This interview appears in full at Ms. magazine. Tune in to Looking Back, Moving Forward for more.

This year, for the first time ever, the full archive of Ms. magazine issues, from 1972 to the present, became available online. ProQuest’s Ms. magazine archive, available now in libraries and on college campuses nationwide (if you can’t find it in yours, ask your librarian!), offers an incredible lens for looking at the current moment we find ourselves in through prescient writing by scholars, activists, and journalists for over five decades that didn’t shy away from confronting misogyny and the other social forces shaping women’s lives.

To mark the launch of the archive, Ms. hosted a two-day symposium in its Los Angeles offices for librarians and academics exploring its uses in the classroom, in research—and in our movement-building. In a conversation led by Ms. executive editor Kathy Spillar as part of the celebration, I joined legendary author, activist and professor Loretta Ross and Ms. contributor and Ms. Committee of Scholars co-chair Janell Hobson for a discussion about what lessons our collective history can offer feminists in this challenging moment.

Together, we explored how the stories of our past can continue to inspire us—and give us hope in the fight forward.

Something that I have thought about through the process with the podcast, and that was really in my mind when we started the process of the podcast, was that our times are less unprecedented than we think. We know that our founding feminist foremothers and ancestors have dealt with far more perilous times, and they found the way to make it happen anyway…

I think that’s what the importance of Ms. and feminist history really is—to know that not only are we not alone now, but we’ve never been alone in what we’re experiencing, and there’s a long lineage of people who have been fighting this fight, because they know that we deserve justice. and it allows us to move forward, knowing that we have the visions that we need for the feminist future, and that means that we can find our way there, as long as we’re willing to try our best to make it back to that home.

—Carmen Rios

Read more at Ms. magazine.