One Question is a monthly series in which we ask leading thinkers to give a brief answer to a single question.

This month, to mark International Women’s Day on March 8th, we asked a number of women academics:

What is the biggest challenge facing women today?

The response has been huge. Overall we have received 25 answers, and as such have split them into two parts. Part one can be found here. Please take the time to read through both.

Sara R. Farris

Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her most recent book is In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Duke University Press, 2017).

I think we should begin by acknowledging that not all women are the same and not all of them face the same challenges. The brutality of neoliberal capitalism in the last twenty years or so – with its anti-welfare agenda, its profound class inequalities and its intensification of racism – has deepened the divisions among women along class and racial lines in particular, but also along gender lines when we think of the exclusion that trans-women encounter in some feminist and women’s circles.

While the women belonging to the wealthy 1% of the population – and I am thinking of course of the ‘neoliberal feminists’ à la Sheryl Sandberg – face the challenge of feeling in full control of the corporate boardrooms and making even more money, the large majority of women, or the 99%, have the problem of making ends meet. Migrant and ethnic minority women face additional challenges insofar as the racism ingrained in western labour markets and societies at large relegates them to the most precarious, low-paid and under-valued jobs in the socially reproductive sector (as cleaners, nannies, domestic workers and so forth).

Furthermore, migrant and ethnic minority women often face the challenge of having to ‘justify’ themselves because of their religious or cultural practices. As I explain at length in my recent book, a number of well-known feminists from Left to Right have adopted a paternalistic attitude towards non-western women (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) and asked them to ‘westernise’ in order to emancipate themselves from their supposedly backward cultures.

This does not mean, however, that there are not commonalities among women of the 99% and that solidarity is not possible. On the contrary, thanks to movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the International Women’s Strike and the various mobilisations that are growing at national levels against restrictions to reproductive rights, sexual violence, transphobia and racism, working class women, non-white and trans-women are developing a new lexicon and new practices of solidarity. I would say then that the biggest challenge facing women today is how to build new solidarities amongst the women of the 99%.

Lynne Segal

Teaches Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include: Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology & Politics (Polity, 1999); Slow motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (Palgrave, 2007); and Out of Time: The Pleasures & Perils of Ageing (Verso, 2014). Her latest book is Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (Verso, 2017).

This sounds like that notorious question ‘What do women want’?, as someone famous once asked, and could not answer. It’s hard to respond briefly, when divisions between women keep deepening and our identifications are both diverse, and also fluid – shifting across a lifetime. Yet we can agree on one generalisation, women overall have been hit hardest by recent austerity regimes – we are the ‘shock absorbers of neoliberalism’.

Second-wave feminism had many victories, but some battles were decisively lost. These were the struggles around social reproduction, ever more incompatible with privileging a financialised capitalism concerned only with the production of profit rather than the care of people. The imposition of austerity regimes undermined welfare provision, invariably hitting women hardest given our continuing primacy in the provision of care – whether inside or outside the home. Summarising research on the effects of austerity in Britain, the geographer Danny Dorling concludes that ‘85% of cuts to benefits have already been taken from women … Almost the entire UK government deficit is to be repaid through sacrifices made by women’. [1] Those sacrifices impact hardest of all on low income, black and ethnic minority women, especially those providing essential care, damaging its providers and recipients.

Issues of care were important for second wave feminists, and more than ever today we must solve the intensifying crisis of care. It means returning to old feminist battles for adequate incomes for all, shorter paid-working days, equal sharing of domestic responsibilities, alongside increased welfare provision and the rebuilding of neighbourhoods. Forcing governments to prioritise care is the biggest challenge women face.

[1] Danny Dorling, A Better Politics: How Government: Can Make Us Happier (London Publishing Partnership, 2016), p.26.

Nahla Abdo

Feminist activist and Professor of Sociology at Carleton University. Among her publications are: An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba, coedited (Zed, 2018); Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle in the Israeli Prison System (Pluto, 2014); Women in Israel: Race, Gender and Citizenship (Zed, 2011); and Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation, coedited (Berghahn, 2002).

