‘We’re 53 Years Ahead of Where They Were Then’: Looking Back at 50+ Years of Ms.—and Looking Forward to a Feminist Future
This year, for the first time ever, the full archive of Ms. magazine issues, from 1972 to the present, became available online. ProQuest’s Ms. magazine archive, available now in libraries and on college campuses nationwide (if you can’t find it in yours, ask your librarian!), offers an incredible lens for looking at the current moment we find ourselves in through prescient writing by scholars, activists, and journalists for over five decades that didn’t shy away from confronting misogyny and the other social forces shaping women’s lives.
To mark the launch of the archive, Ms. hosted a two-day symposium in its Los Angeles offices for librarians and academics exploring its uses in the classroom, in research—and in our movement-building. In a conversation led by Ms. executive editor Kathy Spillar as part of the celebration, I joined legendary author, activist and professor Loretta Ross and Ms. contributor and Ms. Committee of Scholars co-chair Janell Hobson for a discussion about what lessons our collective history can offer feminists in this challenging moment.
You can listen to the entire conversation in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts—or on msmagazine.com.
Together, we explored how the stories of our past can continue to inspire us—and give us hope in the fight forward.
This interview has been edited and re-organized for clarity and length.
Kathy Spillar: A major focus of Ms. is to provide in-depth analysis of laws, of culture, of society as it impacts inequality, and to also put forward some strategies for change and connect to activists who are working for that change as we move towards equality. The key thing that Ms. provides (more than, frankly, I think than any other publication out there) is an understanding of the role of gender in the expansion of right-wing extremism and violence and the rise of authoritarianism here in the U.S. and around the world. Mainstream media really fails to deal with gender as part of rising authoritarianism and anti-democratic impulses in our political landscape. Loretta, can you talk about why including gender in this analysis of our current political crisis is so critically important, and the problems with not including it?
Loretta Ross: Mainstream media does not include gender—not because they don’t know, but because they don’t care. Let’s be clear. All we have done over the last hundred years to educate the public about the importance of gender issues has not gone unnoticed, but it is unprofitable to accurately analyze what is wrong with our society, and so, our project has to change—not just to tell our stories, but to change who listens to those stories so that people are in seats of power who do care. I don’t believe that the assault on women and women’s rights can be extracted from the overall dysfunction of all societies. Let’s look at how the current antifeminist movement began: as a strategy for those who wanted to distort democracy to knit together the antifeminists, the segregationists, the anti-gay people, the anti-immigrant people, the anti-democratic forces that never got punished for the Civil War. They put all of that together in a badly-named coalition called the Moral Majority.
It’s very important for us to understand the hydra-like nature of the attack on women’s rights, because it’s never about just gender. I’ve always said, if you don’t understand white supremacy, everything else will confuse you—because you really don’t understand how the attack on women’s rights is about compelling [and] coercing white women to have more babies, while practicing sterilization abuse and population control on everybody else.
Marlene Gerber Fried and I have just issued a new book called Abortion and Reproductive Justice, and our goal was to situate the struggle for abortion rights into this larger narrative around the fight against white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism and the patriarchy. That’s my analysis. As we fight for women’s rights and women’s human rights, we always have to situate it in the larger struggle against the ravages of neoliberal capitalism, the permanence of white supremacy, the enduring nature of the patriarchy.
Spillar: Carmen, how does what Loretta was just talking about fit into this podcast series that you produced, Looking Back, Moving Forward?
Carmen Rios: Something that I was actually thinking about as Loretta was talking was the Equal Rights Amendment episode. We spoke, in our interview for that episode, about Ms.’s role in unveiling the real opponents of women’s constitutional equality as well as just women’s rights across the board—and, as we know, and as Loretta has touched on, how interconnected all of these other rights and justice issues are within that. I was thinking about the article that we recently published online with Ms., “Why Big Business is Trying to Defeat the ERA.” It was published in, I believe, 1976.
It was just an incredible thing to find, to see that this article just spelled out the ways in which what we saw as a “culture war” with Phyllis Schlafly and her STOP ERA movement was really just a funded operation by groups like the John Birch Society, these far-right groups that are interested in total economic destruction, the absolute ravaging of culture for money, as well as stripping away everyone’s rights. What stood out to me, as I was doing that research, was that our opponents have not changed, and the mainstream media has yet to name them the way that we have, and have continued to for 50-plus years, and how tied in all of that is. And that comes up again and again in the research I did. When it came to women in politics, reproductive freedom, economic justice, of course, and even gender-based violence, so much of this is wrapped up in the people the mainstream media won’t name, because, like Loretta said, their wealth, their ties to this capitalist framework that demands that some are oppressed while other are multi-billionaires and trillionaires, it relies on that system to perpetuate itself, and so the mainstream media can’t name these people.
