From n+1
While the Iron Is Hot by Dayna Tortorici
It’s reasonable to ask whether now is a good time for a women’s strike. This is a revanchist administration that doesn’t appear to respond to demands. And there are arguably more urgent needs to attend to—the safety and support of Muslims, immigrants, and trans people who are under attack. But millions of Muslims, immigrants, and trans people are women, and we strike as them and for them. It is never a bad time to demand what you need. Our bleak political situation has freed us from the constraints of being “reasonable,” of imagining solutions that play by the enemy’s rulebook. There is a new audience for new arguments—a ready population of people willing to think more deeply about the larger forces structuring their lives.
The Woman’s Party by Namara Smith (from Issue 26)
Feminism and social protection have a common history, and their most visible point of intersection and conflict is welfare. Debates over welfare cut to the quick of divergent feminist politics in America, between “equality” and “difference” feminists, and welfare, more than anything else, is the issue defining Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign. Even before she championed the welfare-reform bill her husband signed in 1996, Clinton took a side in the debate simply by being who she was and pursuing the path she did. Her shortcomings as a feminist candidate trace back to this debate, which has yet to be resolved.
More Smiles? More Money by Dayna Tortorici (from Issue 17)
In the 1970s, Western women who were radicalized by feminism were women doing housework. They knew firsthand what that work was like: how strained and boring it was, what social obligations it involved, how it shored up their position in relation to men. Self-knowledge was fundamentally what made consciousness-raising — talking in a room to other women — such a powerful tool: it confirmed that your personal experience of sexism didn’t belong to you alone. It offered solidarity as well as a theoretical framework, a picture of social reality, on a scale that made the personal, as they say, political. The early work of people like Martha Rosler and Silvia Federici — and Flo Kennedy, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Kate Millett, Valerie Solanas, and many others — allowed women, suddenly, to see their lives anew. It was like changing the lights in a room: all the furniture was the same, but, seen in a new cast, never quite the same again.
Sex Class Action by Dayna Tortorici (from Issue 14)
It is true that not all women employed at Wal-Mart since 1998 faced the same degree of discrimination. It’s also true that by including a request for damages the plaintiffs may have compromised their shot at injunctive and declaratory relief. But these were arguments that had little to do with the phrasing of the original rule, and Antonin Scalia’s revision of what constituted “commonality” raised more questions than it answered. What, after all, was “glue”? What was “some glue,” and what was glue enough? To those who cared, it seemed all too coincidental that a group of people who have historically been denied recognition as an oppressed, exploited class—women—were being denied that recognition yet again under our major civil rights law, this time on a technicality—articulated by something so vague as “glue.” Wasn’t the answer to the question, Why was I disfavored obvious enough?—Because I am a woman?
The 2017 Women’s Strike
Striking on International Women’s Day Is Not a Privilege by Magally A. Miranda Alcazar and Kate D. Griffiths
The Impossibility of the International Women’s Strike is Exactly Why It’s So Necessary by Camille Barbagallo
When Did Solidarity Among Working Women Become a ‘Privilege’? by Tithi Bhattacharya and Cinzia Arruzza
Argentina’s Life-or-Death Women’s Movement by Veronica Gago and Agustina Santomaso
Women’s Right to Refuse by Melissa Gira Grant
A Feminism for the 99 Percent by Sarah Jaffe & Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
A Feminism for the Masses by Stephanie McFeeters
Why Women Are Going on Strike in Ireland Tomorrow by Lia McGarrigle
For Domestic and Low-Wage Workers, the Stakes are Higher than Ever by Ai-jen Poo
Why Women Should Strike by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
The Women’s Strike and the Messy Space of Change by Jia Tolentino
While the Iron Is Hot by Dayna Tortorici
On Strikes
A Strike Against the New Jim Crow by Janaé Bonsu
The Strike That Didn’t Change New York by Megan Erickson
