The Women’s March announced this week its much-anticipated “general strike” will be March 8.
Several feminist activists, including radical communist Angela Davis, took to the pages of the Guardian last week to call for a general strike on March 8 as well, proposing a day of “striking, marching, blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work.”
Their announcement came the same morning the Women’s March announced its initial plans for a strike, raising the question of whether they were one in the same.
If so, it would indicate a clear embrace of radicalism on the part of the Women’s March, an organization that managed to garner broad support among moderate women across the country.
Now that both strikes are definitively occurring on the same day, that question becomes even more pressing.
Here’s what I wrote last week:
If the strike the Guardian op-ed calls for is the same strike the Women’s March is organizing, asking women to block roads and skip work to march and allying itself with fringe figures such as Angela Davis, it is difficult to imagine the movement maintaining its momentum with the millions of moderate supporters who first carried it to success. After all, most of these people are conscious beneficiaries of free enterprise.
When I asked for clarification, the Women’s March never responded to request for comment. A second request for clarification sent Feb. 15 went unanswered as well.
The Guardian op-ed sharply rejected “lean-in feminism” and expressed the “need to target the ongoing neoliberal attack on social provision and labor rights.”
It’s worth reiterating that the anti-capitalist radical feminism of extremists such as Angela Davis is part of the reason why so many women have hesitated to identify with the women’s rights movement in recent decades.
Further embracing it would seriously jeopardize the Women’s March’s ability to sustain momentum.
Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
