Feminism is the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes. Intersectionality is a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. Intersectional feminism centers the voices of those experiencing overlapping, concurrent forms of oppression in order to understand the depths of the inequalities and the relationships among them in any given context. All inequality is not created equal. An intersectional approach shows the way that people’s social identities can overlap, creating compounding experiences of discrimination. It's impossible to move forward with any kind of activism without understanding the role intersectionality plays in both its strategy and outcome. For example, while we do still live in a world where women are not completely equal to men, women of color are often disproportionately disadvantaged (i.e. earning less for the same job), compared to their white counterparts. Without acknowledging the systemic racism that underpins these issues, it's not possible to work towards a multi-pronged solution that will tackle them from the ground up and create a more equitable world.
“We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.” - Kimberle Crenshaw
“Those who are most impacted by gender-based violence, and by gender inequalities, are also the most impoverished and marginalized—black and brown women, indigenous women, women in rural areas, young girls, girls living with disabilities, trans youth and gender non-conforming youth.” - Majandra Rodriguez Acha
To become a better feminist:
Start by recognising your privilege
Listen to those from other oppressed groups without getting defensive
Take responsibility for your own education
Support works created by people of colour
Use your voice and your privilege to speak up
The first attempt to organize a national movement for women’s rights occurred in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a young mother from upstate New York, and the Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott, about 300 people—most of whom were women—attended the Seneca Falls Convention to outline a direction for the women’s rights movement. Stanton’s call to arms, her “Declaration of Sentiments,” echoed the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” In a list of resolutions, Stanton cataloged economic and educational inequities, restrictive laws on marriage and property rights, and social and cultural norms that prevented women from enjoying “all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.” Stanton also demanded for women the “sacred right to the elective franchise”—despite objections from Mott and others who considered this provision too radical. The convention eventually approved the voting rights resolution after abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke in support of it.
After the emancipation of four million enslaved African Americans, Radical Republicans in Congress proposed a constitutional amendment extending citizenship rights and equal protection under the law to all “persons born or naturalized in the United States.” Whether those rights would include women was unclear, and debates in both houses of Congress focused on defining citizenship. Many Members praised the virtues of “manhood suffrage” and expressed concern about the inclusive language in early drafts of the proposed amendment. Ultimately, the Fourteenth Amendment went as far as to define voting rights as the exclusive privilege of “male citizens”—explicitly adding gender to the Constitution for the first time. During the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment, Stanton objected to the use of “that word, ‘male,’” and sent to Congress the first of many petitions supporting women’s suffrage. On January 23, 1866, Representative James Brooks of New York read into the official record Stanton’s petition along with an accompanying letter by Anthony. Some Members, including George Washington Julian of Indiana, welcomed the opportunity to enfranchise women. In December 1868, he proposed a constitutional amendment to guarantee citizens the right to vote “without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on race, color, or sex.” Julian’s resolution never came to a vote, and even Congressmen who favored expanding the electorate were not willing to support women’s suffrage.
During the congressional battle over the Fifteenth Amendment, Stanton and Anthony had led a lobbying effort to ensure that voting rights for women were included in the legislation. With increasing frequency, Stanton denounced the extension of voting rights to African-American men while restrictions on women remained. She praised the virtues of “educated white women,” and warned that new immigrants and African Americans were not prepared to exercise the rights of citizens. Stanton’s rhetoric alienated African-American women involved in the fight for women’s rights, and similar ideas about race and gender persisted in the women’s suffrage movement well into the twentieth century.
Led initially by Stanton and then by Anthony, the NAWSA, or National American Woman Suffrage Association, drew upon the support of women activists in organizations such as the Women’s Trade Union League, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the National Consumers League. For the next 20 years, the NAWSA worked as a nonpartisan organization focused on gaining the vote in the states as a precursor to a federal suffrage amendment.But the suffrage movement was only so welcoming. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, civil rights and voting rights came under constant attack in large sections of the country as state policies and court decisions effectively nullified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. As the system of segregation known as Jim Crow crystallized in the South, African Americans saw protections for their civil and political rights disappear, and few Members of Congress or suffrage advocates were willing to fight for any additional federal safeguards. In an 1898 address to the NAWSA, African-American activist Mary Church Terrell decried these injustices, while remaining hopeful “not only in the prospective enfranchisement of my sex but in the emancipation of my race.” African-American suffragists like Terrell continued to struggle to expand access to the ballot. Their voices, however, could only be heard outside of Congress. In the House and Senate, those voices had fallen silent: from 1901 to 1929 no African-American legislator served in Congress. The promise of the Reconstruction Era—that American democracy could be more just and more representative—was undermined by an organized political movement working to restrict voting rights and exclude millions of Americans from the political process.
