Get Real: This is How We Foster a Feminist Economic Future
On February 22, AEOO hosted a Zoom of Our Own conversation on feminist economic futures and how we can truly “build back better” after COVID-19 and the uprisings for justice we’ve seen recently — by addressing the she-cession caused by the pandemic and the underlying racism, sexism, and economic inequality that it has highlighted.
Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, the LBJ School’s associate dean for civic engagement and lead author of the white paper “America’s Recovery from the 2020 ‘Shecession’: Building a Female Future of Childcare and Work,” explained how women have been shortchanged during the pandemic and what needs to change — at home, at work and in our culture — to ensure we don’t lose generations of progress. Karen Bassarab, senior program officer with the Food Communities and Public Health Program at The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, helped us suss out what is needed to build a resilient and equitable global food system. Farah Tanis, executive director of Black Women’s Blueprint, laid out powerful visions for a future in which Black women — and therefore all of us — are truly free. Led in conversation by AEOO’s Digital Director Carmen Rios — a feminist superstar who has been writing about workplace inequality, working-class women, and feminism beyond capitalism for over 10 years — our panel also shared actions we can take to to begin building an economy of our own.
Below is the video and the curriculum from the event for further reading, exploring, and sharing! Don’t forget to check out our Resource Library for even more feminist economic goodness.
(PS: The conversation/webinar series will continue. Check out our events here!)
For Further Learning about a Feminist Future:
- The Most Radical Thing You Can Do: “Our prescribed inalienable rights have been converted from the pursuit of happiness to the pursuit of profit, the extraction of oil, gas, gold, copper, nickel, tantalum, and cobalt, as well as the making of urban sprawl, the ghettoization of cities, and the industrialization of growing food with plows, chemicals, and cheap undervalued human labor. We submit Earth to machine violence. We submit humans to unequal treatment. Our caste systems are built into banking, city planning, and unsound agricultural policies. We are the serial destroyers of the whole. No one asked us if this is how we wanted our world to be.”
- This is a primer on why trickle-down economic policies don’t work and clash with a feminist agenda.
- Carmen Rios on a quest for wholeness: A Reclamation of Our Personal Rights as Working-Class Queer Women
- Identity politics matter in advancing economic justice for women and people of color.
- Alison LaMagna’s op-ed: What Women Really Want for the Holidays: A Better Future.
Learn More about Overcoming the Covid-19 She-cession:
- COVID relief failed women — and feminists fought back.
- How COVID-19 could impact women for generations, from Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security
- Rickey Gard Diamond’s Ms. column, on LBJ Center White Paper: “Singing the She-cession Blues”
- Here’s the YWCA on LBJ Center’s Shecession white paper in full, as well as a NYT article that discusses it.
- New Zealand’s new legislation to address caring work ghettos: not “equal pay for equal work,” but “equal pay for comparable work.“
- The call for a Marshall Plan for Moms, endorsed by 50 prominent women.
- ENDING POVERTY starts with lifting up women and girls. When we lift them up, entire communities rise.
Learn More about Black Women’s Economic Leadership:
- AEOO Advisory Board member Jhumpa Bhattacharya, with Ann Price and Dorian Warren, explain why Centering Blackness will liberate us all.
- Carmen Rios talks in this 2018 video with Black Women’s Blueprint’s Farah Tanis and her co-exec. director, Sevonna Brown, about the power of Black feminist futurism.
- Here is Black Women’s Blueprint Solidarity Economy Manifesta and Black Womens Blueprint’s statement on truth and reconciliation.
- More on solidarity economies: “Today, perhaps as never before, more people are becoming aware that capitalism has turned our lives and our planet into a commodity. A system that is environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust, and that it is not able to guarantee the happiness and dignified life conditions of all persons in any place on the planet.” Carlos Askunze, REAS Spanish network of solidarity economy.
- Congress reconsiders reparations. Shouldn’t all of us?
- March for Black Lives statement on economic justice from a coalition of more than 50 organizations.
- What a Black Lives Matter economic agenda looks like.
Learn More About the Future of Food Post-Covid:
- COVID-19 responses: Food policy councils are “stepping in, stepping up, and stepping back”
- To Safeguard the US Food Supply Chain During the Covid-19 Pandemic, We Must Protect Food and Agricultural Workers: Recommendations for Policymakers and Employers
- Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future — Food Systems Primer
- Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future’s Food Policy Networks project
- Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future’s website on Strengthening Food Systems Resilience