The main challenge facing women today is recognising that ‘women’ is not a unitary, undifferentiated category, and that women of different classes, ethnicities, races, sexual orientations and nationalities experience life differently and carry with them different histories and memories.

With this complexity of identities and experiences, the question becomes how to strategize around a comprehensive and inclusive struggle. The feminist methodology of intersectionality can be a useful mechanism to use, if, and only if, it can capture not only these factors of identity, but more importantly, the socio-economic, political and ideological structures which mould and give rise to such challenges. Herein, I believe, comes the role of the state, especially the settler colonial state, which I find largely absent from most existing feminist analyses.

It is incumbent on today’s feminist analysts and activists to pay special attention to the histories of their own states. This is particularly important in the North American and Israeli contexts of settler colonialism. Women have a responsibility to partake in the process of decolonising public knowledge, the media and the academy. Exposing the North American genocide of the aboriginals and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, among others, must not be the responsibility of native women alone; exposing the settler colonial enslavement of African Americans and Arab-Jews in Israel must not be left to African Americans and Mizrahi/Arab Jewish women only. These are collective responsibilities for all of us/women to undertake.

We must not forget that while in certain cases, say gender, sexuality and class, women fall victims to male patriarchy, most native women and colonised women share with their men very similar forms of exploitation and oppression. Shared experiences of colonial victimisation are also often resisted by both men and women victims. Therefore, it is crucial that all women start building a clear strategy of solidarity with native women, Palestinian women, Black women and Third World colonised women. Solidarity with those deemed Other, in other words, must inform our consciousness, and motivate our struggles.

María Pía Lara

Full professor at the Department of Philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Mexico City) since 1983. Her work includes The Disclosure of Politics (Columbia University Press, 2013); Narrating Evil (Columbia University Press, 2007), and Moral Textures (Wiley, 1998). She has written many articles and book chapters about the thought of Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Nancy Fraser, feminism, critical theory, conceptual history, and other subjects.

The biggest challenge for women in the second decade of the 21^st century is changing the current oppressive patriarchal-capitalist institutional and social system in order to achieve a new feminist political agenda of emancipation.

While feminist activists have recently achieved some well-publicised victories, these changes have not been reflected at the highest and most important institutional levels, namely, in law or in labour practices. The #MeToo movement, for example, has drawn attention to many instances of disrespect and discrimination against woman – especially those involving sexual harassment and rape – but it has by no means succeeded in putting these problems in the perspective of historic female oppression, or in formulating through new concepts the radical changes that could bring about legal and social transformations.

To take the next step in our own liberation and bring about a new historical moment for ALL women – including those who live in environments where patriarchal distortions and gender-based oppression are still tolerated – we, as women, must learn to see ourselves differently and learn to imagine how to change this world from top to bottom. We must claim the power to eliminate what Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls the ‘rules of ruling’, [1] or, as Nancy Fraser has put it, the injustice of ‘misframing’ and ‘misrepresentation.’ [2]

As the feminist imaginary has taught us, domination – including such crimes as sex trafficking, sex slavery, and political, social and economic domination – always strike women first.

[1] Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, (Duke University Press, 2003).

[2] Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (Verso Books, 2013).

Hania Sholkamy

Associate research professor in the Social Research Centre at the American University in Cairo. An anthropologist and feminist.

Gender equality has fallen prey to the vagaries of formalism, symbolism and co-optation.

The translation of gender justice into a set of prescriptions that enable institutions, individuals and states to ‘abide’ by the formal tenets of these guidelines has enabled anti-women policies and violations to proliferate below the radar of rigid but vacuous laws and procedures. Women now are in policy circles but do they represent the cause of gender justice? The figures for women in legislative bodies are improving all over the world but the facts of power and authority do not resonate with the formal assent of women in politics.

Symbolism is a scourge of the globalised, connected and celebrity fixated world. The language of global symbols has proliferated in fields from finance to philanthropy, as individuals with cachet and a communicable power adopt causes, which they may or may not be committed to. The powerful women and men who have donned flowers, pins and black or white outfits, and in many other ways made apparent their positions against violence and injustice perpetrated on women, are doing important work. But fame in the service of gender equality is a wasted and valuable resource if it deflates into symbolism when gestures become acts of personal identification not of political mobilisation.