Between 1910 and 1914, the NAWSA’s intensified advocacy lead to successes at the state level in Washington, California, Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon. In Illinois, future Congresswoman Ruth Hanna McCormick assisted as a lobbyist in Springfield where the state legislature adopted women’s suffrage in 1913, the first such victory in a state east of the Mississippi. Women won the right to vote the next year in Montana, thanks in part to the efforts of another future Congresswoman, Jeannette Rankin.
In 1915 Carrie Chapman Catt, the veteran suffragist and former NAWSA president, returned to lead the organization. An adept administrator and organizer, Catt authored the “Winning Plan” that called for disciplined and relentless efforts to achieve state referenda on women’s suffrage, especially in nonwestern states.17 Key victories followed in 1917 in Arkansas and New York—the first in the South and East. The 1916 election of Jeannette Rankin of Montana to serve in the 65th Congress (1917–1919) crowned the “Winning Plan” campaign. Catt’s “Winning Plan” and Paul’s protest campaign coincided with the United States’ entry into World War I.18 Catt and the NAWSA eagerly embraced the war, believing that women would quickly prove themselves in their support for the cause overseas and that extending the franchise at home would be an important step for national readiness and morale. Moreover, leading suffrage advocates insisted the failure to extend the vote to women might impede their participation in the war effort just when they were most needed as workers and volunteers outside the home.
Suffrage activists pioneered many innovative political tactics still used today. These include lobbying elected officials—as they did in statewide and national suffrage campaigns; going door-to-door to convince male voters in New York State to vote yes on the statewide suffrage ballot initiative; and picketing the White House. Suffragists also leveraged the burgeoning consumer culture by creating political ephemera—such as fliers, badges, and cartoons—and infused their public protests with symbolism and visual impact by proudly wearing white, at a time when it was unusual for women to even gather in public.
The suffrage movement and the 19th amendment discriminated against many women of color. In New York, the suffrage movement attracted a diverse range of women, including Sarah J.S. Garnet, who founded the Equal Suffrage League in Kings County in the late 1880s and organized for the vote through the National Association of Colored Women, and Mabel Lee, who led a contingent of Chinese and Chinese-American women in a suffrage parade down Fifth Avenue in 1917. Yet white-led suffrage organizations in New York and elsewhere usually excluded Black women and sometimes told them to march at the back of parades. After the 19th amendment passed, Black women did vote and run for office in New York, as opposed to many states that passed state and local laws disenfranchising them. But Native American women and Asian American women were barred from voting due to other federal citizenship laws: Native women until 1924 and some Asian women until the 1950s.
Voting is one among many crucial tools in the activist toolbox. Women have often sought change through voting or running for office, but they have also worked behind the scenes in government and pushed for change through grassroots activism. This was the case in 1920, fifty years later amidst the demands of the women’s liberation movement, and in 2020, with our upcoming election today.
A sweatshop is a workplace where workers are subject to:
extreme exploitation, including the absence of a living wage or benefits,
poor working conditions, such as health and safety hazards, and
arbitrary discipline.
The U.S. General Accounting Office has developed a working definition of a sweatshop as “an employer that violates more than one federal or state labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers’ compensation, or industry registration law.”
Today, the overwhelming majority of garment workers in the U.S. are immigrant women. They typically toil 60 – 80 hours a week in front of their machines, often without minimum wage or overtime pay. In fact, the Department of Labor estimates that more than half of the country’s 22,000 sewing shops violate minimum wage and overtime laws. Many of these workers labor in dangerous conditions including blocked fire exits, unsanitary bathrooms, and poor ventilation. Government surveys reveal that 75% of U.S. garment shops violate safety and health laws. In addition, workers commonly face verbal and physical abuse and are intimidated from speaking out, fearing job loss or deportation.
Overseas, garment workers routinely make less than a living wage, working under extremely oppressive conditions. Fierce competition for cheaper labor costs — as well as the liberalization of trade barriers — has brought apparel production to countries where workers have little bargaining power and where authoritarian governments squash worker organizing. U.S. retailers and manufacturers are reaping enormous profit in the garment industry, setting wages with little relation to productivity. “In Mexico, for example, apparel worker are 70% as productive as their U.S. counterparts, yet they earn just 10% as much per hour,” according to surveys by Kurt Salmon Associates Inc. (see chart below).
Sweatshops can be viewed as a product of the global economy.Fueled by an abundant supply of labor in the global market, capital mobility, and free trade, garment industry giants move from country to country seeking the lowest labor costs and the highest profit, exploiting workers the world over.
The examples below illustrate the wide gap between what garment workers bring home and what their families need to live dignified lives. Workers should be earning a living wage that allows their families to meet their basic needs.
