Carroll County Foundation for Change

10/01/2026

09/27/2026

“Underage woman” is sanitized language.

The word you’re looking for is child.

09/23/2026

09/04/2026

Nine days apart. Somebody up there is putting together a hell of a panel.

In January 1987, Ms. named Dolly Parton one of its Women of the Year, alongside a senator, a novelist and a former nun who sheltered Central American refugees.

The tribute was written by Gloria Steinem, and it opened by admitting that people who hadn't listened closely to either Dolly or feminism might be surprised to learn the two went together.

Then she made the case: Parton had used her business sense to bring other women and people from impoverished backgrounds up with her, and had turned every devalued symbol of womanhood — the hair, the rhinestones, the figure — into her own instrument.

Dollywood was a year old at the time.

Steinem was quick to identify it as a huge accomplishment — a dream of bringing jobs into the mountains that raised her.

Parton was never one for labels, and Steinem didn't need her to.

That was the point of the original 1987 piece, and arguably one of the larger points about Steinem: the movement she spent sixty years building was never a uniform.

It was a definition wide enough to hold a woman in a black turtleneck and a woman in a sequined jacket in the same photo, and to mean it.

Ms. re-ran the essay last week when Dolly died. Six days later, the woman who wrote it was gone too.

Read it now and it lands as a double eulogy: one woman recognizing another, both of them refusing to let anyone else decide what their power should look like.

They found their own.
They spent their lives helping the rest of us find ours.

09/03/2026

Thank you, Gloria, for showing the world what it means to speak up for women’s equality. Thank you for fighting for our rights so that every woman and every person can live with dignity, freedom, and equality.

09/03/2026

Gloria Steinem died Wednesday at the Manhattan brownstone she'd lived in for more than fifty years — the one with the living room that hosted hundreds of Talking Circles: strangers, organizers, kids with a cause, anyone who needed a room.

Her foundation says those gatherings continue.

Steinem was known for the time she went undercover as a Pl***oy Bunny to expose the conditions the women there faced. She co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972 when the men running print media assumed nobody would buy one, and built the Women's Action Alliance, the Ms. Foundation, and Take Our Daughters to Work Day.

She built almost none of it alone, and said so. Ms. and the Women's Action Alliance were co-founded with Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the Black child-care organizer who toured the country with her as a speaking partner — that raised-fist photo of the two of them is the movement's most famous image.

In 1971 she helped found the National Women's Political Caucus alongside Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bella Abzug and Flo Kennedy, and her speech that day argued that s*x and race were the two easiest tools for sorting people into cheap labor.

She credited Kennedy, Chisholm, Hamer and Evelyn Cunningham with teaching her what activism was.

"It was like finding a family," she said.

She wasn’t perfect. A 1977 essay she wrote about transgender women aged badly. In 2013 she wrote in The Advocate that trans people are living authentic lives that "should be celebrated, not questioned," and that their health care decisions belong to them alone. She spent the rest of her life on the right side of that line, and the National Gay Rights Advocates gave her their award for it.

She also told NPR weeks before Dobbs that overturning Roe wouldn't undo the work, because the fight was always about who gets to make decisions over her own body, and that question doesn't expire with a ruling.

She was right. Four years of ballot measures proved the fight is far from over.

Her people asked for two things today — light a candle, and give to Gloria's Foundation, if you can.

We'll add a third. Behave like a FULL human being today. Loudly. Let them hear you.