Chapel Talks

International Women’s Day

by CHARLOTTE A. KUNKEL, Professor of Sociology

March is Women’s History Month, and on March 8 th every year we celebrate International Women’s Day. The theme this year is Each for Equal. And this year we are also celebrating the 100 th 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.

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).

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. “Women are not weak. When women are liberated, the world IMAGE DEY SUBRATA CC BY-SA, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

March 6, 2020

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, colonial

Peaceful protestors in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood in Delhi in January, 2020. Mostly Muslim women, they demonstrated against police brutality, poverty, and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) until India’s COVID-19 policies forced them to end the protest in late March..

IMAGE BY DTM CCO WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

ism, capitalism: these issues are all our issues. I must fight these fights everyday because I am not free until, unless, we are all free. Moreover, I can use my privilege, whatever its forms, to raise the issues, to make the connections, all the time wherever I see them. And I must see them—because my sisters are suffering. The women of Shaheen Bagh street have been in the streets of Delhi since December fighting against the citizenship law that Prime Minister Modi has passed in India that questions the RIGHT of Muslims to be Indian citizens. These women are staging a peaceful occupation of the street to protest the law—in the face of extreme cold, in the face of police violence and death. Women at our border are fighting against the internment and caging of their children. Women all over the US are fighting for a living wage. Women are fighting for black lives. Women are fighting against religious oppression, against borders, against the exploitation of workers, against sexual harassment, and on and on. Women are fighting. They are fighting for me, for my freedom. Thus, these are all my issues as well. We are not free until all of us are free. International Women’s Day is a day to honor women around the world who have wandered out of their designated spaces, who have wandered into the streets, across borders, and into our classrooms and communities. We must remember that challenging boundaries, while it does not come easy, often comes at great cost, yet challenging boundaries is necessary to claim equity and inclusion. It is necessary to challenge boundaries with a full and loud voice, and with votes. For us all. It is incumbent on each one of us to be courageous, to be brave (and I mean Harriet Tubman brave) to create equality now, each and every day, everywhere, and especially right here where we live, work, and learn. For only when every woman is free, are we ALL free. Each for Equal.

Works Cited

Maloney, Barbara, Janet Theiss and Hyaeweol Choi. Gender in Modern East Asia: China, Korea, and Japan. Westview Press, 2016. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Haymarket Books, 2017.