A Moment for Deeper Solidarity in The Women’s Movement

Immense opportunity and exceptional challenge. In a nutshell, this is what the women’s movement is faced with now.

The opportunity? As we meet this unimagined moment of a Covid-19 crisis paired with a period of institutional and historical racial reckoning, we have a real chance to both deepen and broaden our collective conversation about how to advance women’s issues, and to achieve an unprecedented level of solidarity.

The challenge? If we don’t embrace this moment, I don’t know when we will have it again.

Great strides have been made for women, including the first women’s rights convention organized in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York and the ratification of the 19^th Amendment in 1920. But the gains have not been inclusive. The concerns addressed in Seneca Falls were of privileged women, not the working class. The 19^th Amendment guaranteed that white women could vote but not their Black and brown sisters.

Covid-19 brought the inequities of 2020 into sharp relief. In the U.S., people of color were disproportionately more likely to catch the virus, more likely to get seriously ill and more likely to die. Statistically more often born into poverty and other adverse conditions, they entered the pandemic period with preventable health disadvantages.

But even the healthy faced devastating consequences. A Center for American Progress analysis of 2018 data from the Current Population Survey found that 67.5 percent of Black mothers and 41.4 percent of Latina mothers were the primary or sole breadwinners for their families, compared with 37 percent of white mothers. These are women who continued to work in frontline jobs as their communities shut down, even with their children suddenly out of school, because they had little to no savings to allow them to consider their health first.

And when jobs were cut, women were excessively impacted. Globally, women make up 30 percent of the paid labor force but account for 54 percent of overall job losses, in part because of the increasing burden of unpaid care which disproportionately falls on women. In a gender-regressive scenario in which no action is taken to counter these effects, McKinsey & Co. estimates the global GDP growth could be $1 trillion lower in 2030 than it would be if women’s unemployment simply tracked that of men in each sector. On the other hand, acting now to advance gender equality could add $13 trillion to the global GDP.

The pandemic has made it clear that it’s time to buck the old (and frankly, patriarchal) conventions which have guided the women’s movement, to make way for new voices while joyfully acknowledging that one size most definitely does not fit all.

We in the women’s movement must find a cohesion that goes deeper than ever before. We have to be intentional as we make space for different hues: not only Black and white, but BIPOC, transgender, and LGBTQ, merging fresh voices with the wisdom of longstanding activists to give the movement vitality and dynamism.