A Women’s Strike Reading List

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?