Keep Marching

1

Waking Up

Driving to pick up my daughter from school, I started noticing bursts of colors in the yards as I passed. Light blue, lime green, hot pink, deep purple, sunny yellow, bright orange, sapphire blue. Yard signs adorned lawns even though the election season was over and done. I got curious. The print on the signs was too small to read as I zipped by, so I pulled my car over in front of one house to read the words:

In this book, that’s the belief, too. Now some people will say: “Hey, Kristin—This book is about women’s rights! Why such a broad spread of topics?” To this I say: As women, we’re all mosaics of many different experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds. As such, the top priorities of a modern women’s movement must reflect all that is our lives, our contributions, our needs, the barriers we face, and the paths we need to take to break those barriers down.

None of us are single-issue people.

Not all of us are ever going to agree on every issue, policy, action, or stand.

That’s okay.

What’s most important is to keep believing in and inspiring each other, knowing that together women can—and must—be a nation-changing force.

When each of us does better, we all do better. When the most discriminated-against women among us rise, we all rise. If one group of women is left behind, we all suffer. Our freedoms are intertwined.

And thus, our struggles are intertwined, too.

To win, the modern women’s movement must be intersectional. We must pay deep respect to everything that we each carry and bring as women into our worlds, both alone and shared. Many women have long known this. As the great feminist thinker Audre Lorde said many decades ago, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone.” We are stronger together.

We saw, felt, and heard how strong we are at the Women’s March when millions of women took to the streets in the largest march in American history. We also saw that we are a beautiful cacophony of backgrounds, making a strong mosaic of a powerful movement together, and that the strands of all of us woven together are an unbreakable force. The fight for women’s rights to succeed is a fight for our nation to succeed. All of us together will make America strong.

Full Disclosure

Each of us brings our individual world of experience, talents, hopes, dreams, and worries to this movement. Similarly, each of us also wears blinders to each other’s worlds. In order for the movement to be successful, we must admit that we all wear blinders, open ourselves up to learning, and be as transparent as possible in order to lift all women up and win the fight for equality, equity, and justice.

So: As we begin this book, here’s who I am (or at least partly). I am a white, blond, now upper-middle-class, cisgender, hetero married woman with two children and a dog. I live outside of Seattle. I play soccer. I am bad at tennis, can’t figure out accessories, and am sometimes painfully awkward at small talk. I’m an imperfect parent of two. I’m a Democrat married to a former Republican state senator. I often work in my jammies from home, guzzling lattes and blue Gatorade as I type. I’ll take whiskey over wine any day. I’ve worked as a house cleaner, waitress, freelance writer, political director, and now as an executive director and more. I sometimes do yoga when I’m stressed out. I also was born in Chicago and raised in Maryland. As a child, my cupboards weren’t always full, my family of origin was never “nuclear,” and the close people in my early life weren’t all heteronormative.

I’m flawed—far from perfect. I screw up regularly but persist just the same.

And each and every day I fight for a modern women’s movement that doesn’t center around women who look exactly like me, knowing that our fight and movement must be different than it has been in the past.

What Woke Me Up

To be completely honest, I assumed that most of the fights for women’s rights were over and that we had won, until I became a mom. I couldn’t have been more wrong. When my son was born in 1996, he was diagnosed with an immune deficiency disorder that made it impossible for him to be in childcare with other kids. A minor cold for other kids often meant a hospital trip and nerve-racking, wheezing weeks of illness. At the time, I didn’t have access to any paid family/medical leave, so I had to quit my job to care for my son. In the process, I lost not only my income but also my employer-provided health care coverage.

I never expected to be an unemployed mom. My mom, who was single for most of my childhood, always said to never, ever, ever, ever rely on a partner in order to have food on the table. But there I was, relying on a husband for food on the table, a roof over our heads, health care, and more. It was lucky there were resources to get my son and, later, my daughter the health care they needed when I couldn’t work. But an unplanned out-of-work situation like that could have been a flat-out disaster for my own mother or for more than three-quarters of moms who are breadwinners in our nation. Luck alone should never determine whether a woman, child, and family can thrive. Yet too often it does for too many. More than 80 percent of women have children in their lifetimes,¹ a quarter of families with young children in America are living in poverty,² and having a baby is now one of the leading causes of poverty. Being a mom is now a greater predictor of wage and hiring discrimination than being a woman, and the wages of moms of color take the biggest hits. These are all signals that the fight for intersectional women’s rights isn’t over.³

In truth I’ve had many wake-up calls (some at two a.m., eyes blinking in the darkness, baby crying) about how very much we need a new kind of women’s movement. This new movement needs to center the voices, the power, and the leadership of moms, of women of color, of women with disabilities, of LGBTQ+ women, of women of all ages and religions, of women of all income levels, and of women who are often denied chairs at the power tables. It was these many wake-up calls that led me to co-found MomsRising in 2006.

I now serve as executive director of that organization and work with a brilliant team of women across the nation, and none of us are exactly alike. I am led by and learn from the women at MomsRising. Our team is Black, Asian, Latina, white, queer, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and more. Together we’ve built an intersectional organization that works across multiple policy areas at the same time, within a core framework of justice for women, mothers, and families. We’ve pushed each other to grow our individual ideas about gender, racial, economic, LGBTQ+, and disability justice. Together we build campaigns that will make all women in America and families stronger. Together we rise.

