International Women's Strike Day

I went to see Roxane Gay's lecture last night (yay Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures!). If you don't know her, go read Bad Feminist now. I purchased a copy of Difficult Women but haven't read it yet, so I can't recommend it. One of the audience questions was whether not she agreed with the Strike day. She had a good answer. She said that it's yes and no - there are so many women who can't afford to strike, and they are probably the ones who need this most. Her other point was that she would never want to WORD CHOICE the efforts.

What's a funemployed unchaperoned white girl to do on a strike day? It's not like I was going to take a day off work or something! Then I realized I was definitely thinking about it wrong. I'm currently not doing paid work, but I am doing a lot around the condo (my choice)! I'm doing laundry and dishes and cleaning in general.

This is definitely the mindset people get into about stay at home mothers and housewives (ugh...can there be a better word for that? I don't like homemaker either). Some people think that if you are not working outside the home that you are not working. And I was thinking that about myself! Things being done around the home are work. I'm not going to get on a high horse and bust out one of those memes where I pretend to calculate the different jobs I do and how much it would be paid, but these are necessary things in your adult life that you can pay someone to do. Not having children makes people think of it differently as well. To some people, I'm probably just sitting around, doing nothing, spending my husband's money.

So tomorrow, for International Women's Strike Day, I will participate. It's about not doing paid or unpaid work. Mine probably isn't quite as effective as it could be since my husband isn't back from his work trip yet. So I won't be washing my own dishes or doing my own laundry. But it's the solidarity that counts.

I hope that with all the marches and protests as sit-ins that we finally get together as a group. Women working together. Although we are comprised of a lot of different groups, we all need to work together to make this world a better place for us and those who come after us.

So, as the great musical Newsies taught us (if you haven't seen this, please go watch it now): And the world will know we been keepin' score. Either they gives us our rights or we gives them a war. We've been down too long, and we paid our dues. And the things we do today will be tomorrow's news.