Democracy Rises and Falls with Women’s Movements and Mobilization
A state of the state for women.
March marks Women’s History Month, hardly a rote observance this year, not when our lives, our bodily autonomy, and even our ability to cast a ballot in these United States (the threat of the SAVE America Act isn’t dead yet!) are under attack. Democracy rises and falls with women’s movements and mobilization, a linkage we at The Contrarian regularly address.
I have been especially hungry for feminist perspectives on the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran and how women, in particular, view this war. Mandana Dayani’s powerful essay “Why We Must Amplify Voices Inside Iran” (Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper) and Jill Filipovic’s well-curated post “What to Read about Iran Today” (Throughline) are must-reads. Both writers make clear there is no uniform drumbeat or response, especially for those who seek a path to democracy. But there is a whole lot of noise to drown out. Notes Filipovic, “That may be a complicated truth for anti-Trump anti-war liberals to hold in tandem with our own opposition to this war, but we can hold it.” We must try.
Dayani, an Iranian refugee, writes of the current generation of women and girls who are “not just participating in this movement — they are leading it, becoming the defining faces of resistance despite the unimaginable consequences they know they face.” She unpacks what it means to demand consequences for the regime’s deployment of mass violence and torture, sexual assault, and systematic oppression of women — crimes the international community has long treated “as unfortunate but unavoidable facts of geopolitics.”
As the events in the entire region unfold — including details that emerge about the deadly bombing of a girls’ school last weekend, a “grave violation of humanitarian law” per UNESCO — I will continue to seek out and share reporting from women writers and those with identities that enable them to wrestle with all the complexities at play. As Dayani writes, “The fate of Iran’s regime has profound global consequences, and its collapse offers the greatest chance for long-term stability and for the liberation of the Iranian people who have lived under its terror for nearly fifty years. Imagine how unbearable life must be to dance in the streets at the sound of strikes above your head.”
The downward spiral of reproductive rights in the United States. is another regular topic at The Contrarian. A new article, “Jailed for losing a pregnancy: how progress on El Salvador’s harsh anti-abortion law is unraveling” (The Guardian), offers a harrowing cautionary tale. For context, though most of the world’s nations (nearly 60) have liberalized their laws on abortion in recent years, the United States is emphatically not one of them. Rather, we are one of the four countries worldwide that have actively rolled back abortion rights. The three others whose company we keep? El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Poland.
It has been several decades since El Salvador outlawed abortion and enshrined in its constitution the protection of “life from conception,” thus shepherding in an era of pregnancy criminalization: women who have had abortions have been charged with aggravated homicide, which carries a potential sentence of 50 years in prison; others who have suffered miscarriages or related emergencies, many of whom have been reported by hospital staff, are charged with negligent homicide.
For many years, advocates built up a defense network and successfully won the release of women who had been incarcerated for pregnancy outcomes. But since 2022, when populist President Nayib Bukele instituted a series of emergency powers to address rising gang violence, supposedly a temporary solution, the suspension of rights and liberties has extended rapidly to pregnant women.
Paula Ávila-Guillén, who directs the Women’s Equality Center, told The Guardian that this is hardly an unintended consequence or an anomaly. Authoritarian governments treat such outcomes as incidental damage, she said. “Strongman leaders believe this is the cost of doing business,” she says. “If you want a ‘safe’ country, then some people will pay the price.”
It is hard not to draw parallels to the United States, where President Donald Trump’s penchant for emergency powers and blatant misogyny put us on a similarly terrifying collision course. (For more information about rising criminalization and reproductive rights and justice, the nonprofit Pregnancy Justice is an essential resource.)
Meanwhile, as the domestic affordability crisis rages on — you know, the “hoax” and “dirty, rotten lies” told by Democrats — the personal finance site WalletHub published its annual “Best & worst states for women (2026)” offering up some sticky stats. In comparing the 50 states and the District of Columbia across two dozen standard-of-living indicators — such as median earnings, quality of and access to health care, and public safety records — these maps highlight just how unequal life is for women across the country. Click here to see how your state ranks. Quick toplines: The five best places for women are Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, Maine, Minnesota, and Maryland. Ranking and tanking out at the bottom are Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Check out the winners for Women’s Equality (Hawaii, Nevada, Maryland, Maine, and Oregon) and Working Moms (Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, the District of Columbia, and Maine), too.
Finally, as the United States prepares to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, enter Feminist 250 (Ms. Magazine), a beautiful, multi-disciplinary site that explores the feminist histories that laid the nation’s foundation and shaped 250 years of ideas about equality, justice, and freedom. The “Founding Feminists” series launched this week and will feature new content posted throughout Women’s History Month. Scholars, journalists, poets, and artists square the extraordinary vision of legions of women — from their “revolutionary manifestos to quiet domestic rebellions” — with the reality that we surely have yet to complete the quest for a more perfect union.
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Announcement! Join Moms First and others for a virtual event Motherhood Live: Moms, Democracy, and the Fight for Free & Fair Elections this Thursday, March 5 at 7p.m. ET. (Register here.) Historians, organizers, and civic leaders will discuss why mothers have always been central to protecting democracy. From the suffrage movement to modern fights against voter suppression and disinformation, this virtual event offers concrete actions we can take to defend free and fair voting in our communities.
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.
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Ever since Donald Trump has been president, the United States has regressed over a 100 year period in the areas of civil rights, women’s rights, education and science among many other things.