By Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Enough is enough. Trump, his administration, and his backers are waging war on women, and millions of women are making it clear that we are not going to be pushed backwards. From the massive Women’s Marches, to the midterm elections, to the constant, everyday resistance, women are standing up against Trump’s reactionary agenda.
Trump and his supporters in the Senate want to pack the Supreme Court and roll back reproductive rights, and they have gotten a start by appointing the drunken misogynist Brett Kavanaugh. Accompanying the administrations outrageous policy of placing immigrants in detention, Trump’s Justice Department is defending the attempt to deny abortion access to unaccompanied young immigrant women. The Department of Education is trying to undermine the undermine the rights of rape survivors. And the Trump administration has launched an assault on transgender rights.
On top of these abuses, Trump and company have mocked the #me too movement and work overtime to create a climate of disrespect and misogyny, all the while greenlighting violence against women.
Nothing in this country is fair, and the inequality and oppression that falls on women in the Black, Chicano and Latino, Native, Asian and Pacific Islander community’s hits extra hard. Statistics on unemployment, wage disparities, lack of services, or just about anything else that can be measured, bear this out.
The White House, Pentagon, and Wall Street have globalized the war on women – creating an empire that is marked by inequality and discrimination. Women are among those hit hardest by imperialism, and that can be seen in the caravans of refugees fleeing the ‘made in the USA’ poverty and violence that has engulfed Central America and so many other places, or in the faces of the families starved by the U.S. and their Saudi allies in Yemen.
Looking at the tide of resistance that in this country and around world, we are approaching a turning point. That which is unacceptable must be changed. We need a movement that is broad and inclusive, willing to confront each and every injustice, and that is willing to do what it takes to win. Silence and civility will get us nowhere with opponents who are neither.
March 8, International Women’s Day, will soon be upon us. It’s a holiday of struggle that puts our demands front and center. It is celebrated across the globe and started right here in the U.S., when garment workers fighting for a decent living and the movement for women to vote merged for a powerful protest in New York City, on March 8, 1908. The outstanding and heroic German socialist leader Clara Zetkin drew inspiration from this fight and encouraged working people everywhere to make March 8 International Women’s Day.
It’s been said that “women hold up half the sky,” and on International Women’s Day it can be affirmed, the stronger the role of women, the stronger our collective movements will be.
This year’s International Women’s Day is a day to stand up and be counted – and to push back and against everything and everyone who would hold us back, and to look forward to a bright future.
The oppression of women is not a new thing – it predates capitalism, and in fact was a precursor to the division of society into classes. This systematic inequality is now an essential feature of capitalism, and it will take socialism – a social system where societies economic and political power is in the hand of working people, to fight and ultimate destroy every barrier to equality and liberation.
