the director of the “Get Married Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies”—a right-wing think tank that recently launched a “Pronatalism Initiative.”)
But none other than the Chief Actuary at the Social Security Administration, Karen Glenn, testified to Congress (3/25/26) that birth rate has nothing to do with impending shortfalls in the program. Instead, one of the biggest factors imperiling Social Security is the problem of greater-than-expected income inequality.
Since 1980, when income inequality began to increase sharply, the amount of wage income that exceeds the cap for Social Security tax has doubled. The vast majority of us—those who make up to $184,500 a year—pay Social Security tax on all of our income; those who make more pay nothing above that cap. Simply removing the cap would eliminate three-quarters of the Social Security fund’s long-term projected shortfall.
Economic Value Judgments
And, of course, there are all the other ways the rich avoid paying their fair share in our economy, whether it’s through low capital gains rates, or simply through the fancy accounting that lets the super rich—including those who own the news outlets reporting on such things—pay next to nothing in federal taxes. Jeff Bezos, for instance, owner of The Washington Post, paid an effective income tax rate of under 1% on the over $4 billion he amassed from 2014-18 (ProPublica, 6/8/21).
So when The New York Times (3/26/26) tells you in its reporting on US population change that “the country needs a population of young workers and taxpayers large enough to finance infrastructure like schools, hospitals, and healthcare for older residents,” understand that they’re making a value judgement about taxation. The more objective statement would be that the country needs an economic output large enough to finance these things, which is certainly true.
There are important policy conversations to be had about supporting people in having the size family they want to have. Many Americans have fewer children than they want because of financial limitations—like lack of affordable childcare or housing—or concerns about the state of the world or the environment. News outlets can and should be addressing these issues.
But reporting that covers birth rate decline without the critical contexts of immigration policy, gender norms, and economic inequality masks the regressive ideologies behind the purported solutions.
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Why a Feminist and Just Energy Transition Is the Only Way Out of the Climate Crisis
As we look toward Santa Marta, the message is both simple and profound: We cannot solve the climate crisis with the same logic that caused it.
Apr 21, 2026
Wars, invasions, blockades, and genocide from Venezuela and Iran to Palestine have ripped the curtain off the inherent volatility and violence of the fossil energy system. We need a rapid and just scale-up of socially controlled renewables to end the era of fossil fuels. But ensuring a just transition requires deeper conversation. Who benefits from the energy transition? Who bears the cost? Who gets a say in how energy is produced? These are also feminist questions about power, labor, care, and whose lives are valued.
To answer them, grassroots leaders, Indigenous communities, trade unions, and environmental justice activists will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia for the Peoples’ Summit and First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels this week. For many of us in environmental and social justice movements, this gathering represents both urgency and possibility. This will be a critical space because, without justice, the energy transition will reproduce the same systems of extraction, control, and violence.
So We Must Ask: an Energy Transition for Whom?
The transition narrative sold by corporations and rich countries today tells us we can scale up corporate, market-led renewable energy technologies without questioning who controls them, who benefits, and who bears the cost. This risks the transition becoming nothing more than the old model in greener packaging. In Malaysia, for example, the energy transition policy largely rebrands the old growth-and-extraction model. It uses green rhetoric, prioritizing corporate-led false solutions like carbon capture and storage and carbon capture, utilization, and storage. Copying Western-style developments through corporate-driven trade and investment patterns sustains fossil fuel dependence and continues to entrench structural inequalities both nationally and internationally. Without systemic change, the transition becomes another chapter in a long history of resource plunder, particularly in the Global South.
Consider the surge in demand for minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements. These are essential components of batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines. Governments and corporations in the Global North are racing to secure these materials, often greenwashing extraction as necessary for climate action, while diverting these minerals into military, aerospace, AI, and data centers. For communities across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, this rush is already translating into land grabs, water depletion, labor exploitation, and violence. Lithium extraction threatens fragile ecosystems and Indigenous Peoples’ livelihoods; cobalt mining has been linked to dangerous working conditions and child labor. As with oil before them, critical minerals are becoming objects of geopolitical competition—backed by military power and strategic control.
If this transition is not rooted in justice, it will not be a solution. It will be the next phase of the crisis.
The military is among the world’s largest consumers of fossil fuels, yet its emissions are routinely excluded from national reporting. At the same time, states and corporations work together to secure control over oil, gas, and critical minerals—profiting from war and devastation from Lebanon to Venezuela and Cuba.