We’re seeing that in real time with the Epstein files. We’re seeing the refusal to name the forces that are powerful, and that is something that is so incredibly important, and something that we know. When I was Managing Digital Editor of Ms. during the fallout from the 2016 election, we also just noticed the absolute inability or unwillingness of the mainstream media to admit that there are not two sides to whether or not everyone is a human being with human rights, that there are not two sides to so many different issues. But in order to make money and in order to sell, they need to have a conflict, and they need to have a debate, and something to sit around the table and talk about for 18 hours, and so, it just all comes back to how vital it is to have a resource like Ms., an independently-funded community publication that’s willing to speak real truth to power, and not just report on the fallout from these critical problems.
I don’t believe that the assault on women and women’s rights can be extracted from the overall dysfunction of all societies.
Loretta Ross
Spillar: I thought the strongest pull quote [from] this article is the economic consequences of equality for women are enormous, and of course, the flip side of that is big businesses’ consequences, as well. Point well made—and I hope we don’t forget, and it really goes to what you were saying, too, Loretta: don’t accept the popular wisdom or the conventional wisdom about why things are the way they are. That has been a key job of Ms. magazine from the beginning. Go beyond the curtain. Who is pulling the levers of what is happening? Don’t accept that it’s social wars, that it was Phyllis Shlafly. I get so angry when she is featured in even popular series as having defeated the Equal Rights Amendment. She was the front. We can get into who defeated and why and what we’re going to do about it. That’s the exciting thing, is what are we going to do about it now?
Part of what Ms. has done is always connect to the academic community, to scholars, and brought their research forward, including what we are doing with our work to help scholars learn to write for the popular media, so that the research reaches mass audiences and people can understand some of this vital research. Janell, you had a very popular series on Ms. about Harriet Tubman. If you want to talk about that or any of the other pieces, you’re a regular contributor on culture, as much as anything else, which I think is very important.
Janell Hobson: It’s been such an honor to be able to write regularly for Ms., and even teaching articles, not just my own, of course, but all of the Ms. writers, or even just teaching various pieces that I think are useful for my students. One of the things I love about being able to link to a Ms. online article is that there are no pop-up ads, and I’m going to mention it, because when you talk about commercial-free, that is something important when you think about how you’re able to still bring a certain feminist analysis in your media, in your news, without having to be reliant on a kind of corporate model for that, and that is extremely important.
It’s also important to go back to how I came into writing for Ms., because this happened back in 2010 when Ms. received a Ford Foundation grant, when the right people were in charge of Ford, I might add. I’m thinking of Irma McClaurin and the work she did to provide funding for Ms., for the National Women’s Studies Association, for a number of those different institutions, to make sure that they had an opportunity to grow and expand, and Ms. took advantage of that by reaching out to scholars like myself. If you’re interested in writing for a broader audience, come work with us. Come train with us. Come do some media training and writing and whatnot. It has been so profoundly important in the way I’ve been able to rewrite and write my work and to translate my work through a broader audience, whether I’m writing about Beyoncé or writing about Harriet Tubman, and it makes a huge difference.
That’s what the Feminist Majority Foundation said: We want to grow our own journalists, so let’s start with the actual feminist scholars in the academic institutions, but bring you out of the ivory towers. Don’t get too comfortable over there, just writing because you need to get tenure, or you need to get promotion. That there is a real-world impact of the writing that you’re doing that’s more than just your professional development. And that was an important message, when you consider where we are right now in terms of the state of mainstream media and what a feminist media can do as intervention.
I see the work that I’m doing as both co-chair of the Ms. Committee of Scholars in terms of making those bridges between scholars as well as journalists and Ms. in particular, and being able to be a bridge, but to also be an intervention to actually provide an alternative, because that has become more and more important in the work that we’re doing.
The Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project, that just came out of realizing that there was a bicentennial anniversary to celebrate, and realizing, this is an opportunity to do a series. We actually worked on doing a whole series from Black History Month on up to Women’s History Month, because, being Black women, we get to combine two months together—and doing it with Harriet Tubman, because, according to authenticating archives, there was evidence that showed that she may have been born in either February or March 1822. So, I said, well, we’ll claim the two months together, and we were able to do a series of different articles throughout February and March in 2022 highlighting Harriet Tubman. I did an article about her descendants, those who have been very committed to keeping her memory alive, and one of the descendants, Jaclyn Bryant, who’s in her 80s, something she said was that she would love for us, as a society, as a nation, to be able to see the humanity of Harriet Tubman, and that, in order to do that, you’ll realize that she’s not this superhero, who had this super ability to just go in and rescue so many hundreds of people, but what motivated Harriet Tubman was love—love for family, love for her people, and that was what kept her going back. She freed herself, and then she’s like, okay. I’m in freedom, and I’m all alone. I need to go back for my people.
When we did that article with Ms., I had so many people respond, and said: ‘Wow, I have to tell you I’ve never thought of someone like Harriet Tubman having real descendants. Now I have to actually think about her as a woman.’ So, what was she before? Oh, she was like Wonder Woman, a superhero.
History is also about not just inspiring you about what people did in the past, but to also recognize their vulnerabilities, recognize that they are human, to recognize that these are people who actually live real lives—which, by the way, the new administration is now trying to act like she never existed. We’re not letting this go. We have to keep rewriting history and reclaiming history, especially knowing that the forces out there are doing what they can to erase us.
Spillar: Loretta, do you want to talk about some of the work the movement has done to communicate the value of feminism to men and their involvement in the movement, which is growing?
Ross: I had the privilege of being the third executive director of the first rape crisis center in the country, the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, back in the ‘70s. Even at the beginning of the anti-rape movement, we knew we had to go beyond just helping the survivors—we had to stop rape. And to stop rape, we needed men to stop raping. We understood that project from the outset.
In the early days, we had men who were committed to fighting rape and sexual violence and the rape culture serving as our volunteers, doing the childcare when we had the conferences, trying to establish a presence for themselves. But they did it in a way that I thought was insufficient, because they weren’t establishing a masculine analysis of ending violence. By the ‘80s, we started seeing the development of Men and Masculinity conferences that were taking place, where men were actually coming together to talk about reframing the concept of masculinity so that they could remove violence against women and misogyny from the definition of what it meant to be a man. In the ‘90s, when I served on the board of Men Stopping Violence, it was there I met people like Jackson Katz and others, who were beginning to theorize and conceptualize about repopulating the definition of masculinity without the violence, the white supremacy.
Black folks say, we’re fighting for the soul of white folks. We’re also fighting for the soul of men folks—but we can’t fight for them. They have to fight for themselves, because we can’t save them. We’re busy saving ourselves.
I’ve watched this for 50 years, that effort for men to recapture a sense of integrity and honesty and joy in being a man, without all those things that are leading them to the deaths of despair and the loneliness, but it is a very hard project for men. When we decide to claim feminism and claim self-empowerment and claim new definitions for ourselves, other women aren’t going to threaten to kill us for it. They might dislike us for it, but they’re not going to come out and actually kill us for it. It’s totally different for men. We have to recognize the differential price that you risk for standing up for human rights and justice if you’re a man.
History is about not just inspiring you about what people did in the past, but to also recognize their vulnerabilities, recognize that they are human, to recognize that these are people who actually live real lives. … We have to keep rewriting history and reclaiming history, especially knowing that the forces out there are doing what they can to erase us.
Janell Hobson, professor and co-chair of the Ms. Committee of Scholars
Spillar: Loretta referred to deaths of despair. The death rate among men from suicide, from drugs, overdoses, from alcohol [are] very high, and the tragedy is that masculinity being tied up with violence comes back to kill them so often. Carmen, you looked at violence and masculinities as part of the new podcast series. Anything that Loretta has said you want to take off on?
Rios: In episode one, I spoke to Aimee Allison from She the People, and she spoke at length about the importance of rewriting the myths of America in order to fix our democracy and assess what we’re seeing now, and that through line really does come through throughout the whole series, to think about the interconnectedness of racism and sexism and homophobia and xenophobia in reproductive justice. That came up in my interviews with Michele Goodwin and Renee Bracey Sherman—and then, for the violence episode, to really unpack the ways in which, when Ms. was founded, there wasn’t even language around a lot of these issues that we now have so much conversation and dialogue about.
