So the people who brought us the Women’s March on Washington have another big idea: A general strike of all American women. So far the idea looks to be just that, an idea; they haven’t even picked a date yet.
But if they pull it off, this act of collective resistance could have huge consequences. Ask the people of Iceland, or at least the older ones: That county had its own day-long women’s strike in 1975 which basically rocked the country to its core as a generation of men learned that women play an essential role in the economy, a fact that many of the world’s misogynists still refuse to believe.
Speaking of which, you may wonder what the misogynists of today think of the idea of a Woman’s Strike.
I took a peek into the Men’s Rights subreddit and found that the fellows there are mostly supportive of the idea, though for reasons far different than the strike’s organizers: MRAs, many of whom seem to think that women don’t do anything but gobble bon-bons while watching The View, are fairly confident that no one would even notice if each and every women vanished from the workplace and/or stopped doing unpaid work at home.
In the Men’s Right subreddit, our old friend ImnotMRAbut posted about the proposed ban under a headline written in the form of a question:
Someone called liquid_j asked “is there room for negotiation? Can we call it like a week? Maybe two?”
Another old friend, ThePigmanAgain, offered a similar take, suggesting that
They should make it a whole year, in my view. Let’s face it, apart from the nurses, we really don’t need women for anything.
Meanwhile, factspissyouoff found himself feeling pretty pissed off at all those women who think their lives amount to anything:
Of Suffragettes and Sherlock Holmes
This sort of fits here. There was a short lecture the other week about Edith Garrud, and luckily someone filmed it (starts off a bit shaky but stick with it):
And even when women are in dominantly women’s fields, they are often supervised or managed by the few men that go into that field. Librarians, for instance, are predominantly women, but libraries have usually been headed by men (at least academic libraries; I don’t know much about the make up in public libraries).
I used to work for an employment agency that specialized in Physical Therapists, a field strongly dominated by women, something like 75% (I’m quoting this off the top of my head from a job 20 years ago, and even though I have a good memory, you might not want to consider this totally scientific). I was horrified to discover that something like 90% of Physical Therapy Supervisors were men.
I do harp on a lot about Edith Garrud; but it occurs to me that I’m being a bit Anglo-centric. So for our friends across the Pond, may I introduce you to Blanche Whitney. She was the worlds women’s wrestling champion in the 1910s. She had an open challenge to any woman and any man (up to 145lbs) and she never lost.
http://www.bartitsu.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/BW2.jpg
She wasn’t much into suffrage herself: “I can take care of myself without a vote”; but she did teach self defence to ladies, incorporating wrestling, boxing and (not quite sure why) fencing.
I wonder what the MRA crowd would make of her?
Nursing is also being masculinized in the U.S. There are articles if you google, but they mostly pertain to nurse-anesthetists and are several years old.
My new doctor’s nurse is a man and when I had to take my dad to the ER year before last, his nurse was a man and at least a quarter of the other nurses I saw were men.
@CPhazor
EDIT for punctuation and clarification.
I’ve linked more than a few people to this thesis on the history of gender in programming because it so neatly describes how strongly societal respect intertwines with perceptions of masculinity. What’s notable especially about programming is how, in the early days, the profession was entirely done by women as the job was seen to be comparatively simple compared to the act of designing and constructing the computers, which was the purview of male computer scientists.
Once the world started to realize just how difficult programming actually was, things began to change. Companies put restrictive aptitude tests and educational requirements on job advertisements that, hardly coincidentally, discriminated against women in the hiring process. Male scientists crossed over into the newly-respected discipline, displacing many of the women already working there.
By the 1960’s, programming had been solidly established as a male industry, and has stayed that way until today.
More related to my own experiences (I’m a game design student) is this study on the apparently higher skills of young girls at designing and scripting games. It, and other studies like it, puts to rest the idea that women are biologically less capable than men at the art of game design, another profession that has for a long time been dominated by men. To this day, the classes at my school have archaic gender ratios due mainly to the fact that girls don’t believe games are a welcoming environment to them; a belief that I don’t entirely blame them for having, given the history of misogyny in the player community.
This women on strike thing, while I think it sounds promising at first…won’t it have a disproportionately harmful impact on lower-income women and women of color?
I was thinking of taking part, but I’m the only woman in a 5-person business. I could still do it. My boss wouldn’t bat an eyelash. But for the women working service and minimum-wage jobs, won’t something like this put them in a vulnerable position?
Not to mention the working poor (women) who won’t be able to use daycare that day, due to daycare being provided overwhelmingly by women.
I am kind of thinking out loud. I don’t want to participate in something that is blatantly privileged and leaves out poor women, women of color, etc. (not conflating the two, to be clear).
Glass escalator:
http://www.womenonbusiness.com/men-women-the-glass-escalator/
@Terrabeau : videogame development is toxic as hell, and partly because it’s deeply misogynistic.