These are the very predictable outcomes of a system that prioritizes profit over energy as a right for people. A just transition must go far beyond emissions reductions. It must actively confront inequality, redistribute power, and wealth, and repair historical and ongoing harms. It must center those who have been marginalized and exploited—not as victims but as leaders.
A Just Transition Must Be Based on Peoples’ Sovereignty and Energy Sovereignty
At the heart of this vision are peoples’ sovereignty and energy sovereignty: the right of communities to control their lands, resources, and energy systems, and to shape the decisions that affect their lives. This means treating energy as a common good that is managed for collective well-being rather than private profit, while building energy democracy, where communities have real decision-making power over how energy is produced and used. It also requires energy sufficiency, prioritizing meeting people’s needs over excessive and wasteful energy use. Together, these principles challenge the concentration of power in corporations and wealthy countries, and point toward energy systems that are locally rooted, democratic, and aligned with social and ecological needs.
Achieving this also requires that we confront imperialism. The current global order allows wealthy countries to externalize the social and environmental costs of their consumption to the Global South, while maintaining control over finance, technology, and trade. This imbalance shapes the terms of the energy transition, devastating communities and often locking countries in the Global South into roles as raw material suppliers rather than equal partners.
Policies that ignore power dynamics may deliver short-term emissions reductions, but they will ultimately fail as communities resist exploitation and inequity deepens. A transition rooted in justice, however, can build the broad-based support needed for transformative change.
Around the world, communities are already practicing energy sovereignty, from managing decentralized renewable systems in Palestine to asserting their rights against extractive projects in Mozambique. Alternatives are not only possible, but underway.
A feminist and just energy transition must challenge the structures that perpetuate dependency and inequality, including unfair trade agreements, debt regimes, and corporate impunity. It must also recognize and address the intersecting forms of oppression based on gender, race, class, and colonial history that shape how the climate crisis is experienced and resisted.
As we look toward Santa Marta, the message is both simple and profound: We cannot solve the climate crisis with the same logic that caused it. If this transition is not rooted in justice, it will not be a solution. It will be the next phase of the crisis.
The path forward will require confronting entrenched interests and reimagining our economies and societies. From Santa Marta and beyond, communities are showing us the way. The task now is to listen, to act, and to ensure that the transition ahead is truly just—for people, for the planet, and for future generations.
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Raising Misbehavin' Girls
I’m sending my daughter into the world armed with a legacy of misbehaving. I hope she meets your girls on the way. Because the more misbehaving girls we raise, the closer we get to a world where women get what we deserve.
Mar 31, 2026
Fifty years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich popularized the phrase, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” It became a feminist call to action. Even women who didn’t claim feminism invoked it before challenging a rule, a system, or a societal norm—a permission slip to be loud, difficult, and disruptive.
But lately, I wonder if something has shifted—if girls are not just discouraged from making history, but conditioned against it. What happens to the women and girls who still live the phrase?
Look around.
Jasmine Crockett faces backlash for refusing to shrink herself. Female athletes at Howard University were criticized for protesting. Joy Ann Reid, once a prominent voice on MSNBC, was pushed out of the very spaces that benefited from her boldness. Leqaa Kordia became a flash point, punished for her pro-Palestine speech at Columbia. Renee Nicole Good murdered for talking back to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The women in my life taught me that there are repercussions to being “misbehaving”—but that the courage to continue is worth it.
Different circumstances. Different stakes. But a similar message: Misbehave, and there will be consequences.
I come from a lineage of women who refused to be well-behaved.
Long before it was popular to challenge Confederate symbols, my grandmother protested John McDonogh Day in New Orleans public schools. While others celebrated a man tied to oppression, my granny and her friends resisted—even when it meant detention. She modeled that courage for my mother.
As a school board member, my mother openly challenged the charter takeover after Hurricane Katrina. It cost her reelection. Well-funded lobbying groups backed her opponents, and she lost. But she did not bend.
Later, in my own career, I spoke out against unfair disciplinary policies—three-strikes rules and bans on hooded sweatshirts that disproportionately targeted Black students. I did so publicly. I was not promoted. Instead, my mental and emotional health were questioned.
The women in my life taught me that there are repercussions to being “misbehaving”—but that the courage to continue is worth it.