Like Loretta has said so many times today and yesterday, the language matters so that we can tell our stories. A platform like the Ms. Archive matters because that history, those stories, remind us that these issues are not new and that we can come together and heal and work for progress around them. I was working on the issue around violence at the same time that the 2025 Ms. special issue on men and masculinity came out—and to be able to see, once again, that 50-plus years before, men were in Ms. writing about feminism, about violence, about the idea that masculinity is tied to violence, and trying to put that message out there. Seeing how normalized that conversation has become was really powerful, to know that I was writing this episode in a place where I came into the feminist movement with all that language and with male allies in that work, to see that progress was heartening and did give me hope.
Spillar: Janell, I would love for you to talk about some of the ideas around America 250.
Hobson: We started talking about what we can do for next year because of the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, and of course, hearing what the current administration has planned, it was like, yeah, we need to do a counternarrative. It’s an opportunity to actually think through: What is this idea of nationhood? What is this idea of America? And, specifically, how we want to actually articulate a more inclusive, more feminist democratic America—which means that if we need to imagine it for the future, we also have to remember and reimagine it in the past. Those two things are connected, the looking back and moving forward.
The idea is a series in which we can actually raise up the narrative of America’s founding feminists and who they are and how they operated within and without that particular master narrative that we have of the Founding Fathers. That might look like talking about Iroquois women, who gave us the constitution. It might look like bringing up Phillis Wheatley as a Founding Mother. It might look like Sally Hemings as a Founding Mother. It might look like Ona Judge running away from George and Martha Washington to claim her own freedom. It might look like expanding on Abigail Adams’ Remember the Ladies, and to think beyond first ladies, as well, but to also include them in that conversation, to think about ways in which that history was also queered, the ways in which men have been supporting feminists. I’m thinking of how the Declaration of Independence has always been this kind of signifying document that others have often used to respond to, whether we’re talking about Frederick Douglass or Elizabeth Cady Stanton coming up with the Declaration of Sentiments.
We’re not just going to take it back to the Founding Fathers, which is what is the plan in terms of next year’s master narrative of America’s 250th anniversary. In many ways, when I think of what is going on in this moment, I actually think about Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, because that really was the point when right-wing folks lost their ever-loving minds, because she dared to actually suggest that maybe 1619, and not 1776, really ought to be our origin story. After that, what happened? Banning books, vilifying critical race theory. All of those things came out of The 1619 Project. Even before Biden was elected president, one of the main executive orders we were dealing with in 2020 was, coming from the White House, that tried to ban anyone talking about race—which is what gave me the impetus to come up with the Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project, is realizing that these narratives are so important.
We have to push back against the more extreme elements, and help people to do the critical thinking. I like the idea of mass education, but some folks are also doing mass dilution, and we have to think about how to fight that, as well.
Not only are we not alone now, but we’ve never been alone in what we’re experiencing. There’s a long lineage of people who have been fighting this fight, because they know that we deserve justice.
Rios
Spillar: One of the things, Loretta, that you had mentioned earlier is the importance of Ms. intervening in the popular media’s reporting on so many things and how I wish we could come up with other ideas for how to totally define the conversation around some of these issues. I think we’re breaking through in many ways. The New York Times did a big piece that many of you probably saw on Black women’s unemployment, and literally, four months prior to that, we had had a major piece online about this very subject. I wish, occasionally, the writers would say, “as I found from Ms. Magazine…”
Ross: I think we should celebrate when we make a breakthrough, but what pisses me off is that, even when we make a breakthrough, it’s a one-off. They won’t cover it with the routine repetitiveness of Hillary’s emails, or what have you. It’s a nod to doing the right thing, but not a commitment to keep the conversation going. That’s something that needs to change.
I didn’t even graduate from college until I was 55—and so, I doubted that I had the chops to become a writer, because when you fail at college and you don’t get published, and you’re a community activist, you see people like Janell, I’d say, ‘oh, I’d like to be her one day,’ and it took me a long time to be persuaded that not only did I have ideas, but they were ideas worth writing down, and that I had the capacity to write them. I have to actually blame Kimberlé Crenshaw for this, because I went to California just to beg Kimberlé to write the first book on reproductive justice, and Kimberlé looked at me and said, ‘Loretta, you got to write that,’ and I went, ‘Oh, shit. That’s not the answer I wanted to hear.’ Well, now I’m four books later on the topic. That’s what I want to leave people with: You have a voice, and however you present that voice is good and okay. Learning writing is a discipline, just like learning to play chess. The more you do it, the better you’ll get at it, but don’t assume that you have to be great at it to start. As my writing coach told me, when I finally got smart enough to hire one, writers write. Write every day, and the more you do it, the better you’ll get.