The third obstacle on the path to equality is that of co-optation. Illiberal elites in many places are embracing the language of equality and the symbols of fairness because it has become easy to do so. The bar for equality is now set low enough for more people to adhere to its principles, but this means that the language, gestures, standards and procedures of gender equality are perhaps too low, and do not necessarily translate into a better position for women. For example, equal pay is no longer at issue (accept in very highly paid industries such as entertainment) but women are not getting the support and training they need to access better paid jobs. Moreover, the feminised segments of the labour market such as care work, part-time work or social work are flagrantly under rewarded both materially and financially. Equal pay for equal work is not enough of a rallying call.

The challenge facing women today is the preponderance of a de-politicised, somewhat glamorised, but ultimately naturalised view of ‘women as an issue’! The idea of womanhood as a natural identity is a conservative and worrying standpoint. It is conservative to think that identities are derived from natural characteristics, [1] that all women are the same, and that any woman can be a meaningful asset or symbol.

Women need Feminists attuned to the rights and needs but also the world-views and desires of the women who most need support. Powerful elites are important but only if they are accountable to the many and when they are able to speak to the needs of those who are not themselves.

[1] Sherry B Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Duke University Press, 2006), p.63.

Amy Lind

Mary Ellen Heintz Professor and Head of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Gendered Paradoxes: Women’s Movements, State Restructuring, and Global Development in Ecuador (Penn State University Press, 2005), and an editor of four volumes, including Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance (Routledge, 2010) and Feminist (Im)mobilities in Fortress(ing) North America: Rights, Citizenships and Identities in Transnational Perspective (Ashgate, 2013). Her forthcoming book (with Christine Keating) addresses the cultural, economic, and affective politics of Ecuador’s postneoliberal Citizen Revolution. 

There is no simple answer to this question. Racism, sexism, queerphobia, economic exploitation, climate change, colonisation, globalisation: All of these processes and systems of oppression affect cisgender and transgender women around the world in distinct ways. Within all of these processes and systems, gender-based violence is pervasive in contexts of peace and conflict, and is inherently racialized.

I’d therefore ask us to consider why racialized heteropatriarchal violence continues to occur in epidemic proportions. This includes epistemic violence, and also material forms of violence such as sexual assault, harassment, abuse, and rape.

Theorists typically refer to epistemic violence as a form of violence that renders invisible or inferior other forms of knowledge production outside the hegemonic form. We need to apply this to gender-based violence as well. This includes questioning the boundaries of the public and private in our lives; how so-called private forms of violence such as intimate-partner violence and ‘corrective rape’ continue to be accepted and remain largely invisible in accounts of human rights abuses; why gender inequities in the workplace continue to be trivialised as ‘personality issues’ unworthy of institutional reprimand; and why transwomen’s visibility in daily life is viewed as threatening, thus subjecting them to extremely high levels of violence. Why do these occurrences threaten the hegemonic social order?

Gender-based epistemic and material violence includes all of this and more. As recent social movements such as Hollywood’s #TimesUp movement, the #MeToo movement, inspired by Tarana Burke’s term and activism, and the #FacultyAgainstRape movement have shown, we are just beginning the collective dialogue and healing from centuries of abuse and institutional neglect. Our ancestors’ experiences of violence are embedded in our genes and historical memory. Our students’ experiences of sexual harassment, left unacknowledged, slowly destroy our trust in the institutions in which we work. Women of all walks of life hold these stories inside. This is why I believe women from around the world will continue to fight against racialized heteropatriarchal violence, despite dominant societies’ or powerful institutions’ tendencies to trivialise accounts of epistemic and material forms of gender-based violence. Women will #RiseUp.

Johanna Oksala

Associate Professor of Environmental Philosophy at the Pratt Institute, New York. Her books include: Foucault, Politics, and Violence (Northwestern University, 2012), Political Philosophy: All That Matters (Hodder and Stoughton, 2013), and Feminist Experiences (Northwestern University, 2016).

The biggest challenge facing women today is climate change. I am afraid that we do not fully comprehend the enormity of this challenge. Climate change will completely remake our world; its physical boundaries, as well as the viable forms of social organisation.

