This past week, the world celebrated the indispensable role that women play in our economies, communities, and families. International women’s day was also marked by the “A Day Without a Woman” campaign. Aimed at emphasizing the importance of female contributions, A Day Without a Woman is the follow-up to February’s Women’s March. To most every believer in gender equality, these protests seem perfect for this moment in time. Are they really though?
Feminism has long been entangled with notions of elitism. Despite calls for intersectionality when pursuing gender equality, feminism seems resistant to change. Look up feminism and intersectionality and you’ll find essays, penned far more eloquently than this one, explaining feminism’s
inevitable association with economic class and race. Yet, despite these artfully crafted arguments, many of them the inspiration for this one, feminist movements have remained disappointingly unmoved.
How, you might ask, do these movements foster ideas of elitism? A Day Without A Woman has, and justifiably so, received a fair amount of criticism for its blatant disregard for economic status. Who is speaking for the woman too economically disadvantaged to skip work? The Women’s March’s, exclusivity, however, seemed more nuanced with its incidents of racial intolerance, creating a space that was hostile to people of color. This is not intended to suggest that these movements are useless or evil; it is intended to question their true efficacy. If people are aware of these overlaps between gender, race, and economic status, why are our efforts to correct inequality still so apathetic to the women who get the shortest end of the stick? Simply put, nearly a hundred hears after the first wave of feminism, feminism is still undeniably elitist. It has been made perfectly clear that there is no room for those that society has already, through other means, deemed irrelevant. Feminism must stop being referred to as only feminism. Intersectional feminism isn’t good enough either. What is feminism anyway? It’s just one part of equality. When we say “feminism”, we unconsciously say: “not race right now”, not economic inequality right now”, “not everyone right now”. We must stop separating equality into comfortable bite-sized pieces. While the importance of focus is undeniable, this approach has always forgotten someone. Whether it be the poor, the disabled, or people of color, someone is disregarded when we pick and choose which aspect of equality we want to attend to. Feminism just isn’t good enough.