March 8 was International Women’s Day, commemorating the 1908 march of garment workers in New York City. This year there were calls for A Day Without A Woman, and women around the world went on strike for the day and gathered for protests. For those who could not skip work, not spending money except at small and/or women- or minority-owned businesses was a way to participate, and wearing red was a way to show solidarity. I donned a red shirt and garnets for my doctor’s appointment. In New York City, organizers were arrested at a protest outside a Trump hotel. Several school districts around the country closed because so many staff applied for the day off. Some noted that this mostly inconvenienced other women, especially those who couldn’t afford to take the day off, who had to find child care. But strikes are supposed to create inconvenience. The media commented on how this was a much smaller action than January’s Women’s March, wondering if such a movement could be maintained.
Of course the right wing press chimed in, generally calling the day a failure. I read the National Review (surprising myself) to see what their take on it was. Mostly they complained that identity politics was not what this country is about:
Progressivism’s answer to this central flaw [the divisiveness of identity politics] is the now-popular idea of “intersectionality.” This approach — summed up as “we’re all victims, so let’s fight The Man together” — is evident in the way that the Guardian column awkwardly attempts to lump together “the economic attacks on Muslim and migrant women, on women of color and working and unemployed women, on lesbian, gender nonconforming and trans women.” The “attacks” on these disparate groups are intended to make a case for modern feminism. One of the slogans of today’s strike makes a similarly clumsy attempt: “Gender justice is racial justice is economic justice.”
And women are special as they are; why should we want to be like men?
In reality, the complementarity of the sexes is enormously beneficial to society, and to erase it would be a serious loss. A feminism that denies sex differences or that sees the sexes as in competition must necessarily be aided by an agenda of expansive birth control and abortion, both of which can function as attempts to make women more like men — able to engage in consequence-free sex.
A true insight into the hatred of the ACA’s birth control provision.
But I’ll leave this section on a lighter note, with Alexandra Petri’s take on the women’s strike:
1. “The Day They Disappeared“ (March, 2017)Many things, I regret to say—indeed, a suspicious number of things—went on without a hitch for a brief time. Most movies lost only a scene or two and it was barely noticeable, although ticket sales plummeted. The Cabinet was almost entirely unaffected. Wall Street and Silicon Valley largely went about their business as if nothing had occurred.
Statehouses began to feel bereft without women to regulate, whether on the subject of what bathrooms they could use or where they could go for reproductive care. There were no organs to restrict that the legislators did not, themselves, possess. And what was the fun of putting limitations on those? They looked for consolation to those fetuses who for many years they had ranked as full persons, but, inexplicably, they were nowhere to be found.
You began to be concerned.