I would not advice anyone, men or women, to work here, but it’s sure harder for women.
dreemr – that has occurred to me, as well. Many women are on an hourly wage, and if they take off, they will not be paid, and could even lose their job. Some of us (like me) have a limited number of leave days, and could possibly use one for this.
As for day care, well, I suppose the idea is to leave the kids with hubby, but that isn’t an option for a woman who doesn’t have a husband, or who has a husband that won’t take care of the kids, even if there is no one around to do it (I have a brother-in-law who refused to change diapers, no matter what. When he was watching the kids, he’d haul them to my mother’s house to have her change the diapers).
The planners need to make some sort of arrangements to help out women who want to strike but can’t – financial arrangements, perhaps through a Go Fund Me that would allow these women to participate without losing salary. As for the kids, well, I’m open for suggestions on that one. I don’t think they should take the kids with them, because that sort of diminishes the impact of the strike, and they will still be spending their day in unpaid labor.
How was it organised in Poland? I’m sure the women’s march people are reaching out to those organisers. At least, I hope they are!
I like the idea of helping to fund people taking the day off, if they can without losing their jobs. I know I lived below the poverty line for a while, and I couldn’t miss out on the money for a shift at all without some serious consequences.
After all, if people could find 70k$ to fund buying a vote away from Betty DeVos, surely something similar could be arranged?
(I have no idea how one would organise that though, or ensure that the funds went to people who needed them.)
I don’t just worry about them missing the pay from a shift, but of being fired.
I like some of these ideas, though, and I will ask this same question on some of my “secret” FB organizing groups, too.
Any more ideas?
I’m definitely interested to see what this strike will be like. I telecommute, so the main places I interact with women in a professional setting are the grocery store and the bank. But I only go to those places a few times per month, so I may not get to see what effect the strike has.
What sort of participation rate do you think this will have? I live in a pretty whitebread red state, and I’m wondering if I’ll notice much of a difference.
I don’t like Trump, so I hope it does well. But women aren’t very relevant to my life, overall, so I’m not sure how much I’ll notice…
@Atomic Ant:
Um… I guess since you telecommute from home, if you had no need to go outside at all, you might not notice. But if you needed to go and buy groceries, say, you would notice if suddenly all the cashiers* were gone.
(I worked for a grocery store, and noticed that alllllll the cashiers were female. All of them. And 90% of the people who worked on the floor were male. It hold pretty true at other stores, as well. It’s almost a rarity to get a male grocery store cashier!)
@dreemr: That’s what I’m worried about, women losing their jobs. I wish there was a way to show these women as well! I’m sure there will be marches organised, perhaps signs including their names or faces? (If they were comfortable with sharing that.) Or perhaps signs conveying that “I’m marching for women who can’t be here, because they would lose their jobs”. Or perhaps just carrying signs that have slogans that those women would have wanted to carry themselves.
I saw on a different site a woman who desperately wanted to go to the woman’s march, but knew she was physically incapable of doing so. She had asked a friend to carry a sign for her, saying that, but her friend didn’t feel she could manage two signs. So someone online offered to carry her message.
I’m not sure if it actually happened, (in my dreams, it did!) but much like making pussy hats that can go to the marches even if you can’t, I think it might help include people who otherwise couldn’t be there.
I’m in a severely red state, too, but there are a few of us – more than I had feared, now that I am speaking up more.
Nobody will really notice if I take the day off, tbh. I am a bookkeeper in a 5-person business and I’m allowed days off, it doesn’t throw the business into a tailspin.
But I’d like to show solidarity, march if there is a march within a few hundred miles of me. But again I don’t want this to be yet another thing privileged white women do that completely leaves out entire groups of women.
On one of my groups we just had a couple of huge discussions about white women, women of color, intersectionality, and white privilege. A woman of color had posted a call to other WOC to respond and maybe they could have a discussion amongst themselves to hear their own voices and share their experiences. I was reading through the thread because I would like to understand how they view some of these things – I know the Women’s March was considered very problematic for women of color, and I was hoping to learn what they had to say about it.
Imagine my horrified embarrassment to see that, despite asking that white women refrain from commenting, (because it was mainly for women of color to gather their ideas and make contact with each other) just about every second or third post was from a white woman declaring her allyship. Making it all about HER/White women!! Basically shutting down the voices of women of color in real time. I was so mortified for them. It was like condescending to appear seeking validation, and saying, “Greetings, mortals! I, a white woman, approve of your little post, here. Indeed, I am an ally!” And then, when those women were RIGHTFULLY told to STFU and listen, they were OH SO HURT I’M JUST TRYING TO HELP BOO HOO HOO.
So, you can see why I am particularly sensitive to this right now. I can’t believe we still expect people of color and really any minority to spoonfeed us Racism 101. They’ve been trying to tell us for over 300 years, and yet we’re still demanding that they take responsibility for gently and kindly walking us through their experience???
