From The
Nation:
In
her recent op-ed for Elle, Sady Doyle asks the important
question, “What does it mean for women to go on strike in 2017?” She argues
that because increasing inequality among women since the 1970s has given
certain women better access to education and job security, participation in a
women’s strike is a privilege as opposed to a coherent political project. In
the 1970s, she argues, secretaries and housewives could unite around a common
project of making their care work visible. Now that the doors to traditionally
male jobs have been opened to women, Doyle calls for a kind of guilty, stagnant
solidarity of intention, aptly summarized by the title; “Go Ahead and Strike,
but Know That Many of Your Sisters Can’t.”
To
what extent is the present call for a Women’s
Strike on March 8 actually a less coherent project than its 1970s
counterpart, or any previous women’s strikes? Our present situation is in some
ways closer to the situation in 1908, when the first women’s strikes were led
by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Unions were virtually
nonexistent then, to say nothing of the brutal working conditions that resulted
from their absence (146 people, mostly women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory Fire of 1911). Union membership today is at a historic low (10.7 percent and
decreasing in 2016). Was it a privilege for garment workers to strike then?
Would it be a privilege for us to strike now?
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