Why Doesn’t the Women’s Movement Prioritize Women?
Letter submitted by E. Gelman
It was abrupt how quickly the length of the world was shortened. There was a sudden new dimension when, in the morning, I put on my clothes and felt my stomach (flat) under my shirt; and also, as I drove to work, sat at my desk, completed my various tasks. When I stopped at the drug store on the way home, I calculated what I determined to now be the cost of life: plan-b pills, the pregnancy tests, birth control, if not covered by insurance. And then when I stepped outside there was, apparent in the street, an unbearable, depressing sense of loss — of potential, of financial gain, good health, completed education, full and healthy lives. I saw it on the girls who were making their way from their classes to their apartments and then the bars, with backpacks and tote bags and books: this new line of fate that we were all now connected to, all trodding on, this knowing.
Before, we were worried, but not enough. I denied for many years that it could be a genuine reality. And so when the opinion was leaked I asked my boyfriend – a law student: “It really wont be overturned, will it?” But he said yes; that it really was happening. We were at his friend’s house, and almost everyone there was also in law school, sitting on soft couches, facing each other. He had a tone that I could not quite identify; reserved, apprehensive. But he saw it coming, and he knew it. “The democrats,” he said, “have just been using it as fundraising.”
One of the guys agreed. He put his drink down and leaned forwards in his chair and said, that though he thought Ruth Bader Ginsberg did a lot for women, she was (and he did not hesitate,) “kind of a bitch.” The word was harsh and acerbic, but it seemed to me only. The conversation continued; how she should have retired, how she pissed away her legacy. He was proud of his words, I could tell—these assertions, this political talk.
“The thing about supreme court justices,” someone else said, “is that they have huge egos. They don’t know when to quit.”
A quiet girl’s boyfriend wanted to talk about gun rights. The conversation changed course. The men crossed and uncrossed their legs and wet their mouths with their beer. The man opened his wallet and removed his gun license and showed it off to everyone at the table. I even held it in my hands, briefly: white plastic, his face staring up at me, his name and height and sex legible in plain black font. It is no secret that men fear losing their rights. They talk about this fear openly, angrily; march in the street for it, brandish their weapons to support it; go to the courts to protect it. All this even though they have no natural predators, besides, of course, themselves.
After the opinion was leaked the many socialist groups of my progressive city went to work. My friend and I took a Saturday and planned the day out: First a protest, then a meeting. She brought her boyfriend. He was a progressive. Because her dress didn’t have pockets, he held her phone. On State Street we saw young college girls going this way and that way, in sandals and flannels and crop tops and shopping bags, busy. I’ve always asked myself if there was something that the average person could do in circumstances like this. “Do you think the protest will actually help?” I asked. They didn’t know. “I hope so,” my friend said. This language in the crushing heat. One could suffocate in it.
At the protest a woman who makes pendants in the shape of coat hangers told us that she would donate all her proceeds to abortion funds. My friend and I each bought one, and hung them on our necks. Another woman saw that we had come with nothing, and handed us signs, simple and double sided: “I’m a person not an incubator” on one side, and “abortion = healthcare” on the other. I put the first one facing outwards and held it up. Women began to line up on the stage to speak.
The messages were similar but mixed. One speaker mourned the number of women who would die because of this. Another suggested boycotting the tavern league. Another indicated how trans healthcare (surgeries, therapy appointments) is linked in the struggle of women’s rights.
The metal from the pendant poked at my skin and I rearranged it so that it fell against my shirt instead. Between the speakers, the organizers led us in chants, calling for an end to abortion bans, demanding the right to legal abortions in any and all circumstances. “By the way,” said an organizer, as she took a breath, “none of these chants have the word ‘women’ in them. Not only women have abortions!” The crowd cheered especially at this.
We went to the meeting after. It was an action meeting to discuss the potential overturn of Roe v. Wade and what we could do about it, and it was very serious; someone had set up rows of chairs and taped up posters, which were all shiny and red and stressed a need for urgent action in capital letters and exclamation points. They called it: Reproductive Justice. They warned that the republicans would not stop at the overturn of Roe v. Wade and teased other issues that were next on the agenda – gay marriage, interracial relationships, trans healthcare, racial justice. The speakers were of mixed-sex and gender. There were men with long hair and short shorts and some male- and female-bodied people asked to be called by they/them pronouns – perhaps a political act. But the audience, I noticed, were mostly women. The socialists talked about class issues. Society was easily divided into areas of powerful and not powerful; rich and poor; white and black; straight and gay; but somehow this is where they stopped their analysis.