That is why the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) collective bargaining fight meant so much to me. The players weren’t asking for excess—just the standard their male counterparts had long received. Even so, they were met with resistance; fans and commentators questioned their gratitude.
For months, the women of the league misbehaved. They rejected lowball offers. They challenged the status quo. They held the line—and even threatened to strike—because they refused to be mistreated.
And it worked. A historic agreement will bring higher salaries, revenue recognition, and support for injured and pregnant players.
Central to that fight were WNBA Players Association leaders Nneka Ogwumike and Napheesa Collier—women who understood that progress requires pressure. Ogwumike has credited her family for instilling discipline and purpose. Collier’s parents modeled misbehavior early, creating opportunities when she was shut out. Years later, she took it further—co-founding Unrivaled, a rival league that pressured the WNBA.
Those foundations don’t just produce great athletes; they produce fighters. And when misbehaving women connect, things change.
During those negotiations, I found myself explaining courage to my 3-year-old daughter. She is too young to understand contracts or labor rights—but not that her voice matters. And I will continue to nurture that—even when it’s inconvenient. When she says, “Mom, stop, you’re hurting me” while I’m combing her hair. When she insists, “I can do it myself,” even if it means wasted strawberries and a mess I’ll have to clean up. Because the alternative is a girl who does not believe in her own agency, her own power.
In my work with girls, I’ve learned that many of us are not raised this way. Caregivers—often out of love, fear, or inherited trauma—teach girls that silence and compliance will lead to an easier life. And that belief is understandable. Who doesn’t want ease and safety for their children?
But as Viola Davis shared in a recent conversation with Amy Poehler, being a “good girl” didn’t protect her. It taught her to shrink, to tolerate hurt. That’s the lie we don’t talk about enough: that if girls (and women) are agreeable enough, soft enough, accommodating enough—they will be safe.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that progress has never come from compliance. It has always come from those willing to disrupt, to demand, and to refuse. To misbehave.
So, to the adults raising and influencing young girls, here’s what I’ve learned as an educator, advocate, and mother:
- Let them say no (within reason). They don’t have to hug anyone. They don’t have to stay friends with people who mistreat them.
- Give specific compliments. Replace “good girl” with “That was brave,” “That was thoughtful,” “You worked hard on that.”
- Respect their opinions. Let them explain why they’re upset, what they prefer, what they think.
- Let them experiment—with their style and their interests. It helps them find their voice.
- And model it. Praise yourself. Name the women—past and present—who you admire for their refusal to conform.
This isn’t just for parents. Anyone who has girls in their lives has the power to shape their beliefs.
I’m sending my daughter into the world armed with a legacy of misbehaving. I hope she meets your girls on the way. Because the more misbehaving girls we raise, the closer we get to a world where women get what we deserve.
Well-behaved women rarely make history. And they damn sure don’t get things done.
I’m raising the next generation of misbehaving girls. Who’s with me? Whose #RaisinMisbehavinGirls
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Eulogy for My Friend and Freedom Fighter, Yanar Mohammed
Yanar knew that wherever there is terrible violence, there are people behaving magnificently. She was one of them.
Mar 29, 2026
The first time someone threatened to kill Yanar was in 2003.
That was the year she returned to Baghdad, after having fled with her infant son during the first US war seven years earlier.
With Iraq now under US occupation, Yanar noticed something that the media did not: The US had unleashed and empowered Iraq’s most reactionary political forces, and like fundamentalists everywhere, their first priority was to subjugate Iraqi women and girls.
Yanar wasn’t having it.
Yanar would also want us to remember that the timing of her murder has everything to do with the war on Iran launched by the US and Israel just three days before she was killed.
She saw what was happening and launched the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) to fight against the dismantlement of women’s rights and the terrible rise in violence against women. The organization’s first office was a bombed-out bank in central Baghdad.
From that moment, Yanar became a lightning rod for anti-feminist attacks, and very soon after, the threats began.
In 2004, I published an open letter to the chief of the US administration in Baghdad, reminding him that the United States was legally obligated to protect Yanar’s life and the lives of all Iraqi civilians under occupation. I didn’t know Yanar yet, but she wrote to thank me, and we arranged to meet in New York.
We sat on a lumpy couch in MADRE’s old office and talked about building a network of safe houses, where women fleeing violence could find safety and solidarity. Then we went to Macy’s, and Yanar tried on every single lipstick at the makeup counter.