Spillar: Thank you, Loretta. I had meant to ask you specifically about that. It’s a brilliant observation, and something that Ms. is deeply committed to. We just finished a series with Groundswell Fund, which funds a lot of women of color reproductive justice organizers, activist groups, entities, and we invited them to step forward, leaders of these different grassroots groups around the country, and write about the work they’re doing and the importance of it. The purpose of this series is to center women and gender in democracy, and we felt that having the voice of activists become widely read is critically important, and the work that they’ve done, we’ve coached them. We’ve helped edit. We’ve really put in the effort, and they’re now all coming back and saying, well, we have other ideas for other stories we want to do. So, it’s created a whole new cohort for us, for writers, which we’re thrilled about.
Hobson: It’s always a pleasure being able to share the same table, to actually talk about these ideas, and overall, I agree with what Loretta says. It’s interesting you’re wanting to write like me. I want to think like you! We’re all, obviously, inspiring each other, and I think that the work that we’re doing is so critically important. That motto, more than a magazine, it’s a movement, that really is true. It is about movement building. It’s about also incorporating people, inviting other people.
I’m planning to invite my students in my research seminar next semester to work with me on founding feminists, because that’s what I do. I like to integrate the teaching with the writing, because there is that space. We, in the field of women’s gender, sexuality studies are feeling the pressure and the fear of people trying to eliminate us, targeting us—and yet, at the same time, this is the first time, in the 25 years that I’ve been teaching at the University of Albany, that I actually have a majority Black women in a class that I am teaching this semester. And the best part about it is, it’s a course called Women in the Media, not Black Women in the Media. It was a reminder that our field started with students saying, ‘We want these courses. We want this program. We want feminism. We want magazines like Ms.‘ It’s already grassroots, ground-up, and that’s how we’ve always built, and we have to remember that when we’re being targeted, to go back to our roots and to think about how we make things happen.
It’s like what Audre Lorde said: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. We have to go back to our radical roots, because we’re not going to give up when folks are trying to target us, because that’s not how we started. We started from our own resources. And that’s what I like about Ms., is that when you see the commercial-free platform, the commercial-free magazines depending on subscribers and those who are supporting, it is about growing your own and finding your own resources, because we’re going to have to keep going back to that.
Because of Ms. and its coverage of all of these issues over 53 years, more people today understand all of this than ever did. … We’re now talking about the problems, but how the hell we’re going to solve them—and that is a difference that we should all be very grateful for. We’re 53 years ahead of where they were then.
Kathy Spillar, executive editor of Ms.
Rios: Something that I have thought about through the process with the podcast, and that was really in my mind when we started the process of the podcast, was that our times are less unprecedented than we think. We know that our founding feminist foremothers and ancestors have dealt with far more perilous times, and they found the way to make it happen anyway. The process of putting together Looking Back, Moving Forward, being able to see the history of Ms., there’s this simultaneous reckoning with how deep these problems are, to know that 50-plus years later, we’re still talking about it. It’s frustrating and deeply disheartening to know how these conversations have circled because of the disregard that so many have for these issues.
But every single episode, no matter how tough the challenges were that I had to recap in the narration coming down from this administration and Project 2025 and the far right, every episode left me with a reminder that, because we have been here before, or we have been in familiar terrain before, and we have been fighting these forces for so long, and because of the stories in Ms. from women like you, Loretta and Janell, from academics, from activists, and from everyday women, that offered me so much hope and inspiration. That was what I was hoping to pass on, and I think that’s what the importance of Ms. and feminist history really is—to know that not only are we not alone now, but we’ve never been alone in what we’re experiencing, and there’s a long lineage of people who have been fighting this fight, because they know that we deserve justice, and it allows us to move forward, knowing that we have the visions that we need for the feminist future, and that means that we can find our way there, as long as we’re willing to try our best to make it back to that home.
Spillar: And I will just say, that because of Ms. and its coverage of all of these issues over the 53 years, more people today understand all of this than ever did when that first issue came out. The very first issues were just explaining that there were problems and what those problems were. We’re now talking about the problems, but how the hell we’re going to solve them, and that is a difference that we should all be very grateful for. We’re 53 years ahead of where they were then. It’s been a deliberate strategy, obviously, by our opponents to constantly denigrate the term feminist and feminism, and you can see that, in so many different ways, but I will say that despite that, despite that, the majority of women in this country self-identify as feminist.
We have a long way to go to reach that power level that feminists need to really change things, but the good news is, is despite the constant questioning, we’ve made great progress.
