On International Women's Day
Dear readers,
Tomorrow is International Women’s Day (IWD), one that takes place amid such theatrically empowered misogyny that we’re shocked the administration hasn’t renamed it International Men’s Day and unveiled heroic murals of tech CEOs exploding with masculine energy. Throw off the shackles of untanned testicles and spread your precious essence around!
These unleashed men and women are tearing into the fabric of our lives. We hardly need to enumerate every horror of the last almost seven weeks, ranging from cruel deportations to mass layoffs of public servants, but highlight on this IWD the Republican attorneys general prosecuting abortion doctors from afar and hospitals shutting down trans healthcare. And as we write in our forthcoming ed note, sexual assault has become a bonus not a bug for Republican politicians.
Things feel pretty fucked, and they are. Most people I talk to are struggling to imagine any next step that seems up to the task of stopping the onslaught.
Consider though that the first International Women’s Day was not so long ago and not so far away: 1909 in New York City. Women and Black people couldn’t vote, and it would still be two years before the catastrophe of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment workers, mostly women and girls, after which organizers rallied women to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and went on to successful battles against sweatshops in the United States.
Today these battles are nearly the same, but elsewhere: in 2012, the infamous garment factory fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh killed over a hundred works under similar conditions of locked doors, flammable mess, and coercive labor practices that forced fearful workers into an unsafe building. The labor movement in Bangladesh has been fighting international conglomerates for safer conditions ever since. These issues also remain here in the US, but underground: immigrant children performing hard labor, for instance.
I note this past and present of struggle not to say that our conditions aren’t bad ones — they are — but to say we’re not alone. Our historical moment is unique, but not entirely exceptional in a country whose Civil War over chattel slavery was only five or six generations ago, and where abortion has been legal (not necessarily accessible) for two or three. And all over the world feminists are fighting authoritarianism and exploitation on hideous terrain.
In discussing with friends and loved ones what they can do right now, I often suggest joining a local group trying to get a task done, whether that’s sponsoring patients for abortion or trans healthcare travel, trying to get a shield law passed, volunteer to support local immigration organizing. And I often hear the same response: what can a little bit of well-meaning local organizing do in the face of Trump’s avalanche of horrors, in the face of Fox News, in the face of the tech industry and jabbering influencers?
The fact is, the right has all the money, and the left has to have all the people. There is no path for us that does not lead through organizing. (We recommend reading legendary organizer Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts, and this profile by Lux writer Eleni Schirmer in the New Yorker.) When feminists organize to change one thing — a law, access to care — you can not only change the lives affected by that policy, but you have built trust and built skills with five or ten or fifty people. The big change will come when something ruptures that is out of our control (think of the financial crash of 2008) and the only question is — will we be ready?
See you out there,
Sarah Leonard
Editor-in-Chief