RELEVANT NO MORE
How the Day Without A Woman protest disproves its own point
Tomorrow, the Women’s March brand will be rolling out its newest product: the “Day Without A Woman” protest, a generalized strike intended, according to its website, to help achieve “equity” and “justice” for women and “all gender-oppressed people” (whatever that means).
In The Federalist, Joy Pullmann outlines a number of the reasons why this protest is a terrible idea. To her excellent list, I would add a more fundamental flaw at the protest’s core: the logic of the event is entirely backwards.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the protest lives up to all of its organizers’ hopes and dreams — that scores of women walk off the job for a day and as a result the wheels of American industry come to a screeching halt. What would that prove, exactly? It seems like it would prove that the goals of feminism have already been fully realized; that women have been so thoroughly integrated into the workforce that their ongoing participation in it is critical to the proper functioning of the U.S. economy; and that working women, far from being marginalized or oppressed, are in fact power-brokers with the ability to wield tremendous clout equal to or greater than their male counterparts.
Equal representation in the workforce has been the stated goal of feminism since Gloria Steinem burned her first bra. In that context, a successful Day Without A Woman strike would not be so much a protest as a victory lap. “Look at us, everybody! We’ve gotten everything we’ve ever wanted!”
Presumably the protest’s organizers did not intend the event to be a formal announcement that they are no longer relevant or that the days of striving for equality are over and, having achieved total victory, triumphant feminists should now go back home and resume their quiet lives like soldiers returning from war.
Why, then, would the organizers choose to protest allegedly rampant inequality in a way that, if successful, would so thoroughly disprove their point? The answer may lie in the dusty corridors of the old-school feminist mind-set. Feminism’s old guard has been working from the same playbook since Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique hit the shelves in 1963. Despite that fact that every aspect of American life has been re-written, erased, and re-written again in the last 50 years, the methods, messaging and language of the feminist movement have remained mostly unchanged.
When feminists want to bring attention to their cause, they invariably and exclusively invoke words like strike or protest or march or sit-in or walk-out. Looking only at the vocabulary, one could genuinely be forgiven for wondering whether an event was being planned for 2017 or 1967.
The fact that the feminist movement seems to be mired in a bygone era is a big part of why it often struggles to capture the passion of younger generations. There is a quaintness to the notion of marches and strikes, but at some point it’s like listening to your (grand)parents talk about playing records and snapping polaroids — in a world with Spotify and the iPhone, the relics of yesterday have little practical use.
It’s likely that tomorrow’s protest will amount to more flash than substance. But if it does result in half of the American workforce staying home, perhaps it will at least force hard-core feminists finally admit what most of us have long accepted as an established truism: women are vital to the American economy.
Congratulations, ladies! You’ve reached the mountaintop. Now can we get back to work?
