Building off the momentum of the Women’s March in Washington, feminist organizers hoped that their so-called “A Day Without a Woman” strike would really stick it to the Trump administration for its supposedly “anti-woman” policies. While the March seemed to have the full support of the mainstream media, many outlets started to express skepticism, and for good reason.
In the end, even the New York Times admitted the strike’s failure on multiple fronts.
Set to coincide with International Women’s Day, organizers called on all women to do one or all of the following: 1) take the day off from paid or unpaid labor; 2) avoid shopping for one day (except at small, women- and minority-owned businesses); and 3) wear red in solidarity.
The strike purported to recognize “the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socioeconomic system,” but several outlets struggled to fully get behind it.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed calling the protest “A Day Without a Privileged Woman,” and predicting that few will actually join this “party.” It foresaw that the strike would “mostly be a day without women who can afford to skip work, shuffle childcare and household duties to someone else, and shop at stores that are likely to open at 10 and close at 5.”
The article concluded that women “are too essential to play hooky,” and that “the idea that women should take a day off en masse to make a political point is both self-defeating and vaguely insulting.”
Likewise, the New York Daily News encouraged women to “screw the Day Without a Woman” protest, which would “only end up with wealthy ladies taking the day off to protest while the women who work their asses off cleaning their houses, caring for their kids and every other by-the-hour day work, won’t be able to do the same because their bosses will be out protesting.” The article recommends the protest be scrapped and replaced with a “good old-fashioned sex strike.”
Vox seemed to endorse the strike, but raised some serious concerns about it at the same time. One semi-critical article pointed out that “general strikes don’t work very well in the United States” namely because there are “no legal protections whatsoever for walking off the job in the US unless you have a specific grievance in the workplace.” It went on to ask: “If the only women who feel empowered to participate in a strike are the ones who already have secure jobs and good benefits, then who is the strike really for?”
Finally, Cosmopolitan published a surprisingly fair article on “Why Conservative Women Won’t Strike on ‘A Day Without a Woman.’” Not only did the article reinforce how many women can’t afford to miss work or would get fired if they don’t show up, it featured the interviews of several conservative women who find the strike “counterproductive” and noted that for these right-leaning women, “the way to advance gender equality is to take a seat at the table, not to leave an empty chair.” In the article, Townhall’s Katie Pavlich contends: “[M]y philosophy on getting people to appreciate and respect your work is not to not show up for work.” The article also reveals to readers that the strike’s organizers are — shocker alert — not “welcoming” of conservative women.
The mainstream media realizes that feminists are fighting a losing battle by following stale, ineffective tactics and galvanizing the wrong demographic. Low income millennial women, who would be more prone to protest, are all but left out by these kinds of protests, and conservative women of all ages are blatantly excluded by their liberal agenda. Some of the more pragmatic media outlets hoped that the strike would fail so that feminists change their strategy.
Unfortunately for them, feminists are stuck in the 1960s and don’t want to leave.
