“Women are human beings,” intones one of the characters in Liberation, Bess Wohl’s new play about Second Wave feminism. “If you don’t believe that, at this point, I don’t know how I can help you.” The audience, gathered for a matinee on Broadway in mid-November, laughed dully in response.

The grim joke was that the women onstage were already weary of ceaseless misogyny in 1970. And yet my phone had just been vibrating with texts and news alerts from 2025: about an infamous child-sex trafficker and his chummy emails with the most powerful men in America; about pregnant women dying thanks to a regressive Supreme Court decision; about the president telling a female reporter, “Quiet, piggy!”

While I was supposed to marvel at the notion that people were over still having to talk about all

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