Then, the speakers stood up. They emphasized collective action. The message was this: we must fight now, or else face monumental consequences. They passed around some slips of paper, and advocated how they would fight against the potential, looming overturn of the domino called Roe v Wade: by organizing highschool walkouts. The message was clear: this particular movement wasn’t for us. We left after that.
It becomes time to call it what it is. The emperor is naked. 50% of the population will be subjected to restriction, limitation, illness, poverty, financial burden, hindrance in career — and 50% will not. Based on the pure biological chance of birth and the deliberate social evil that is misogyny, one segment of the population will suffer, and one will be virtually unscathed. We must recognize the female class, and we must recognize issues that impact the female class as disasters in their own right — not as prologues to real trouble for other, real people. Only by naming the issue and uniting as a cohesive class can we begin to work together towards a solution.
While race and class are currently viewed as the fundamental issues in contemporary society, the issue of sex is just as important. This is glaringly obvious in areas such as financial strength, general safety, and societal power. To illustrate, consider the wage gap; in 2021, men were paid 22.1% more than women, on average and with other variables controlled, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Regarding the issue of safety, 1 in 5 women has been the victim of attempted or completed rape, according to a 2015 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence survey. Women are also still underrepresented in leadership positions, Pew Research found in 2018. And now, with the greatest piece of evidence that women are an oppressed group in American society showing itself in the overturn of Roe v. Wade—the left has decided, evidently, that women’s rights are trivial, and greater people suffer more.
When confronted with this sexism, liberals, in the name of inclusivity, deny the problem exists. In an effort to create balance they clarify that females will not be the only group who will suffer from this ruling, and create bizarre but egalitarian statements indicating that women are not the only ones who can get pregnant (“pregnant people” instead of “pregnant women”). To destroy sexism, they bury their heads in the sand; and when issues that impact women are on the line, they break the issue down, in the name of intersectionality, to find other groups who may suffer more. Of course, other demands (racial justice, gay and trans rights, et cetera) are important and deserve their own conversations – but they shouldn’t be used, as they are, to distract from women’s matters. Now, even as our rights are stripped away in front of us, we are told we cannot name the issue. We are made mute. We center other groups in our own protests. We are too nice about it. We let men talk over us and explain the frivolity of our complaints, and we believe them. But there is simply no way to identify out of or distort the reality of biological fact.
One of my friends, a quintessential liberal activist with the same mindset of those we encountered at the protests and meetings, was angered by my sentiments on the topic. She said abortion and reproductive justice must be degendered, that this issue harms white people the least, and trans people of color in the red states the most. On the inverse, there have also been viral, wildly shared posts on the internet stating that rich white women will always have access to abortion, regardless of what the rule of the land is. But these ideas are myopic and circumvent the realities of sex and sexism, which is malicious to ignore.
These statements indicate that we should not care about the freedoms and liberties of all women but instead focus on a group of small, unique people who are especially impacted. But these are top-down sentiments that spring from the idea that sex is not a significant issue in society. Rather, let us look from the bottom-up: a lack of access to abortion impacts all women (even the rich or middle-class white woman), with a caveat that some women (women in red states, poor women, women who live in more patriarchal cultures) will have a greater struggle in achieving abortion or, stemming from this, their other life goals. The goal of statements which ignore the fundamental problem is to divide the female class; these statements create a mythical woman who simply does not exist to carry the brunt of the anger and turn us against ourselves.
Let us expand on the same thought exercise: even if the richest, whitest, most bulletproof woman is pregnant and needs an abortion, she still faces the potential of significant threat, which in and of itself does not mean she is free. If this woman goes and gets an abortion, there still is the fact that she could, potentially, face significant social and criminal penalty. If this woman is unable to get an abortion, she faces a loss of autonomy at baseline, as well as the risk of death, illness, poverty, and more, as consequence. This risk alone, even if never actualized, is significant. If even the most privileged woman is affected, it is evidence that this is a female issue, not one of race or class or gender identity.
The insistence of isolating the transgender experience from the cisgender female experience is additionally troubling. This is a small group (an estimated .6% of the United States population is transgender) that has access to sterilization procedures that the average cisgender woman does not have access to. Additionally, the notion that those who do not identify as women suffer more than those who do identify as woman under the overturn of Roe v. Wade is similarly a delusion; any individual who is forced to carry an unwanted child will struggle regardless of whether they identify as cisgender or transgender. Instead of dividing ourselves, we must recognize what unites us.
