Celebrate, but Fight for our Feminist Dreams
Our movements are stronger than the shocking early days of Trump’s 2016 upset. Do not relent. Rest when you need to, but keep fighting. Our movements will have to be stronger than ever to push the Biden/Harris administration to live up to the promise of containing this pandemic, to bailing out the people (including unpaid and underpaid women across the nation filling the gaps of our failed system) not corporations, and embarking on long overdue reforms to our long work week, lack of paid leave and our failing for-profit health system. While corporations will pressure the new administration to expand their largesse, we the people must tug harder and louder and be bolder from the ground up. It’s time to go for what we really want. Join us at a meeting, study group, or in the streets. And if NWL is not where you want to put your time or dollars, join a group that you admire and want to see stronger — support it with whatever you have to give. We need broad movements fighting on many fronts.
National Women’s Liberation celebrates the electoral defeat of the Trump regime. While not as overwhelming as it needed to be, this is an important victory. But, our victory is limited. Male supremacy, white nationalism, and corporate greed did not start with Trump’s campaign in 2015. The 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will not end those powerful forces either. Still, we must celebrate. We have pushed out an open woman-hating, white nationalist billionaire administration and elected the first woman VP, who is Black and South Asian. Little girls around the country– little boys and adults too! –will finally see the line of white male VPs broken. Around the world, women have been elected to lead their countries decades sooner than here (e.g. Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Ceylon Sri Lanka elected head of state 60 years ago; Tarja Kaarina Halonen elected Finnish prime minister 20 years ago) and much work remains to be done in having a country run “by, of and for the people.” Still, we struck an important blow that will undoubtedly save lives, prevent pain and give us space to build and organize. We got ourselves here to this moment, no one came to save us. And it is better to be here than to face the struggle of four more years of Trumpism.
The resistance movements that formed under Obama (including Black Lives Matter and our own formation of National Women’s Liberation in 2009), grew exponentially under the Trump years and sharpened our understanding for the long haul. From the resistance protests shortly after the 2016 election, to the enormous mass meetings where we welcomed fresh troops to collective feminist struggle, to the largest #RedForEd strikes for public education across the “red” states to the Movement for Black Lives Matter worldwide, and the many uprisings against state violence against Black and Brown people over these four years, our movements have changed and grown.
This transformation grew in part from our sisters in the #MeToo truth-telling movement that stood up against predators from Hollywood to DC and in our classrooms, jobs and homes; every marcher, sign holder, fundraiser and organizer for national and local enormous Women’s March(es) and Women’s Strike; the massive voter registration drives and youth movements able to surge even in an unprecedented worldwide pandemic and voter suppression; the untold heroes that canvassed, called and texted potential voters, the poll workers who counted and recounted every vote, people who gave rides and everyone who voted for this new terrain. We have new heroes showing us how to do the work: Stacey Abrams in Georgia for one, but also unknown leaders from Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and New Mexico. In every state, in every town we know we have talented community organizers plotting a way forward. Still, the rich have a stranglehold, setting the political agenda and appropriating the resources we all collectively create as workers — including the work women do bearing, raising, and caring for each other–and the Democratic Party is not speaking to this pain and the perpetual crisis we find ourselves in. Instead of squashing our dreams and vision, Democrats should be praising radical protest movements and working hard to appease us.
It is time they listened and amplified fighting movement leadership and dumped the corporate consultants and pundits giving only a “blue” or “red” vision of limited (corporate friendly) possibilities.
Fifty years of feminist agitation has brought the women of this country much progress, but more often change was from the action in the streets and at our kitchen tables, with courts and the ballot box trailing behind. While Trump disrupted our progress and caused countless amounts of pain and put our movement on the defensive, the main block to women’s freedom remains entrenched with a Biden/Harris administration: the power of billionaires. Let’s not forget that Biden assured the billionaire class that “Nothing will fundamentally change.” Well, we will see about that.
Join or donate to National Women’s Liberation at womensliberation.org or plug into another movement group today.