The Independent, March 2020
I regularly attend meetings where a group of women talk politics while a group of men look after our children. They cook and serve us a meal, and do the washing up too. The meetings are part of the Women’s Strike Assembly, a collective that – as part of a growing international movement – is struggling towards a red feminist horizon, “dismantling the capitalist patriarchal systems of power that oppress us all.”
The global women’s strike movement calls upon all women able to refuse to work – we’re building a strike fund to support those who otherwise couldn’t – to do so on 8 March, on International Women’s Day. Our strike won’t look like traditional industrial action, because most of the work women do is unpaid: preparing kids’ food (and picking it up when they spill it), washing bedsheets, remembering appointments, keeping husbands happy. Where “women’s work” is paid, it is often performed by women of the Global South, and therefore underpaid and undervalued.
Sophie Hemery 