I just don’t want to perpetuate that bullshit. I want to think about it beforehand so we can at least attempt to be inclusive. Good things DID come out of that disastrous post, however, in that a lot of white women woke the eff up finally and learned, for the very first time, it seems, that just being willing to do good doesn’t absolve you from racism or any other ism.
Of all the baffling MGTOW positions, the “women-don’t work” one is the most baffling to me. The form of work-related misogyny that I’m most familiar with is that women are best fitted for supervised drudgery, and least fitted for supervising, or anything requiring creativity, decision-making, etc.
What on earth is this guy looking around at? Where does he live, where men do all the cooking and cleaning and serving? Where all the cashiers and bank tellers and newsreaders and admin assistants are all men?
Perhaps the key is “created solely by a woman“. As in, it only counts if it was the work of a single woman working on her own. Or maybe women working together but without a single man on the team…?
He thinks land was created and built by men, so there’s another problem with his apprehension.
Then he names five aspects of construction and two utilities – industries dominated by men, true, but even so there are women in all of those. I was in senior management at a power company for a little while, and the table was about a quarter women, not at all “so fucking rare it’s dishonest to even bring [them] up.” (Even assuming we were all bitter and childless.)
Not sure how he sees no women working on the internet. Powerful filters, I assume.
If his point is that women do not make things, doesn’t this disprove his point?
I think his point is either:
– that he gets to say what counts as work and what doesn’t count as work. Construction counts as work because its mostly men who do it. That would dovetail nicely with those views we saw about sex work not being work. Also with the MGTOW entitlement to redefine reality generally: Anything that women do isn’t work. Ta-da.
or
– women are fit only for supervised drudgery etc….
or I guess both.
Hey, Atom’s here trying to neg us all again!
My husband and I are both public school employees, and, yeah, if all the female school district employees took a weekday off, there’s no way there could be school that day. Custodians, cooks, paraprofessionals*, teachers, counselors, administration, daycare workers, parent volunteers**… more than half of them would be gone.
* Women–they’re all women–who do everything from door-greeter junior to assisting disabled students.
** ALL WOMEN
In terms of getting fired or even not being paid for the day, as an EU country Polish workers have significantly better protections than the US, so they wouldn’t face the same sort of risks.
Yeah, strikes are pretty white, period. Without strong unions, only people with the means to risk wage loss/unemployment can actually participate. That usually means white dudes, but, since it’s meant to be a women’s strike, white gals take that spot. And even then, unions have not always been particularly welcoming to brown folks. I could be wrong, but I somehow doubt too many women of color were in on the brainstorming sessions here
@Rhuu
Currently work at a grocery store, can confirm. In our case tho, our floor is pretty even genderwise
@Atom
http://gif-finder.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Bill-Murray-Ok.gif
If you just removed that last sentence it would’ve sounded halfway decent.
According to Facebook, the date seems to be February 17.
Yeah, I also was unsure of whether I could participate in the strike and still keep my job. I know that the company being in trouble with less workers available (especially since it’s a nursing company dominated by women) is the point of the strike, but still.
Even if you can’t stop working or are retired etc, you can still not spend money that day. That’s probably what I will do. I’ll try to do everything that requires me to spend ahead of time.
I think his “point”, when discussing how his clothes were mostly made by women, was that he wishes he could just go naked. Then he wouldn’t need women to make his clothes. And the only reason he CAN’T go naked, he thinks, is because women might see.
Maybe all the MRA/MGTOW guys should protest their dependence on women by having a day without clothes. Of course then they’d all end up fired and in jail. But they’d probably just blame women for that, too.
@iknklast
Wow, what a great parent! /sarcasm Poor kiddos, having to sit in dirty diapers because daddy couldn’t be arsed to change a damn diaper.
I wouldn’t be suprised to hear he referred/refers to doing his parental duties as ‘babysitting’.
Is this where we’re supposed to beg Atomic Ant to deem us relevant and offer him blow jobs and sandwiches? Because I don’t see it happening.
Re: women as grocery cashiers
Where I live, the grocery store market is dominated by two entirely locally-owned chains with strong unions. Cashiers are very well paid.
And a lot of them–50/50? majority? not sure, but I’ll start paying attention–are men.
Those irrelevant women are the ones who make the shelves on your grocery store full so that you can have what you want when you do go shopping. They’re the ones cashing your direct-deposit paycheques, and handling your direct-debit bill payment paperwork so that you can work at home. They’re prepping your takeout food and teaching children so that your co-workers can actually go to work instead of having to watch their children. They’re everywhere.
But they aren’t relevant to your life, sure.
Words are important, @Atomic Ant. Just ’cause you don’t see women all around you doesn’t mean that they aren’t working hard every day to make your life easier. (So too with men, obviously, but men tend to, you know, get the credit for that).