The Women’s March on Washington has decided to become a permanent fixture on the political scene, not just a pink hat-wearing one-off. But that means it’s gotta do something, so it’s come up with something to do: a “general strike” with the catchy title “A Day Without a Woman.”
Now, there’s already at least one other general strike in the offing—and it’s right around the corner, on February 17. The focus of this protest is President Trump’s executive order setting a 90-day moratorium on travel to the United States and a 120 day-moratorium on refugee-admissions from seven Muslim-majority countries. Although that order is currently on hold pending appeals of a Seattle federal judge’s ruling that bars federal authorities from enforcing it, the strike website issues this national call nonetheless.
My prediction: There will be lots and lots of not going “to school” on our nation’s campuses. There will be a very elastic definition of “necessary” when it comes to deciding whether to “spend any money” (will Starbucks be deemed “necessary”?). General strikes are popular in other parts of the world—Latin America, Greece, Italy—but maybe not so much in the United States. Still, the “demands” the Feb. 17 strike will present are various enough to appeal to a wide range of left-leaning tastes: not just getting rid of Trump’s travel ban but also getting rid of such Trump-supported projects as the Keystone pipeline, Obamacare repeal, and the “Mexico City” policy forbidding federal aid to organizations involved in overseas abortions.
The Feb. 17 general strike is a co-ed affair, open to both—or as is more politically correct these days—all sexes. Not so A Day Without a Woman, which as of yet has no scheduled date. It seems to be purely a female thing. Now, “a day without a woman” is an interesting name for a strike or anything else, since “without a woman” has vaguely sexual overtones. And maybe that’s the plan: a nationwide reenactment of Lysistrata. Then again, as my TWS editor points out, if they called it “A Day Without Women,” too many guys might actually like the idea. But the name probably derives from the 2004 movie A Day Without a Mexican, in which the idea was for all the Latinos in California to magically disappear, so that the Anglos couldn’t get their lawns mowed or their floors mopped.
If this is the case, A Day Without a Woman may prove to be the test case that decides whether the Women’s March on Washington really represented the views of America’s 126 million adult women or just a Trump-o-phobic fringe. I’m not sure that the organizers of that march really ought to want to find out.