How We Move Forward

To build a truly intersectional movement, we have to touch base with where we’ve been. Women of color have played major roles advancing the rights of women in our nation’s history, and women of color have often led the way. But much of that work has, historically, been ignored or erased. Gloria Steinem recently reiterated this during an interview with Chelsea Handler. “It’s condescending to say make the movement inclusive; women of color are the movement and have always been the movement.”⁴ Case in point, a 1972 national poll conducted by Ms. magazine—a magazine Steinem helped to launch—found that while over 60 percent of women of color supported feminism and women’s equality issues at the time, only around 30 percent of white women supported those same issues at that time.⁵ Women of color were leading the way in 1972 (before then, too) and still are today. In fact, the leadership of women of color has long propelled the entire women’s movement forward.

Make no mistake: Gender justice is economic justice is racial justice. One doesn’t happen without the others. It’s time for all of us to stand together with each other and for each other’s rights in a new kind of women’s movement. When we speak about women’s issues, we must speak to issues that impact every woman—not just the issues that impact able-bodied, middle-class, cis, and straight white women. We need to embrace that we don’t all have to define things in precisely the same way, see ourselves reflected in all of other people’s experiences, or be exactly the same in order to celebrate each other as we fight for the same outcome. And we must do this not just because this is the right thing to do, but also because we can’t win anyone’s freedom without fighting for everyone’s freedom.

“It’s the old thing of I’m not free until my sister is free,” said Sarah Sophie Flicker of the Women’s March. “Our role is to show up for each other and protect each other. We are kept separate to keep us all down. When we don’t show up for each other and don’t acknowledge each other, and when my privilege pushes down my sisters, we can’t win. We can’t win until we all show up for each other.”

Sarah’s right. Our goal is simple: We all win when we all win.

Anything that hurts one of us hurts all of us. In order to build a strong women’s movement, we have to have one another’s backs—especially when a discriminatory policy doesn’t impact every single one of us in our daily lives, but impacts so many of our sisters. An intersectional approach, like the one in this book, covers many policies that have often been left out of the mainstream women’s movement agenda in the past. For example, mass incarceration and the fair treatment of immigrant families are covered in chapters 12 and 10, respectively, right along with fair pay (chapter 11) and reproductive rights (chapter 7). The policy platform in this book isn’t centered on a single issue, and neither are any of us in real life.

All of the issues in this book deeply affect women across our nation—along with everyone else. And, speaking of everyone else, it’s high time people in power stop telling women that the issues that are destroying our lives and dreams aren’t priorities in our country. The truth is, when this many people are having the same struggles at the same time, that’s a national issue that we must solve together—not an epidemic of personal failings.

Mistakes Are Necessary

Building an intersectional movement requires being curious and compassionate about all the issues women face and how to break down those barriers. It requires us to imagine ourselves in one another’s worlds. And it requires us to consider not only the issues we’re dealing or have dealt with, but also those in the lives of people who have had very different experiences.

Building an intersectional movement also requires that we each make mistakes.

As a longtime organizer for women’s rights, I’ve made many mistakes and had many failures due to my blinders along the way. Too many to count, in fact. I’ve said the wrong thing; done the wrong thing; been embarrassed; second-, third-, and fourth-guessed myself. I’ve also been thankful to have my mistakes pointed out so that I can do better—and this has helped me to play a role in more wins than I ever expected.

For instance, in 2009 I was onstage at George Washington University for the Feminism 2.0 Conference. During my talk I addressed the average wage gap for women overall and mentioned that moms experienced even more discrimination when it comes to pay. After I was done, Shireen Mitchell, founder of Digital Sisters/Sistas Inc. and Stop Online Violence Against Women, raised her hand and asked: “What about women of color? The numbers you shared don’t reflect women of color. You left us out.”

My stomach dropped. I was mortified. I’d hit one of my own blind spots. My own implicit, unconscious bias was center stage. I should have known better. I had inadvertently repeated history. My mortification in that moment was nothing compared to decades of women of color being forgotten or erased. (Historically, white feminists have often failed to incorporate how structural racism permeates everything that has to do with sexism as does classism, homophobia, and other isms, too, for that matter.)

This may seem like not a big deal: I left women of color out of my presentation. So what? But it was a big deal. Shireen Mitchell was rightly pointing out that women of color had even further to climb to achieve parity in pay with white men than white women did. Which means that I left an entire group of women out of my data, out of my presentation, and out of sight.

It wasn’t Shireen’s job to call me out that day in 2009, and while it was a moment of public failure, I’m forever grateful to her for it. The reason I share this story is because sometimes people tell me they’re afraid to get involved because they may accidentally do or say something wrong. But it’s important not to let fear stop us from joining in. Nobody is perfect in anything we do. It’s time to give each other grace, lift one another up, and accept that if we’re truly building the best kind of movement for our nation, then we’ll be uncomfortable and make mistakes at least some of the time, and that if we listen, learn, and work together, we will rise together.

The Internal Fight against Discrimination