The Only Way to Know If Striking Works Is to Do It by Dayna Evans
A Day Without Care by Sarah Jaffe
The Role of the Mass Strike in the Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg
On Reproductive Labor: Care Work, House Work, and Emotional Labor
Having a Child will Bankrupt You by Bryce Covert
The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James
Approaching the Obsolescence of Housework by Angela Y. Davis
Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation by Angela Y. Davis
Wages Against Housework by Silvia Federici
Grin and Abhor It: The Truth Behind Service With a Smile by Sarah Jaffe
Adventures in Feministory: Johnnie Tillmon and the Welfare Rights Movement by Kjerstin Johnson
Love’s Labor Earned by J.C. Pan
The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward
More Smiles? More Money by Dayna Tortorici
Sex Class Action by Dayna Tortorici
Viewpoint Issue 5: Social Reproduction by Viewpoint
On Organizing Women’s Work
The Problem with (Sex) Work by Peter Frase
Happy Hookers by Melissa Gira Grant
Organized Labor’s Newest Heroes: Strippers by Melissa Gira Grant
Let Call Sex Work What It Is: Work by Melissa Gira Grant
The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism (1940) by Esther Cooper Jackson
Walmart’s women can’t save money or live better with wages or hours like this by Sarah Jaffe
A Life in Writing: Selma James with Selma James
Domestic Workers’ Rights, the Politics of Social Reproduction, and New Models of Labor Organizing by Premilla Nadasen
Unite and Fight by Kate Redburn
On Hillary Clinton, Liberal Feminism, and “Trickle-Down” Feminism
The Atlantic, Trickle-Down Feminism, and My Twitter Mentions, God Help Us All by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Trickle-Down Feminism, Revisited by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ campaign holds little for most women by Melissa Gira Grant
Trickle-Down Feminism by Sarah Jaffe
Opting for Free Time by Sarah Jaffe
Housekeepers Versus Harvard: Feminism for the Age of Trump by Sarah Leonard
Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning In? by Kate Losse
Kicking Back, Not Leaning In by Madeleine Schwartz
The Woman’s Party by Namara Smith
On Feminist Futures
On the “dispute” between radical feminism and trans people by Juliet Jacques
The Kids Are Alright: A Legendary Feminist on Feminism’s Future by Sarah Leonard and Ann Snitow
As Many Shoes As She Likes: On Feminism by Jenny Turner
Books and Further Reading
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa
Part of the Family? Nannies, Housekeepers, and the Battle for Domestic Workers’ Rights by Sheila Bapat
Undoing the Demos by Wendy Brown
The Other Women’s Movement by Dorothy Sue Cobble
Dishing It Out by Dorothy Sue Cobble
Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins
Women, Race and Class by Angela Y. Davis
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Global Woman by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild
Class War: The Privatization of Childhood by Megan Erickson
Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Worker’s Rights at Walmart by Liza Featherstone
Revolution at Point Zero by Silvia Federici
Scales of Justice by Nancy Fraser
Fortunes of Feminism by Nancy Fraser
The Lost Promise of Civil Rights by Risa Goluboff
Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant
The Managed Heart by Arlie Russell Hochschild
The Second Shift by Arlie Russell Hochschild
The Time Bind by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Feminist Theory from Margin to Center by bell hooks
To ‘Joy My Freedom by Tera Hunter
Sex, Race and Class: The Perspective of Winning by Selma James
Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism by L. A. Kauffman
Caring for America by Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein
Freedom is Not Enough by Nancy McClean
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale by Maria Mies
To Serve God and Wal-Mart by Bethany Moreton
Household Workers Unite by Premilla Nadasen
One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power
Whipping Girl by Julia Serrano
From Bondage to Contract by Amy Dru Stanley
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power by Ann Stoler
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor
Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity by Micah Uetricht
The Problem With Work by Kathi Weeks
—Assembled by Red Papers, a collective of socialist feminist thinkers, organizers, and writers