“I Was Floored…”
  March 17, 2026 Howdy Meteor readers, Happy Women’s March Madness season to all who celebrate!  In today’s newsletter, Ann Vettikkal speaks to three New York moms about what it would mean for them to access free childcare through Mayor Mamdani’s proposed universal 2-K program. Plus, an AI battle looms upstate and a double slice of women’s history. Rooting for South Carolina again, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONAffordability in real time: The victory speech Zohran Mamdani gave the night he was elected mayor of New York City ended with a familiar call-and-response. “Together, New York, we’re going to deliver universal…” Mamdani began. “Childcare!” the crowd shouted back. And earlier this month, just a few weeks into his tenure as mayor, Mamdani announced that 2,000 daycare spots for two-year-olds in primarily low-income parts of New York would be available in the fall, with plans to expand “2-K” universally in the next four years. The Meteor spoke to working parents raising young children in New York City to understand the financial, physical, and emotional costs of parenthood in an expensive city—and what Mamdani’s plan for universal childcare could mean for them.  EVERYONE’S FAVORITE MAYOR DURING THE CHILDCARE PROGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT WITH NEW YORK GOVERNOR KATHY HOCHUL. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) “I just felt such an incredible sense of relief.”—Roona Ray, a part-time healthcare worker whose wife works in costume design. They live in Jackson Heights, Queens; have a 5 year-old, 3 year-old, and 2 year-old; and currently pay $1,400 a month for childcare. “I actually started as a single mom by choice. And then I met my partner, and we decided to get married. My mother-in-law really helped a lot in the first few years. But then I got fired from my job when I was nine months pregnant with my third child, and that really set us in a tailspin. And I broke my foot and… I didn’t work for a long time. It was very hard to take the time to look for work, because I was just too knee-deep in parenting. It was a very stressful time. We applied for childcare vouchers and got them, so we did have some help from the state, but it took a number of trials to apply. The paperwork is very confusing. I went back to work a couple of months ago, and it’s been a big adjustment. I think a lot of people are just running on empty all the time and that’s a very bad feeling. Luckily, I was able to find a job where I work four days a week. Our older two kids are in public 3-K and kindergarten. The youngest one is in a home daycare. So we’ve been paying for her [with] cash. We have seven more months of paying for child care…[before] we get to 3-K. [Accessing 2-K childcare] would be really great for us, just to save us a few months paying for child care. I think it could be really wonderful for so many parents, and just give so much relief.” AND:
 DOUBLE SLICE OF WOMEN’S HISTORY 🍕🍕Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, feminists of faithBY SHANNON MELERO Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ll be featuring women (or women’s movements) that aren’t on the typical media lists we see every March.  A PORTRAIT OF SOR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ PAINTED BY MIGUEL CABRERA, 1750. (NATIONAL HISTORY MUSEUM, MEXICO CITY, MEXICO) In the beginning was the Word, and that word was decidedly not “feminism.” But the work of liberation has long been in motion even before we had a word to package it together. In the late 1600s, Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez, a Mexican woman born under Spanish colonial rule, became one of the early champions of feminism by doing something most modern women would shudder to consider: She joined a convent. De Asbaje y Ramírez would take on the name Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, becoming a poet and fierce advocate for women’s right to education. She understood that “her desire to learn was an impulse given to her by God,” explains Latina feminist theologian Theresa A. Yugar. Sor Juana also believed that having opinions was central to understanding God. “She said it was better for women to be educated by women, because being educated by men could cause innumerable harm and women could be violated,” says Yugar. While serving the Church, Sor Juana published stage plays, mathematical treatises, social manifestos, and criticisms of homilies. For this, she was silenced, her works suppressed until the 20th century, when she was recognized as the first published feminist of New Spain. While Sor Juana was the first, she certainly was not the last. Three hundred years after her death, another prominent theologian helped develop a new understanding of the unique relationship between Latinas, God, and the struggle for liberation. Her name was Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, the mother of mujerista theology. Isasi-Diaz, a Cuban immigrant, joined the Ursuline order as a novice in her twenties, but eventually left the order to pursue a doctoral degree at a seminary school. She believed that women should be ordained within the Catholic Church (a debate that continues to this day) and wanted to become a priest. But within the Church that was a non-starter, so Isasi-Diaz became the next best thing: a professor shaping the lives of Latine PhD students at Drew University. Her work helped make feminist thought and practice accessible to Latines of faith who were often left out of mainstream American feminist movements, even though they were quite literally in the room. (Xicanisma also took on this work of centering Latine people, but with less of a focus on faith.) Her work echoed that of Audre Lorde, who “taught us early on that unless we created new methods for doing theology we would not effectively dismantle the…[traditions] that have excluded women…for ages,” Isasi-Diaz wrote in “Lo Cotidiano: A Key Element of Mujerista Theology.” She goes on to explain that mujeristism prioritizes the liberation of Latine women and calls for centering their “cotidiano”—the realities of their everyday lives—and “not an abstract faith but the faith that sustains grassroots people in their daily living.” The relationship between faith and modern-day feminism is still fraught, particularly when it comes to the Catholic Church. But these women exemplify that there is a place where the two things can meet and, God willing, get us closer to the fully realized dream of collective liberation.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
