International Women’s Day
March 6, 2020
by CHARLOTTE A. KUNKEL, Professor of Sociology
M
arch is Women’s History Month, and on March 8th every year we celebrate International Women’s Day. The theme this year is Each for Equal. And this year we are also celebrating the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the US. Thinking about women’s history comes on the heels of honoring black history and Black History Month. Ironically, these two months illustrate a vexing problem black women (and other women of color) face. Are they mostly part of a race, or part of a sex? How often are they invisible to each? In response to this problem of a hierarchy of oppressions, two speakers last month, Lydia Kelow-Bennett and Terrion Williamson, referred to the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977. It is also a text that I am currently teaching. I want to tell you a little bit about this text and one other I am also teaching—both have been wandering around in my head lately.
Meaning that, “If black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Taylor, 23). Similarly, in 1927, a collective Korean feminist organization called Kunuhoe was organized to bring vastly different Korean feminist organizations together: socialist feminists, farm and factory workers, and nationalist feminists. They wrote its inaugural declaration in 1929. It reads, “It is readily apparent that all the irrational factors that put women at a disadvantage are essentially linked with factors that haunt Korean society and indeed all societies around the world. Therefore, all the solutions to the problems are intricately connected and cannot be separated from each other. IMAGE DEY SUBRATA CC BY-SA, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The Combahee River Collective was a radical black feminist organization who
gathered to address the complicated and interlocking nature of multiple oppressions. They chose their name to honor Harriet Tubman and her role in the raid of 1863 along the river Combahee. In this raid, Tubman served as the first woman to lead a US army operation, in which she and a unit of 150 African American male soldiers freed over 700 enslaved peoples. What courage did it take to fight alongside the US army, to risk her safety, herself, her life? In 1977, in remembrance of Tubman, the collective theorized: “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of Capitalism and Imperialism as well as Patriarchy” (19).
Shaheen Bagh street protest art, Delhi, India, January 2020
“Women are not weak. When women are liberated, the world
Charlotte A. Kunkel will be liberated. Korean sisters, unite.” (Maloney, Theiss and Choi, 204). Why address these texts on the celebration of International Women’s Day? I chose these texts because radical and courageous women of color have been reminding me, reminding us, for centuries that no one is free until we are all free. In recent decades all too often we have been fighting individual fights. We have often used a distorted and exclusionary identity politics to divide us— we say, “I am a woman, I will work only for sex equality.” Or “you are not part of this group, you can’t stand with me.” Or we ask, “why are you fighting for that issue? Are you sure you belong there?” We create new identities to address our specific problems and create new groups that call for new identities. We are often stuck in identity politics such that we fail to see that, if women of color were free, we would have had to confront all systems of oppression. Racism, sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, Anti-Semitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, colonialSpring 2020/Agora
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