It’s not just “violence.” It’s femicide.
  April 21, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, I am sending hearty applause to all of you finishers out there who hit the streets of Boston and Jersey City this past marathon weekend. I genuinely marvel at your abilities. In today’s newsletter, we try to wrap our minds around the uptick in femicides and the lack of response. Plus, a suspicious lawsuit out of California and a shred of good news for bodily autonomy. Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONCall it what it is: In 2023, historian and author Kimberly A. Hamlin wrote in the Washington Post that femicide—the killing of a woman because she is a woman—was on the rise, and that said rise is not surprising given our country’s deeply patriarchal and white-supremacist history. Her assessment rings particularly true this month, as the news of Dr. Cerina Fairfax, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, Lindha Zerpa Lara, Nancy Metayer Bowen, Ashlee Jenae, and Shaneiqua Pugh have flooded our screens. These women were murdered (aside from Pugh, who was critically injured), and men they were close or married to were named as perpetrators. Over the decade between 2014 and 2024, the number of women killed by intimate partners increased 22 percent. Men are suspects in more than 98 percent of those incidents. Yet “femicide” is not the term most commonly used to describe these kinds of killings; it appears nowhere on the CDC website. The public instead relies on terms like “intimate partner violence”: killed because of a relationship gone wrong. Or “domestic violence”: killed because of some mysterious, private matter inside the home. Neither of those phrases, though, makes clear who the target and perpetrator of that violence is. You can’t address a problem without first properly naming it. Femicide comes closer. The tradition of American femicide has its roots in our country’s history of patriarchy and violence. In her piece, Hamlin points to the exact legal mechanisms that have helped. The most enduring of these was “coverture,” the idea that women’s “legal identity was covered by that of her husband.” Under the laws of coverture, Hamlin writes, it was “basically inconceivable for a husband to be prosecuted for assaulting his wife or children,” because they were his property.  AN ANTI-VIOLENCE PROTEST IN ARGENTINA, 2019 (VIA GETTY IMAGES) More than a hundred years after coverture stopped being common practice, women are still being killed at an alarming and growing rate—and most often, according to data, by men they know. Some women are especially vulnerable: Researchers find that femicide occurs disproportionately among Indigenous, Latina, and Black women, the last of whom make up 14% of the population but, according to the CDC, a full 30 percent of intimate partner murder victims. Laws may change, but the long-term effects of men being told that all things and people are theirs to do with as they please, do not just go away. They adapt. But our response has not. The CDC lists intimate partner violence as a “significant public health issue.” So why is this administration, which purports to be protecting women from everything, stripping away resources meant to protect women from this very real threat? Why is the administration easing gun regulations when on average more than 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner every month? In other countries, women have taken to the streets to demand an end to these murders. We could do the same—or at the very least, begin asking candidates what they plan to do about a crisis impacting nearly half of all voters. Because this problem deserves to live not just in “intimate” and “domestic” corners, not just in lurid headlines or true-crime plotlines, but in the open air of the streets. AND:
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