Over the next 22 years, Yanar became one of MADRE’s closest partners, and to me, she became family.
MADRE accompanied Yanar as she brought her visions for revolutionary feminism to life again and again, founding a network of shelters for women and keeping them operational through attacks by clans, militias, and the State.
She launched a feminist newspaper and radio station and staffed them with women who rebuilt their shattered lives through the care, feminist education, and job training that OWFI provided.
She created safe spaces for young people to come together across sectarian lines to defy the logic of the US-caused civil war and create art, music, and poetry.
She co-founded the first organization of Afro-Iraqis, understanding that there is no feminism without racial justice.
She built an underground railroad to free women who were enslaved by ISIS.
She fought like hell to defend women’s legal rights, understanding that the more we lost, the more critical every victory became.
She led protests, campaigns, and coalitions that brought down a corrupt government and forced its successor to answer to demands for accountability from Iraq’s most marginalized people.
Yet, as extraordinary as Yanar’s legacy is, she was so much more than the sum of her accomplishments.
Yanar loved jazz, sushi, and beer. She also worried about her son and spent years hoping to find love. She loved her husband, who made her so happy these last few years.
Yanar was also despondent at times. More focused on all that was left to do than on what she had achieved. Her moments of exhaustion and frustration always reminded me that we don’t have to be infallible heroes in this work; we just have to keep doing our part and take care of each other along the way.
Yanar would also want us to remember that the timing of her murder has everything to do with the war on Iran launched by the US and Israel just three days before she was killed. The Iranian-backed militias that had threatened Yanar for years have been galvanized like never before by this war.
In January, when Yanar and I spoke about the killing of Renee Goode in Minneapolis, we were both struck by the parallels between those militias in Iraq and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the United States.
“Now you have what the US brought to Iraq,” Yanar said, “A paramilitary force working for the worst reactionaries in government, terrorizing communities and committing extrajudicial executions.”
We talked about the beauty and the power of the organizing to protect immigrants, and the militant joy of people coming together to remake the world: in Minneapolis, in Baghdad, in Gaza, in Darfur, and in Haiti.
Yanar knew that wherever there is terrible violence, there are people behaving magnificently:
Heating soup and handing out blankets,
Offering sanctuary to those who are under attack,
Spinning the ideas that will move everything forward,
And putting their bodies on the line again and again.
Yanar did all of these things. And she did them with joy in her heart and fire in her belly. I loved her for that.
Two years ago, when I was in Jerusalem, where I lived as a child, Yanar wrote to me about her hopes for the future:
My plan for the coming decade is to have a small house with a big garden in a Baghdad suburb, where I will get a dog, and plant all the flowering trees and vegetables. And I hope the day will come when we can both visit each other in our home cities without any fear.
This is the legacy Yanar leaves us to enact—to fight for each other and spend time together in the flowering gardens we’ve planted.
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Beware Men Who Wage War to Prove They Are Men
The rabid hypermasculinity unleashed across Iran by the White House can be no surprise.
Mar 21, 2026
Seemingly endless recitations throughout history of what constitutes virtuous citizenship emphasize military life. A specifically masculine heritage of violence in the service of the nation oversees and delimits democracy and authority—a privileged area of social welfare in contrast to health, education, the environment, or poverty.
Much classical and modern political theory assumes and even endorses domestic violence, bellicose masculinity, and the notion that “real” politics is generated, discussed, and concluded between men. The idea that male virtue is tied to violence, whether in defense of faith, family, or the border, is immensely strong.
From individual duels to national campaigns, the “right” way to engage in violence has given rise to ideas of nobility. Masculine worth is supposedly incarnate in bloodshed and authoritarian leadership, embodied in the military as a righteous national embodiment of power, spirit, religiosity, and victory.
Raewyn Connell articulates the history of North Atlantic countries that conquered much of the world with contemporary ethnographic study of gender politics. She finds white male sexuality in Western Europe and North America is isomorphic with power: Men seek global dominance and desire, orchestrated to oppress women through hegemonic masculinity.
US masculine anxiety is repeating itself in a manner that may be totally predictable, but is no less disastrous for humanity, other animals, and the planet.
