Ms. Magazine Takes Gold at 2026 Anthem Awards for FEMINIST 250

Ms. magazine has won Gold at the 2026 Anthem Awards. The prize, announced this week, went to FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists in the Special Projects, Belonging and Inclusion category.

The Anthem Awards are presented by the organization behind the Webby Awards. Organizers position them as the premier international honors for social impact work. Gold placement puts Ms. alongside a notable cohort of 2026 honorees. The magazine named the Rockefeller Foundation, LEGO, National Geographic, Doctors Without Borders and Sesame Street as fellow recipients.

What is the winning project?

FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists launched during Women's History Month to mark the nation's 250th anniversary. It is an illustrated collection of essays, historical research, art and multimedia storytelling. The project's stated aim is to challenge the familiar narrative of America's founding by recovering women whose names rarely appear in school curricula.

The multimedia site carries several built-in features:

• An interactive timeline spanning more than 400 years of women's activism
• Original artwork by Nettrice Gaskins
• Podcast programming
• A public syllabus
• Reader contributions inviting personal visions of a feminist future

Which stories anchor the collection?

Six essays form the project's core, each with a named author and subject.

Michelle Schenandoah, a member of the Oneida Nation Wolf Clan, wrote "Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America." Her piece examines an Indigenous system in which women have long held political, economic and spiritual authority, and whose democratic traditions influenced the United States.

Historian Vanessa M. Holden's "She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women's Revolutionary Resistance" tells the story of Ona Judge. Judge was enslaved by George and Martha Washington and escaped to freedom. The essay also covers the countless other Black women who resisted slavery long before the nation's founding ideals reached them.

In "Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America," historian Jen Manion challenges the notion that transgender and gender-nonconforming people are a modern phenomenon, uncovering lives that defied gender expectations centuries before today's LGBTQ+ vocabulary existed.

Jacqueline Beatty's "The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity" introduces Elizabeth Finney. Finney was an 18th-century woman who used the era's expectations of feminine obedience and dependence to challenge her abusive husband and demand a divorce.

Jessina Emmert's "Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy" revisits the woman enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. Emmert frames Hemings as a figure of remarkable political agency who negotiated for her children's freedom.

Further essays cover the political imagination of Phillis Wheatley, the overlooked contributions of Spanish-speaking women in early America — with the article cross-posted in Spanish — the abolitionist origins of American feminism, and the experiences of Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman known to have arrived in the United States.

Who made it, and who funded it?

Janell Hobson, Ms. contributing editor, led the project. The credited team includes executive editor Kathy Spillar, executive director for partnerships and strategy Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, managing digital editor Roxanne Szal and art director Brandi Phipps, plus scholars, historians, artists, writers and members of the Ms. web and editorial teams.

Funding came from Susan Byrd and the Women Moving Millions Art Catalyst Matching Fund.

Hobson connected the award to the current political cycle. "Receiving this news in the wake of the historic midterm election wins for women is a testament to feminist media and our journalistic approach to preserving history while continuing to make history happen," she said.

What does the win change?

For Ms., the Gold placement converts a commemorative anniversary project into an internationally recognized entry in the social-impact awards space, on a winners' list otherwise dominated by foundations and global brands. The Anthem recognition also gives the individual essays — on Haudenosaunee governance, Ona Judge, Sally Hemings and Afong Moy — a distribution bump through the awards platform's own channels.

The timing compounds the effect. The award arrives directly after midterm election wins for women that Hobson calls historic, placing a 250th-anniversary history project into an active news cycle rather than a purely retrospective one.