Women’s Equality Day
Written by Morayo Omogbenigun, Research Assistant for RACE and BSWN placement student.
Women’s Equality Day is an American holiday on the 26th of August celebrating the 19th Amendment, which gave women in the USA voting rights in 1920. While this was seen as a hallmark achievement in first wave feminism, women of colour have historically been left out of mainstream feminism. At the time, African American women wanted the vote in order to empower their communities by voting people of colour into office while white women sought out the vote in order to be on par with their husbands.
This distinction has been present throughout the history of feminism, where women of colour have been excluded. In Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanna Scafe’s book The Heart of Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (1985), they write that while Black women were campaigning for women’s reproductive rights due to mass sterilisation through forced birth control, the mainstream pro-choice movement led by white feminists failed to take this into consideration. Moving to the present day, many women of colour still feel at odds with the ‘mainstream’ feminist movement, which lacks the ability to criticise institutional issues such as racism, ableism and Islamophobia, and how this applies to women around the world.
With the Taliban gaining control of large parts of Afghanistan following the withdrawal of US and UK forces, there has been concern about what this means for women. Many are using the lack of women’s rights under the Taliban in Afghanistan to justify the involvement of Western powers. Indeed, the concern about women’s rights is genuine, but Western imperialism and White Saviorism is not the answer to women’s rights. In the Western lens, Afghan women have been depersonalised and portrayed as helpless, mainly by white women, which in itself is a form of racism and Islamophobia within the mainstream feminist movement.
In order for women’s rights to be truly achieved, feminism has to be for everyone. A key lesson the Black Lives Matter movement and intersectionality has taught us, is that all struggles of marginalised communities are interlinked. Feminism is about looking at all the structures (the carceral state, racism, Islamophobia, ableism, transphobia, homophobia for example) which work together to subjugate women. Without feminism being intersectional, it cannot be truly liberatory.