It could be objected that climate change affects all people and is not exclusively a women’s issue. I contend that it should nevertheless be recognised as a feminist issue. First, it is a feminist issue simply because women are going to suffer some of its worst consequences. The United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) study, for example, states that women – particularly those in poor countries – are among the most vulnerable to climate change. This is partly because globally they make up the larger share of the agricultural work force and partly because they tend to have access to fewer income-earning opportunities than men.

Climate change is a feminist issue also in a second, theoretically more profound, sense. My wager is that in the twenty-first century, feminists no longer have the option of merely supporting forms of environmental politics that attempt to preserve an external nature somewhere outside capitalist markets. Rather, their goal has to be more radical: they must challenge the unsustainable growth of the capitalist economy itself, which is the ultimate cause of anthropogenic climate change.

Eco-socialist feminists have long called attention to the necessary, but undervalued and depredated base of capitalist economies. Capitalist economies are like icebergs: the visible economy counted in GDP depends on the large underwater part consisting of the care work necessary to replenish the wage labourers both individually and across generations, and the ecosystem services that keep the earth liveable for human beings.

Feminists and environmentalists share the common struggle of creatively pushing back against capitalism. That struggle is going to be vital for solving the problem of climate change.

Hilary Matfess

Research analyst, a PhD student at Yale University in the Political Science Department, and the author of Women and the War on Boko Haram (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Many of the efforts to advance women’s rights around the world focus on the public empowerment of women. In this vein, the international community has promoted gender quotas to improve female political representation, advanced the issue of girls’ education, and worked to integrate women into the economy. While all of these are laudable efforts with tangible benefits for women and girls the world over, they have a considerable blind spot: the violence and oppression that women and girls face in the home.

Domestic and intimate partner violence is a thorny subject. Despite its prevalence around the world, the intimacy of the abuse renders it an under-discussed subject. The World Health Organisation estimates that, globally, roughly 35% of women have ‘experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner violence in their lifetime,’ much of it driven by romantic partners or family, perpetrated domestically. The violence and discrimination that women and girls face in the home not only constitutes a threat to women and girls’ well-being, it also hamstrings future generations’ prospects for a safe and equal future. There’s compelling evidence that children whose mothers are abused in the home are at a greater risk of abuse themselves.

Despite the ramifications that domestic violence and intimate partner violence has on the women that suffer the abuse and the children that witness such violence, support for wife-beating is startlingly high, according to global attitudinal studies done by the World Values Survey. Their polling between 2010-2014 found that in 29 countries, ⅓ or more of men responded that wife beating was acceptable; in 19 countries, ⅓ or more of women agreed.

Efforts to empower women must bear in mind that, after capacity building meetings, school-days, campaign rallies, and entrepreneurial training, women often return to homes where they are subjected to violence and discrimination.

Addressing women’s status in the home is a critical part of advancing women’s rights globally. Women’s empowerment shouldn’t stop at their doorstep.

Julie Shayne

Faculty Coordinator of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and Senior Lecturer in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. She is editor and author of three books: Taking Risks: Feminist Activism and Research in the Americas (SUNY, 2015), They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean Exiles, Culture, and Feminism (Lexington 2009), and The Revolution Question: Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba (Rutgers 2004).

My first thought to the question, ‘What is the biggest challenge facing women today?’ was, ‘which women?’ Undocumented Salvadorans losing Temporary Protected Status? Muslim women students in the wake of Islamophobic hate crimes? Jewish mothers who lost their kids in school shootings? Rape survivors whose assailants serve insultingly short sentences yet claim they had an unfair trial? Poor rural women with shrinking access to labour and delivery facilities? Middle-class Black women who might die shortly after child birth? White feminist studies professors like me who are targeted and bullied by misogynists who disagree with our classes? Trans women of colour who know that they may be murdered simply for living their truth? The 53% of white women who voted for 45?

Despite the heterogeneity among women and femmes, our biggest challenge today is the US president. He, his staff/children, his senators and congress people, his Fox news cheerleaders, and his base, are responsible for emboldening a toxic cocktail of misogyny, racism, and xenophobia. Their poison is our biggest obstacle, even women who voted for him, should they attempt to step off the heteropatriarchal path on which they blindly march.

