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The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism
From Mary Wollstonecraft to Sojourner Truth, the fight for women’s rights emerged alongside—and was fundamentally shaped by—the struggle to abolish slavery and secure universal human rights.
On the 250th anniversary of the founding of the republic, it is timely to trace the history of American feminism, whose roots lie in the revolutionary era and are inextricably bound with the movement to abolish slavery.
(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)
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Founding Feminists: 250 Years of an Unfinished Revolution (With Janell Hobson)
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small group of men declared that “all men are created equal,” casting a vision of liberty that has shaped the American imagination ever since. But even as they debated freedom in Philadelphia, women were writing, organizing, governing, resisting and insisting on their place within the nation taking form.
As Ms. launches a new series on our country’s Founding Feminists this month, Dr. Michele Goodwin is joined by the series’ editor, Professor Janell Hobson, to discuss what America’s 250th anniversary means for women and the feminist agenda.
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Drew Angerer / AFP via Getty Images; Michael Siluk / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images; Jeffrey Markowitz / Sygma via Getty Images; art by Brandi Phipps
War on Women Report: Georgia Woman Arrested for Self-Managed Abortion; Idaho Forces Teachers to Out Trans Youth; Ohio Bill to Force Doctors to Report Pregnancies to the State
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Cover Reveal and Spring 2026 Issue Sneak Peek: ICE Is ‘the Army of the Patriarchy’
In early February, while the nation was still reeling from the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, Loretta Ross and Jackson Katz—two feminist academics with decidedly different backgrounds and identities—discussed how U.S. federal agents became the enforcement arm of the nation’s racism and misogyny.
You’ll find this, and more, in the Spring 2026 issue of Ms.
Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy
The United States was founded not through declarations of equality, but through the labor of Black women whose political work reproduced the nation, even as it was erased from the democratic archive.
Sally Hemings is rarely situated within the United States’ democratic legacy, despite her central role in the material conditions through which democracy was made possible.
In shaping the conditions of her children’s freedom, Hemings exercised a form of maternal political authority that governed who could move beyond enslavement. This labor stands in sharp contrast to Jefferson’s authorship of democratic ideals, which articulated freedom in abstract and ambiguous terms, while Hemings produced freedom materially through the governance of reproduction and kinship under constraint.
Hemings’ strategic negotiations secured her and her children’s futures within a political order that both denied her legal personhood and depended on her labor.
(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)
