Strikes Were a Part of Women's Day Before. With Trump, They Will Be Again

By Cinzia Arruzza and Tithi Bhattacharya, Guardian UK

21 February 17

As progress is being rapidly rolled back, we need a feminism of the 99% to take action. That’s why women in 30 countries are taking to the streets on 8 March

t is time to re-politicize Women’s Day. It has often been celebrated with brunches, flowers and Hallmark cards. But in the age of Trump, we need a feminism of the 99% to take action. That is why we are inviting women across the world to join us in an international day of strikes on 8 March.

The immense women’s marches of 21 January and their resonance across the country demonstrated that millions of women in the United States are finally fed up not only with the blatant misogyny of the Trump’s administration, but also with decades of continuous attacks on women’s lives and bodies.

We are united by the awareness that Trump’s administration is a symptom of a larger problem: the outcome of decades of neoliberal policies, of transfer of wealth to the richest, of erosion of labor rights and of labor dignity, of neocolonial wars of aggression, of the institutional racism and of the structural misogyny ingrained in US society.

Feminist organizations and grassroots groups around the word had already been organizing the International Women’s Strike for months, when we realized that the conditions were in place to launch a women’s strike in the United States.

Inspired by recent successful women’s strikes in Poland, and mass women’s demonstrations in Argentina and Italy, we are building on a growing willingness of women across the world to take to the streets for justice.

That is why we recently wrote a statement together with other feminist activists and intellectuals calling for a day of action in solidarity with the International Women’s Strike. Cis and trans women across the world can join hands and strike together.

The response to this statement was heart-lifting: after only two weeks, and after hours of frantic collective work, a national coalition of grassroots groups, informal collectives, national feminist and labor organizations was born.

Within this coalition women coming from different traditions and political cultures are rediscovering the joy of solidarity and trust among different struggles and different voices.

What unites us is the desire to give voice and power to the women who have been left behind by lean-in and corporate feminism and who are suffering from the consequences of decades of neoliberalism and wars: from poor and working class women, to women of color and migrant women, from disabled women, to Muslim women and trans women.

By striking together, we will be returning to the historical roots of this holiday – a history that we should familiarize ourselves with once again.

On this day in 1908, 15,000 women garment workers, the majority of them immigrants, marched through the heart of Manhattan to demand better pay, shorter work hours and suffrage. A year later women immigrant textile workers were on strike against the terrible sweatshops where they were forced to work, facing down police violence and repression by the owners.

Inspired by the struggle of the women workers, German socialist, Clara Zetkin, called on attendees at the International Conference of Working Women in 1910 to organize an International Working Women’s Day. Women delegates from over 17 countries voted unanimously to pass the motion.

A few years later, in 1917, thousands of Russian women, workers and wives of soldiers, took to the streets on 8 March to demand peace and bread and started the uprising that would overturn the Tsarist regime: this year’s International Women’s Day will also be the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the February Revolution.

There are two particular ways in which we want to re-politicize 8 March in the era of Trump.

First, we want to bring back the idea of the impossible.

In the early 20th century women in general, and textile workers in particular, were considered impossible to organize. The main labor unions of the day left them well alone to work under vicious conditions, or – as in the case of Triangle Shirtwaist Factory – to be burnt alive in these sweatshops.

The women going on strike, apprehended the impossible. As the 19-year-old Clara Lemlich, one of the leaders of the strike, said “They used to say you couldn’t even organize women. They wouldn’t come to union meetings. They were ‘temporary workers.’ Well, we showed them!” We need the idea of the impossible in the age of Trump.

Second, we want the demand for bread to be reunited with the demand for roses.

The labor organizer, Rose Schneiderman, coined the phrase “bread and roses” in 1912 while organizing against sweatshops in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

“What the woman who labors wants” she said, “is the right to live, not simply exist … the right to life, and the sun and music and art … The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.”

Decades of neoliberalism has not just taken the bread from the tables of working women and families but also taken away all infrastructures that sustain life, the roses.

Hospitals and schools have closed while prisons and police have multiplied. While wages have declined and unions smashed by a battery of anti-labor laws, the same law makers have failed to indict police officers who have openly murdered Black men, have tried to close abortion clinics, and ban trans women from using female bathrooms. Thus the fight for wages cannot be separated from the means that sustain life.

This is the history, of women self-organizing and fighting for economic and political rights, that the United States has erased from memory.

We will not just demand bread, for we also deserve roses.