45 has been accused by at least 19 women of ‘sexual misconduct,’ accusations amplified by his bragging. Yet he is still president; an unambiguous statement that 62 million+ voters think sexual assault is acceptable and the president, with the support of his staff, is free to treat women like shoplifted sex toys. His vitriolic twitter vomit targeting immigrants, Muslims and anyone who disagrees with him has legitimized a violent enactment of white supremacy that has emboldened the formerly ‘closeted’ racists to march at neo-Nazi rallies with tiki torches, knowing their president considers them ‘very fine people.’

45’s promise to stack the courts with anti-choice judges means our already unreliable access to abortion makes autonomy over our bodies even more precarious. His steady erosion of Obamacare means disabled women will be moving toward poverty. His administration’s disdain for LGBTQI folks, especially transgender women and children and their right to use the bathroom, means we may see a spike in the already inordinately high suicide rates of transgender teens.

In short, 45 is wholly unqualified to be president, received 2.8 million fewer votes than his opponent, and is the human manifestation of toxicity; he is the biggest obstacle women and femmes face in living with physical and emotional safety, and full embodied autonomy.

Andrea Cornwall

Head of the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, she is a political anthropologist who works on the politics of gender, sexuality and social change. Her recent publications include Masculinities Under Neoliberalism, eds. Andrea Cornwall, Frank Karioris and Nancy Lindisfarne (Zed Books, 2016) and Feminisms, Empowerment and Development, eds. Andrea Cornwall and Jenny Edwards (Zed Books, 2014). 

For me, the biggest challenge facing women today is what Gayle Rubin once called the ‘straitjacket of gender’. That is, the beliefs, assumptions, norms and practices that differentiate women from men and that stand in the way of us realising our rights as human beings.

We see a new push by those who are intolerant of gender diversity to sharpen the boundaries that carve the spectrum of bodies and constellation of identities that constitute the diversity of human experience into two exclusive categories: men and women. Anyone who does not conform faces discrimination, prejudice and exclusion, whatever their gender identity. And those who police the gender boundary are as often women as men, some of them self-defined feminists.

If we are to be fully human, we need to challenge and transform all that causes us to experience differential and unfair treatment. Practices that preserve the gender divide – in language, in children’s toys, in forms of address, in expectations of pay and promotion, in so much of our everyday life – sustain an unequal world for all.

We must cast off the straitjacket of gender and all that it does to constrain us, and assert our right to being treated as equal human beings, in dignity and rights.

Paula Rabinowitz

Professor Emerita of English, University of Minnesota, serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford University Press, Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature. She is the author of numerous essays and books, most recently of the prize-winning American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton University Press, 2014; paper 2016).

Women, encompassing everyone who says she is one – and perhaps even some who decline this nomenclature but find themselves painted with it – comprise more than half the world’s population. So the challenges facing women are those of humanity: how to live deeply, fully, cooperatively, peacefully under the remorseless violence of assault, sexism, racism, murder, warfare and the social disruptions attendant upon the residues of millennia of accumulated hatred for the female body.

Everyone on the planet has had an intimate relationship with the inside of a woman before birth – the cells of foetus and mother intermingle, remaining within each throughout their lives – making us all women. Yet only some are recognised as such. When this recognition irrupts from within private experience to fracture the political terrain, profound change is in the offing. Or, as Muriel Rukeyser put it in her 1968 poem, ‘Käthe Kollwitz,’ ‘if one woman told the truth about her life, the world would split open.’ Perhaps this is happening now.

Since the early 19^th century, when women like Lucy Larcom, editor to the Lowell Offering, entered New England mills, and continuing through successive waves of industrialisation across the globe, working women’s stories of abuse – what Ruth Barraclough calls ‘factory girl literature,’ about harassment (not then so named), rape, sexual exploitation, and physical violence – stand as pillars cementing female consciousness. Proletarian literature channelled workers’ self-awareness through depictions of assembly line speed-ups, unsafe conditions or strikebreaking violence. Women expanded this litany to address the persistence of sexual violence.

