She edited the landmark 1970 anthology “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” led Ms. magazine and helped build the institutions of the modern feminist movement.

© Susan Ragan/Associated Press

Todd Blanche’s remarks are part of a totally-not-invented moral panic that stretches the limits of the imagination

Being a public school teacher in the US these days is tough. You’ve got to pay for a lot of your own supplies, deal with smartphone-addicted children and perform gender-affirming surgeries on your lunch break.

Luckily our intrepid attorney general, Todd Blanche, is on the case. Blanche appeared on Fox News this week to decry a “pandemic” of gender transitions in schools across the US. “There’s not a parent in America, no matter where you live, that would want their school to change and call their child by a different name and not expect to be told about that. We partnered with the Department of Education recently to combat this very trend and, really, pandemic that’s happening in some school districts around the country,” Blanche said. He seemed more concerned with name changes than with surgery, but the president himself has suggested on several occasions that schools are furtively doing surgery on children. During a campaign speech in 2024, for example, Donald Trump said: “Can you imagine … your son leaves the house and you say: ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this?”

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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© Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

© Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

© Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

The feminist icon thought many women would carry on her legacy. But at an unsteady time for feminism, how will the movement carry on?

© Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Gloria Steinem was asked about the young women supporting Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. Her answer created a brief hullabaloo.

© Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for Ms. Foundation For Women

We look at how some mayors have managed to hold onto voter trust, and what national leaders could learn from their success.

© Anna Connors for The New York Times; Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The activist made the movement mainstream – and became a receptacle for its hopes and disappointments

• Gloria Steinem, groundbreaking feminist campaigner, dies aged 92

• ‘We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls’: Gloria Steinem – a life in quotes

By the time she died on Wednesday, at 92 years old at her home in New York, Gloria Steinem was synonymous with feminism, a kind of human mascot for the movement. So it can be easy to forget that when she was born, feminism was over. It was something that had been faddish years before, among women who were now old ladies; something that seemed, in retrospect, like it might have been a bit overwrought and out of touch. To the girl Gloria Steinem, growing up in Ohio in the 1930s and 40s, the suffrage movement that had gained women the right to vote less than two decades prior probably seemed remote – especially to a girl like her, growing up itinerant and poor under the care of a single mother who was plagued by a violent and debilitating mental illness. You might say that growing up, Steinem had worries that were more immediate than the status of women.

But experience has a way of radicalizing women about their own gendered condition. Steinem attended Smith, and her education opened up previously unhoped for possibilities. En route to a postgraduate fellowship in India in 1957, when she was in her early 20s, she had an illegal abortion in London. Later, in 1969, while she was working as a journalist for New York magazine, she attended an “abortion speak-out” put on by a group of radical women from the emergent fringe of what was then called the Women’s Liberation movement.

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© Photograph: Granger/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Granger/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Granger/Shutterstock

After Ms. Steinem’s death at 92, celebrities and politicians reflected on her decades of activism for women’s rights and equality.

© Robert Walker/The New York Times

The writer, publisher and activist spent a lifetime advocating for greater rights for women around the world and brought feminist discourse into the mainstream

• Gloria Steinem, groundbreaking feminist campaigner, dies aged 92

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© Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

© Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

© Photograph: Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.

© Robert Walker/The New York Times