Why A Day For, Without, And About Women (and Girls) Matters
March 8 is International Women’s Day. It’s also ‘A Day Without A Woman’, an action organized by the newly created organization behind the Women’s March.
What’s the point of International Women’s Day? What does ‘A Day Without A Woman’ actually do? These are questions I hear, still, from those who aren’t involved in feminist organizing and while not everyone who asks is ill-intended, it’s frustrating to feel like women (and other gender-oppressed people) must defend our right to organize and take action. On the other hand, there’s no question that historically the women’s rights movement has been by and for white women, and there are necessary questions to ask and concerns about whether national actions and celebrations are led by women of color, immigrant women, low-income women and all women who are historically marginalized. What do these “days of action” actually accomplish for the majority of women, not just white women?
You can read more about each here. But here’s the crux of tomorrow’s ‘A Day Without A Woman’: no matter who you are, you can show solidarity with the fight for equity and justice for all women and gender-oppressed people. What are those fights, you ask? I’m going to quote myself from another post I wrote:
The demands for justice are inclusive and include bodily autonomy, an end to hiring discrimination, a call for gender justice, the protection of the human rights of LGBTQ, two-spirit, and gender non-conforming people, and workers’ rights (including sex workers).
Our challenges are real. They threaten our ability to live freely but they threaten us all differently, it’s true. My privileges as a white, middle-class, able-bodied, cisgendered woman who was born, raised, and lives as an American citizen are vast and allow me to not only live a life that is more inherently equitable than many others but to fight for the rights of others without fear of retribution, for the most part. Yet it’s also true that our rights are linked and that without justice for all, none of us are free.
No matter who you are, you can show solidarity with the fight for equity and justice for all women and gender-oppressed people.
So, my “why I fight” answer is below. It’s meandering and long. Because our fights are not simple and easily attained.
I fight this International Women’s Day so that women’s and girls’ lives matter. It seems so simple and yet it’s exhausting. I am an angry fighter when it comes to the rights of women and girls (and all gender-oppressed people), for sure. But I’m also a hopeful fighter because I know that social change can feel agonizingly slow, drawn out endlessly…until it happens. Until that major shift when we see that what we’ve been fighting for has finally, unbelievably, come to pass.
That’s when birth control becomes free for most women in the country, under a health care law that makes sure no woman needs to choose between paying for her contraception and paying her electric bill. It’s when pregnancy is no longer considered a “pre-existing” condition and a way for insurance companies to get out of providing health insurance. And it’s when our country recognizes the rights of transgender people to use the bathroom or locker room for the gender they are, rather than what they were assigned at birth.
All of these hard-won freedoms are set to be dismantled and so we continue to fight — I continue to fight — for those challenges we have not yet overcome:
I fight for women of color not to be treated as second-class citizens; and trans women to be able to live from the fear that they will be murdered for being who they are. I fight for the time when immigrant women are no longer ripped from their families and deported, leaving children behind to clean up the shards of a life scattered. I fight so that 90 percent of Native women no longer experience violence at the hands of a non-tribal member.
I fight for the rights of my daughter and all girls who deserve access to health care that keeps their bodies healthy and strong, and allows them to live their lives with freedom. That includes safe abortion care for all women regardless of their ability to pay or their citizenship status. It includes access to birth control so that women and girls can decide the trajectory of their lives, as best they can. And it includes the rights of all gender non-conforming people to have accessible and compassionate health care.
I fight so that women and girls know that they are loved and valued. When people ask “why do these days matter?” I say it’s because women and girls matter. Will you stand with me and all women and girls, everywhere?