But the story of women’s workplace abuse drifts beyond the factory floor to include the office (as 1930s’ novelist Tess Slesinger detailed) and the home. Domestic labour: a form of servitude, ‘unproductive,’ according to Marx and Engels, yet essential. Women’s slave narratives (by Harriet Jacobs or Harriet Wilson) painfully delineated how rape and beatings controlled slaves’ psychologies and bodies. The site for much violence against women was (and remains) domestic; nearly half the women and a majority of the children killed in the United States are murdered at home by current or former male partners or, in the case of children, fathers. ‘Violence,’ as H. Rap Brown noted in the late 1960s, baked into home life, ‘is as American as cherry pie.’ Public violence against people of colour, a virulence that hurts the body and invades the mind, saps energy and desire, but also forges protest movements. And now, with a racist president who boasts of assaulting women, private violations have relocated into the public arena, sparking collective outrage.

The challenges for women – that is, for all: to eradicate the system that allows bodies to be transgressed – at work, at home, in the streets. Peace, justice, freedom, autonomy, thinking, love, art, perhaps happiness. That’s all it’s ever been about…and we deserve no less. The challenge ever remains: how to achieve what we want, together?

Zillah Eisenstein

Professor of Politics at Ithaca College in New York for the last 35 years and presently a Distinguished Scholar in Residence. Her books include The Audacity of Races and Genders: A Personal and Global Story of the Obama Campaign (Zed Books/Palgrave, 2009); Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy (Zed Books/Palgrave, 2007); and Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in The 21st Century (Routledge, 1996). Her website is at: https://zillaheisenstein.wordpress.com/.

My answer: everything!!!! So we need to see the interconnections and overlappings that maintain the white supremacist and misogynist underpinnings of capitalism. Or another way of saying this: every action has to self-consciously undermine the systemic power of hetero-misogynist/capitalist racism. The time is now. And there is no middle ground left.

In these noxious times of Donald Trump, alongside right-wing racist patriarchs like Modi in India and Putin in Russia, it is urgent for women and the people who love them to stand against racist misogynist hatreds, and come together in radical solidarity for a humane planet.

We – the big ‘we’ of women of every kind – must say no to all collaboration, all compromise, all accommodation with the exploitation of the air, the water, the earth, and with human life itself.

Let us mobilise against each and every kind of s/exploitation.

S/exploitation – the benefitting of stealing someone’s labour,

or bodily integrity,

or emotional wholeness.

S/exploitation is simultaneously sexual and economic, and racist. S/exploitation shines a light on the intersectional complexity of gain itself. Taking. Looting. Raping. Each protects the other.

S/exploitation is the process of taking what is not yours.

To s/exploit is to gain from someone or something, like the earth, without asking, thinking, or caring. It is to profit at someone else’s, or something’s expense. It is a form of stealing. It is an unfair use of power.

To s/exploit is at the heart of capitalist racist hetero-patriarchy. It is to take what is not yours – economically, sexually, culturally, racially, politically, environmentally. S/exploitation is a form of economic devastation. It can and often does mimic and use sexual rape.

The problem that must be abolished is capitalist racist hetero-misogyny and its vehicle of extraction is s/exploitation. Sexual violations of every sort are the most intimate and personal form of s/exploitation that powers the globe.

S/exploitation is war in yet another form.

Each normalises and naturalises the other because of both the repression and expression of each.

Rape becomes a normalised/invisible site of war through the discourse of sex.

Sexual violation – rape, incest, harassment, verbal abuse, battering, and intimidation – exists inside the locales we inhabit in everyday life. So s/exploitation exists on the job, in the home, inside families, in the factory, in each place that power is exchanged. #MeToo #TimesUp #SayHerName #BlackLivesMatter

Nothing is singular.

But rather interconnected and overlapping.

As are women – women of colour, transgender women, women who are disabled, women who are incarcerated, homeless women, women of the working and middle class, women in our troops. So the challenge is to see in a multiple and complex form and to live inside and with this knowledge. And be uncompromising in the struggle against s/exploitation.

And, on March 8, join the #InternationalWomensStrike to make the fight against s/exploitation visible across the globe.