Winfrey, who is the first black woman to receive the Cecil B. DeMille award for lifetime achievement, used this platform to highlight important issues related to both the #MeToo movement and her own experiences as a black woman.

Men have only been surprised by #MeToo because they haven't been forced to confront the ways in which women’s lives are so frequently tinged with the feeling that they must defend themselves against men’s tendencies to sexualize them.

Winfrey recently made headlines for her incredible acceptance speech at the Golden Globes. In fact, many seemed to think the speech set the stage for the media mogul’s future presidential run.

On December 12, Merriam-Webster declared that the word of 2017 was “feminism.” Their choice highlights not only our culture’s struggle to define the word “feminism” itself, but the way in which the movement the word represents played out in the spheres of politics and entertainment last year.

Since her release earlier this year, Manning has been speaking about issues like gender identity and surveillance in the press and at colleges and universities. On November 15, I had the chance to see her speak at Wesleyan University.

Now that we’ve made it through 2017, it’s important to remember how much the feminist movement accomplished this past year even in the face of political adversity.

United Women Firefighters is an affinity group of women firefighters working in the Fire Department of New York (FDNY).

Colin Kaepernick is unemployed because he decided to kneel while the national anthem played before games in protest of racial injustice, namely the string of police killings of unarmed black men, in the United States.

Young activists are on the ground every day, fighting for and within their own communities in ways both big and small.

Saudi women are unable to exercise freedom in clothing, travel, work, or family. This reality led the World Economic Forum to rank Saudi Arabia 141 out of 144 countries in its 2016 report on the global gender gap.

After immigrant youth spent years relentlessly organizing and protesting against U.S. deportation laws, President Obama signed an executive order called Deferred Action for Children Act (DACA) in 2012. DACA was created to provide temporary deportation relief to eligible undocumented youth who had migrated to the United States as children.

Our government has a way of minimizing its destructive influence on the minorities of this nation by convincing us that we’re the problem—that we’re all out to get each other and everyone else—so we lose focus on the systemic oppression inflicted upon us by our highest-ranking officials and start to point fingers at each other, until we reach mutually assured destruction.

The Seneca Falls Convention, which is perhaps best remembered for its demand for women’s suffrage, was held on July 19, 1848. And yet 169 years later, American women continue to struggle within the confines of a patriarchal and misogynistic society—and to honor the legacy of the Seneca Falls Convention nonetheless by continuing to fight for their rights.

The United Nations has committed to achieving gender equality and empowering women and girls everywhere by 2030. Some specific targets include ending all forms of discrimination against all women, eliminating all forms of violence against all women, ensuring women’s full and effective participation in public, economic, and political life, and ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health resources and reproductive rights.