This encompasses overt sexism—rape, domestic violence, and obstacles to female career advancement—and more subtle domination, such as excluding women from social settings and sports teams, or the bourgeois media’s fascination with men. Ironically, women’s rights are often invoked to justify invasions that injure them. For example, the British used traditional limitations on women’s freedom and education to legitimize the colonization of India.
Everywhere you look, from diplomats to bombers to correspondents, war is an implicitly and explicitly masculine activity. This is rarely, if ever, recognized in mainstream media coverage and academic knowledge, or problematized as such.
That said, reactionary commentators, male and female alike, have gone out of their way to valorize the hypermasculinity that has been unleashed, beyond even normal limits, in the United States since 2001, laying claim to chivalry, dominance, and certainty.
Reactionary public commentators churn out press columns and viral videos, seizing the opportunities afforded by war to push a domestic agenda for male power, using international relations to denounce queerness and feminism.
Camille Paglia, Peggy Noonan and Ann Coulter endorse compulsory heterosexuality. Coulter called one deceased soldier “an American original—virtuous, pure, and masculine as only an American man can be” who “died bringing freedom and democracy to 28 million Afghans.” She insisted that “there is no other country in the world—certainly not in continental Europe—that could have produced such a man.”
In 2025, US Chief of Protocol Monica Crowley stated that “we are in an era of true masculinity thanks to the bold and muscular leadership of President Trump and our Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.” And Hegseth dutifully promises “maximum lethality, not lukewarm legality” in the assault on Iran.
But behind those loud voices lurks a figure long plagued by doubts, failures, and weaknesses—actually existing masculinity. Hence Niccolo Machiavelli in the 16th century proposing that men dressed in uniform and trained to fight lose any “habits they consider effeminate.”
Such anxiety has been common among imperial powers across history and geography, with numerous institutions dedicated to carrying forward errant masculine impulses or channeling them into military readiness: physical culture, “strenuous living,” social Darwinism, rational recreation, and French neoclassical romanticism among them.
Matthew Arnold famously wrote, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”; but a deep concern for military preparedness led him to warn that “disasters have been prepared on those playing fields as well as victories.” Pierre de Coubertin revived the ancient Olympics in 1896 as an international festival of male athletes and diplomats that could cultivate “man’s moral musculature,” redeeming French masculinity after the shocks of the Franco-Prussian conflict a quarter of a century earlier.
By the end of the 19th century, the United States had been at peace for three decades, ever since its bloody Civil War. As most veterans of that conflict passed away, there was public debate about whether American men were still capable of martial masculinity.
Wars in Cuba and the Philippines followed in quick succession. Hundreds of thousands were killed and wounded to expand US imperialism—part of a desperate, felt need to “build masterful male citizens.”
That has its modern corollaries. In 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy alerted Sports Illustrated readers to a “growing softness, our increasing lack of fitness.” Such trends supposedly constituted “a threat to our security” that must be addressed, per Ancient Greece’s Olympian quest to forge and maintain “a vigorous state.” After all, “struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America.”
Concerns about masculinity and domination of territory routinely underpin the allocation of government resources. Donald J. Trump’s National Youth Sports Strategy feared that “most young people are not moving enough,” detailing “surveillance systems” to monitor children. His 2025 “Presidential Fitness Test” for school pupils aimed to improve “our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale” and “emphasize the importance” of “military readiness.”
The hypermasculinity unleashed across Iran by the current White House can come as no surprise. The fact that it is reinforced by a video of Hollywood explosions and outbursts makes this horror simultaneously banal and fatal, as propaganda and movies meet in male bodies: “machismo from film and television, crassly interspersed with real infrared kill-shot footage.”
US masculine anxiety is repeating itself in a manner that may be totally predictable, but is no less disastrous for humanity, other animals, and the planet.
It’s what those men do.
Not all men—the ones who need war to ensure that they are, in fact, men. To them, Hegseth and his cadre represent “less a symbol of toxic masculinity than a masculine tonic.”
Shall we join in? Thanks, but no thanks.
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Cilia Flores: A First Lady in a New York Cell
Cilia Flores is one of the most prominent political prisoners in the world, yet most women’s rights organizations have not said a word in her defense.
Mar 04, 2026
On International Working Women’s Day in 2025, Cilia Flores, the wife of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, read a poem she wrote highlighting the historic role played by Latin American women in the fight against imperialism:
We’re not flowers the wind can pluck,
we’re roots of rebel and loyal land,
we’re grandmothers, mothers, daughters, granddaughters;
we are woman.