Fundacion Nacional para el Desarrollo, an NGO research organization in El Salvador, establishes the basic basket of necessities for the average sized Salvadoran family (4.3 people) to survive in “relative poverty” as $287.21 per month. In El Salvador, workers at Doall Enterprises make $0.60/hour. This meets only 51% of a basic basket of goods necessary to survive in relative poverty.
According to a U.S. Commerce Department report (February 17, 1998), “The minimum wage [in Honduras] is considered insufficient to provide for a decent standard of living for a worker and family.” $0.43 per hour, or $3.47 per day, is the base wage for garment workers in the Evergreen factory in Honduras, meeting only 54% of the cost of survival, meanwhile inflation is expected to reach 13.7% next year, eating away the purchasing power of workers’ wages. When transportation to and from work, breakfast and lunch costs $2.59, that leaves only $0.80 a day for families’ other basic needs.
Garment workers in Los Angeles, California who are mostly paid a piece-rate average $7,200 a year, less than 3/4 of the poverty level income for a three-person family.
The very structure of the garment industry encourages the creation of sweatshops. Retailers sit at the top of the apparel pyramid, placing orders with brand-name manufacturers, who in turn use sewing contractors to assemble the garments. Contractors recruit, hire and pay the workers, who occupy the bottom level of the pyramid. In many countries, competitive bidding by these contractors for work drives contract prices down so low that they cannot pay minimum wages or overtime to their workers. In fact, in today’s garment industry, very little competitive bidding takes place. Most contractors are put in a “take it or leave it” position and must accept whatever low price is given to them or see the work placed elsewhere. The contractors must “sweat” profits out of their workers, cut corners, and operate unsafe workplaces.
Retailers have acquired enormous power to determine the price of clothing. During the past decade retailing has experienced a series of major mergers, which has led to a considerable consolidation of their buying power, especially among discounters. Today, for example, Wal-Mart’s annual sales are nearly $118 billion, and Kmart’s are $32 billion. These two retail giants alone outsell all department stores combined; their purchasing decisions shape much of the apparel industry. The ten largest retailers account for nearly two-thirds of all apparel sales in the U.S. This consolidated buying power vastly increases retailers’ ability to put more pressure on the manufacturers in terms of price and speed. Some retailers, such as May Department Stores, insist that manufacturers making their private labels guarantee a profit margin, sometimes as high as 48%. This impossible goal forces down wholesale prices, and it is ultimately the worker at the sewing machine that feels the pinch. The $100 sale price of a garment is typically divided up as follows: $50 to the retailer, $35 to the manufacturer, $10 to the contractor, and $5 to the garment worker.
Retailers also control the apparel industry by producing their own private labels instead of buying from brand-name manufacturers. Retailers contract for the production of, oversee, and price garments created exclusively for their stores. Approximately 32% of women’s apparel sold in the U.S. is manufactured under private labels. While retailers typically keep 50% of the price of brand-name goods, they are able to keep 80% of the price of their own private label products.
https://incite-national.org/sweatshops-women-of-color/
The vast majority of garment workers – approximately 80% – are women. This is not by chance, but the result of discriminatory practices from start to finish. Women are desirable in the garment industry because employers take advantage of cultural stereotypes – to which women are often obliged to adhere – that portrays women as passive and flexible. Productive, reproductive and domestic responsibilities such as cleaning, cooking and childcare constrain women’s ability to seek other types of employments. they just do not have the time or opportunity to improve their working conditions, or even speak out about the abuses they face on a daily basis, making them the ideal employees in management’s eyes.
Gender discrimination runs deep throughout all of the countries in which garments are currently produced. Women are frequently subjected to verbal and physical abuse and sexual harassment. They also work under the fear of perhaps being assaulted or raped on their way home from work late at night.
Indonesian women employees report that “girls in the factory are harassed by male managers. They come on to the girls, call them into their offices, whisper into their ears, touch them, bribe them with money and threaten them with firing if they don’t have sex with them.”
Women are also discriminated against once they decide to start, or already have, families. In some garment factories, women applicants are asked if they are married or are planning to have children. Some employers will only hire unmarried women with no children and some make each woman sign a document that they agree not to have children during their term of employment. Compulsory testing during the recruitment phase are all too common. Pregnant women or those who refuse to be tested are simply not hired. Women who become pregnant during their employment may try to hide it, often resulting in birth defects and other childcare issues. The harassment that pregnant workers encounter includes verbal abuse, higher production quotas, longer work hours and more difficult tasks, such as shifts requiring standing instead of sitting.
Female Genital Mutilation comprises all procedures involving the removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons. On average girls are subjected to FGM between birth and age 15. FGM is not prescribed by any religion and has no health benefits. On the contrary the practice can cause life-lasting physical and psychological trauma.
200 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM. At current rates, an additional estimated 68 million girls face being cut by 2030.