The conservatives, to their credit, are articulate. Unlike the left, they are capable of naming their problem: the autonomy of the female sex. From here, they can debate, they can legislate, they can trace their logic — though flawed — back to an original source.
I remember when it was a funny joke on the internet when republican lawmakers, who so extremely sought to legislate reproduction, pregnancy and abortion rights, expressed an inability to understand the very functions of the female body. Take for example Todd Akin, former U.S. representative for Missouri and pro-lifer, who claimed that pregnancy cannot occur in rape: “If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” But make no mistake – even if a Republican male lawmaker cannot name a woman’s reproductive organs or understand how they work — he does know what a womb is, and he is very well aware of the distinctly female capability of reproduction. To illustrate, consider Clyde Chambliss, an Alabama Senator who willingly admitted his lack of understanding of reproduction and was unable to articulate the time difference between fertilization and the moment a pregnancy test would read “positive.” Chambliss authored the draconian Human Life Protection Act, which banned all abortion in Alabama except in the case where the mother’s life is endangered. Still, he stated that this statute would not apply to eggs fertilized for fertility treatments – he said, “the egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” This is a stunning admission from someone who claims his goal is to protect human life, not to control women.
Unlike the left, conservatives do not pretend to care about women. In the Christian bible, which these men have read, it is said that for Eve’s sin, the pain of childbirth is passed down from generation to generation, to each woman who must bear the burden of reproduction. This is a very real thing that the men of the courts and the jury believe; that there is a fault in having sex, and retribution only in pregnancy and childbirth. The consequences that a woman may experience—illness, impediment in career, financial burden, and so on are discounted by these men because these pains are considered just and willed for by their God.
Also unlike the liberals, conservatives have been able to work carefully towards their goals. For instance, they utilize Federalist Society— a legal organization which developed what Ilyse Hogue at The Intercept called a “40 year plot to undo Roe v. Wade.” With aspiration in advancing a narrow interpretation of the constitution the members work towards preserving the white, Christian, male, conservative society that the United States of America was, as they see it, founded to be. The Federalist Society is old, and has a large base of donors, students, and lawyers. There are no liberal organizations that have the power or breadth that the Federalist Society does. The reason why is clear, according to Evan Mandery for Politico: the conservatives have named goals and principles that they can, as a result, fight for; liberals, on the other hand, prefer to focus on abstract identity, goal-post shifting idea — leaving them to play the position of defense, to the conservative offense, time and time again. And so, when women’s rights are threatened, the liberal recourse is simple: defang our movement, de-center ourselves in our language, declare other issues more important. At her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the only glimmers of hope the left has against the conservative majority of the Court, was unable to give the definition of the word “woman” when prodded for it by Republican Senators. Now, with the fight for abortion rights to be codified in national law lying in the voting power of Americans who are also unwilling to answer this same question, what hope is there for the women of the United States?
For these reasons, I propose that the language of the pro-choice movement — and women’s movement as a whole — deliberately returns to specific language, sexed language, gendered language — language that reflects the reality of the situation. We must be clear of the consequences of a life without abortion, of why it is important, and who exactly is impacted.
At the second protest, I went alone. Roe v Wade was overturned earlier in the day, and women again gathered on the steps of the capitol. I had my same sign with me, had kept it ready and displayed in my living room for this moment.
Men and women first lined up on the stage to talk. There were more cries of anguish, more focus on the issue, this time. Still, the mythos that we are not enough was with us. The conversation easily ran to other issues, like water down a creek. Then we began to march around the capitol. There was a frenzied energy, electric.
The police, now the arbiters of this unjust ruling, were on the other side of the road and they walked as we walked, encircling us. People began to yell at them, swearing, “Fuck the police!” they said.
The police were a mixed group, men and women. I made eye contact with a woman on the other side of the line. She had more in common with any of us walking than any of her coworkers in uniform. I thought she was crazy, wondered what it would take for her to step over and walk with us. There were bystanders, also; women who were maybe undecided on the topic, who had other places to be, who sat at the same restaurants we passed by, and ate their food.
The question is this: What if we acknowledged that we are united, that all of our fates are intertwined? What could happen to one of us, could happen to all of us — regardless of political standing, profession, race, sexuality, gender identity. We are about 50 percent of the population. If all of us came together, how powerful would we be, then?