Our blood pulses with the Manuelas,
Luisas, Josefas, Juanas, Cecilias,
Apacuanas, Bartolinas, Eulalias,
Martas, Anas Marías, Barbaritas
and so many others who legacy inspires,
commits, and strengthens us
to continue walking and traveling our path.
And in our hands and chests
a light is on that nobody will ever turn off:
love, peace and liberty.
—Cilia Flores, International Working Women’s Day 2025
One year later, she languishes in a cell in New York City, having been dragged out of her room and kidnapped by US forces on the January 3 attack on Venezuela. The first images after her abduction showed her face bruised. We later learned she had broken ribs, 23 stitches in her forehead, and deteriorating health inside US custody.
Flores is no ordinary first lady. She first rose to prominence in 1992 as a defense lawyer for a group of Venezuelan military officers who rose up against the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez, which had massacred thousands of people in the Caracazo of 1989–nationwide riots following the imposition of neoliberal austerity measures. Key among those officers was Hugo Chávez, the founder of the Bolivarian Revolution.
Out of solidarity with Cilia, with Venezuelan women in general, we must make it our cause to fight for her freedom.
In 1993, Cilia founded the Bolivarian Circle of Human Rights and aligned herself with Chávez’s revolutionary movement. In 2000, having helped Chávez win consecutive presidential elections, she was elected to the legislature. By 2006, she became the president of the National Assembly, the first woman in Venezuela’s history to occupy the post. Flores held important positions in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and became the country’s solicitor general in 2012, a post she left to run Nicolás Maduro’s presidential campaign after President Chávez’s passing.
Cilia married Nicolás, her longtime partner, following the election. Feeling that the title of “first lady” could not capture her importance to the Bolivarian Revolution, her husband dubbed her the primera combatiente, or first combatant.
After working behind the scenes as a key adviser to President Maduro, she ran for election to the National Assembly and won in 2015, 2020, and 2025.
Today, she faces charges of conspiracy to import cocaine, along with possession of machine guns and destructive devices. The charges are absurd.
In the early 1990s, back when Venezuela was a key ally of the United States, over 50% of the world’s cocaine was trafficked through the country. By 2025, as Venezuela was considered an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States, that number was down to 5%. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric of Venezuela flooding the US with cocaine, and his constant conflation of cocaine with fentanyl (which is neither trafficked through nor produced in Venezuela), has no basis in reality.
Now that the Trump administration controls Venezuela’s oil trade, the rhetoric on drugs has flipped. Following a visit to Venezuela, the head of US Southern Command touted a new counternarcotics cooperation agreement. Was the abduction of Nicolás and Cilia sufficient to end whatever alleged narcotics operation the Venezuelan government was accused of running? It’s more likely that such operations never existed in the first place. The allegations of drug trafficking served not only to discredit the Venezuelan government and its leaders but also paved the way for the January 3 attack.
Cilia Flores is one of the most prominent political prisoners in the world, yet most women’s rights organizations have not said a word in her defense. She is a sitting member of Venezuela’s National Assembly and played an instrumental role in the movement that greatly expanded democratic, economic, and social rights in the country.
Cilia stands with Palestine. In a November 2023 conference in Turkey, she said: “We are witnessing a genocide… We see the victims in Gaza. We see the death of children, women, the elderly, and civilians. We see civilian victims coming out of their destroyed homes, but unable to leave the city because they are in an open-air prison.”
Cilia brought feminism to the Bolivarian Revolution. On International Working Women’s Day in 2023, she helped launch a social mission aimed at protecting women from the worst of the economic war. At the time, she said: “Venezuelan women have shown they are the vanguard. Women make up more than half the population, but we are also mothers of the other half, so we form a whole. And in this war that Venezuela has endured, we achieved victory and are standing firm thanks to the participation of Venezuelan women, who did not just stay home taking care of children, building their families, but also took to the streets to defend the nation. Our women are patriots... and in the next scenario, whatever it may be, we will be victorious because women will be at the forefront of any battle."
Little did she know that the next scenario would be a prison cell in the United States. Out of solidarity with Cilia, with Venezuelan women in general, we must make it our cause to fight for her freedom.
Recalling her beautiful poem above, today our blood pulses with Cilia.
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