Female genital mutilation is classified into four types:
Type 1: Also known as clitoridectomy, this type consists of partial or total removal of the external part of the clitoris and/or its prepuce (clitoral hood).
Type 2: Also known as excision, the external part of clitoris and labia minora are partially or totally removed, with or without excision of the labia majora.
Type 3: It is also known as infibulation or pharaonic type. The procedure consists of narrowing the vaginal orifice with creation of a covering seal by cutting and appositioning the labia minora and/or labia majora, with or without removal of the external part of clitoris. The appositioning of the wound edges consists of stitching or holding the cut areas together for a certain period of time (for example, girls’ legs are bound together), to create the covering seal. A small opening is left for urine and menstrual blood to escape.
Type 4: This type consists of all other procedures to the genitalia of women for non-medical purposes, such as pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterization.
The type of mutilation practiced, the age at which it is carried out and the way in which it is done, vary according to a variety of factors. These include:
The women or girls' ethnic group;
What country they are living in (whether in a rural or urban area);
Their socio-economic background.
The procedure is carried out at a variety of ages, ranging from shortly after birth to sometime during the first pregnancy. It most commonly occurs between the ages of 0 to 15 years and the age is decreasing in some countries. The practice has been linked in some countries with rites of passage for women.
FGM is usually performed by traditional practitioners using a sharp object such as a knife, a razor blade or broken glass. There is also evidence of an increase in the performance of FGM by medical personnel. However, medicalisation of FGM is denounced by the World Health Organisation.
Immediate consequences of FGM include severe pain and bleeding, shock, difficulty in passing urine, infections, injury to nearby genital tissue and sometimes death. The procedure can result in death through severe bleeding leading to haemorrhagic shock, neurogenic shock as a result of pain and trauma, and overwhelming infection and septicaemia, according to Manfred Nowak, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Almost all women who have undergone FGM experience pain and bleeding as a consequence of the procedure. The event itself is traumatic as girls are held down during the procedure. Risk and complications increase with the type of FGM and are more severe and prevalent with infibulations.
“The pain inflicted by FGM does not stop with the initial procedure, but often continues as ongoing torture throughout a woman’s life”, says Manfred Nowak, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
In addition to the severe pain during and in the weeks following the cutting, women who have undergone FGM experience various long-term effects - physical, sexual and psychological.
Women may experience chronic pain, chronic pelvic infections, development of cysts, abscesses and genital ulcers, excessive scar tissue formation, infection of the reproductive system, decreased sexual enjoyment and psychological consequences, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Additional risks for complications from infibulations include urinary and menstrual problems, infertility, later surgery (defibulation and reinfibulation) and painful sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse can only take place after opening the infibulation, through surgery or penetrative sexual intercourse. Consequently, sexual intercourse is frequently painful during the first weeks after sexual initiation and the male partner can also experience pain and complications.
When giving birth, the scar tissue might tear, or the opening needs to be cut to allow the baby to come out. After childbirth, women from some ethnic communities are often sown up again to make them “tight” for their husband (reinfibulation). Such cutting and restitching of a woman’s genitalia results in painful scar tissue.
A multi-country study by WHO in six African countries, showed that women who had undergone FGM, had significantly increased risks for adverse events during childbirth, and that genital mutilation in mothers has negative effects on their newborn babies. According to the study, an additional one to two babies per 100 deliveries die as a result of FGM.
FGM is practiced on girls usually in the range of 0-15 years. Hence, the practice of FGM violates children’s rights as defined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC):
The right to be free from discrimination (Article 2);
The right to be protected from all forms of mental and physical violence and maltreatment (Article 19(1));
The right to highest attainable standard of health (Article 24);
The right of freedom from torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Article 37).
According to the UN Committee on CRC, “discrimination against girl children is a serious violation of rights, affecting their survival and all areas of their young lives as well as restricting their capacity to contribute positively to society” (2005). Moreover, the negative effects of FGM on children’s development contravene the best interest of the child - a central notion to the Convention (Article 3).
Because it is performed without the consent of the girls, it also breaches the right to express freely one’s view (Article 12). Even if the girl child is aware of the practice, the issue of consent remains, as girls are usually too young to be consulted and have no voice in the decision made on their behalf by members of their family. On the other hand, adolescent girls and women very often agree to undergo FGM because they fear the non-acceptance of their communities, families and peers, according to 2008 Report of the Special Rapporteur on Torture. FGM also impacts on the right to dignity and directly conflicts with the right to physical integrity, as it involves the mutilation of healthy body parts.
The Committee on the Convention on the Rights of the Child has said that States party to the Convention have an obligation “to protect adolescents from all harmful traditional practices, such as early marriages, honour killings and female genital mutilation” (2003).