International Women’s Day has never had the kind of robust presence in the United States it enjoys abroad. For years, while foreign leaders made speeches and citizens of other countries held rallies, the main signal to many in the US that 8 March was any different might have been that day’s Google Doodle.

Then Donald Trump was elected president.

Now, organizers aided by the people behind the 21 January Women’s March on Washington are calling for US women on 8 March to stage a general strike. Under the hashtag #DayWithoutAWoman, thousands have pledged to take part by missing work or refusing to spend their money.

The goal is to keep the momentum of the Women’s March building, the organizers have said. But it is also to spotlight the kinds of women who haven’t always been permitted to stand at the center of large feminist movements.

“8 March is about the women who have been left behind,” said Tithi Bhattacharya, an associate professor at Purdue University and one of the people who first called for the strike in a February op-ed for the Guardian. “The decline in real wages, the rise of mass incarceration, the violence against marginalized communities – those issues did not start with Trump, those are ongoing. Trump is their apotheosis.”

The strike is about more than Trump, said the organizers. It comes at the end of a brutal recession and recovery that did not touch all communities equally, and amid a long-term trend of increasing inequality and wage stagnation for those who already earned less. Marginalized groups of women, such as trans women, seem to be under a growing threat of violence. Feminism is having a mainstream moment, but it is, in the opinion of the organizers and many others, corporatized.

“Especially surrounding Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, there’s been this idea that feminism is somehow about women becoming powerful and successful CEOs,” she continued. “The goal of 8 March is to make feminism a threat to the system and to talk about the feminism about the 99% rather than the 1%.”

One of the best views of these trends is afforded by the gender wage gap, which is often described as if it were a single number: the difference between men’s wages and women’s. In fact, while the overall wage gap has narrowed over the past four decades, the disparity between white women’s wages and black women’s is one of the fastest-growing gaps in the economy. That gap has increased the most for college-educated black women who are just entering the market. Latina women are even further behind when their wages are compared alongside white workers’. For every dollar a white man is paid, white women are paid 81 cents, black women 65 cents, and Hispanic women 58 cents.

Tens of millions of women have neither the benefits nor the flexibility to take the day off in protest Maureen Shaw, writer

Women have made forward progress in gaining managerial roles – including those CEO positions Bhattacharya talks about – but those gains have almost all gone to white women. Meanwhile, the minimum wage workers who have seen their wages freeze are more likely to be women of color. Women are nearly two-thirds of the minimum wage workforce, and the majority of women earning minimum wage or less are women of color.

The strike, said Cinzia Arruzza, another organizer and an assistant professor of philosophy at the New School, is an opportunity to place a focus on those issues and on those who have experienced inequality at lopsided rates: people such as young women, Muslim women, working-class women, transgender women, and women of color.

But the composition of her list underlines one of the challenges facing the strike organizers, which is that the women whose causes they hope to spotlight are among the least able to sacrifice a work shift or take time away from childcare. “We strike for them,” the group’s website intones, several times, in an answer that has failed to satisfy many critics with anxiety over who will protest and be impacted.

“This feels very much like a protest of the privileged – and frankly, unrealistic,” wrote Maureen Shaw, a feminist writer, on Monday. “Tens of millions of women have neither the benefits nor the flexibility to take the day off in protest.”

The Women’s March on Washington. The challenge facing strike organizers is that they women they want to highlight are those most unable to protest. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

Still, Arruzza said some of the largest groups participating in the 8 March strike represent people and issues who are often shunted to the side. In Chicago, some of the largest local unions, such as the Illinois Teachers Union and SEIU, and social justice groups such as those connected to Black Lives Matter have organized a rally together. In DC, a group of restaurant workers are preparing to demonstrate on the Department of Labor’s front steps.

The organizers are expecting other, smaller demonstrations across the country, much like those seen on “A Day Without Immigrants”. On 16 February, individual immigrants in multiple cities gave up their work shifts or closed their businesses to protest Trump’s immigration executive order.



A Day Without a Woman calls for women to take the day off “from paid and unpaid labor”. For women who can’t strike – for instance, because their financial situation or labor laws won’t allow it – the organizers urge them to avoid shopping except at women or minority-owned businesses, or wear red, a color historically associated with the labor movement.

Men are asked by the organizers to “lean in” to household chores and the work of taking care of children or old or sick relatives, which disproportionately falls to women.

“We have the sense that people will spontaneously make a call for demonstrations in their town,” said Bhattacharya. “I think the most exciting thing about 8 March is the way it’s being interpreted in diverse ways by different groups.”

Talking at dinner last night about civic engagement and my 10 year old wrote this letter to her principal #DayWithoutAWoman pic.twitter.com/wgxiHD1eHH — Laura Moreschi (@LMoreschi) March 6, 2017

The organizers have been spreading their call through social media and with the help of those who organized the Women’s March. In some places, the impact of the planned strikes are already evident. Enough teachers in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro, North Carolina, and Alexandria, Virginia, school districts made plans to miss work – in Alexandria, 300 staff requested off – that the schools were ordered closed. Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s employees are 75% women.

A third professor just cancelled class on Wednesday. So far that's 3/4. #daywithoutawoman #adaywithoutawoman — I Am Rekia Boyd (@KayLamb510) March 6, 2017

New York City will play host to a noon gathering and a march beginning at the south-east corner of Central Park, just blocks from Trump Tower.

But Trump and his administration are not central to A Day Without a Woman, said the organizers. Although they expect he will fuel a surge in participation, the main goal of the strike, Bhattacharya said, is to protest decades of policies that have contributed to “soaring inequality”.

Trump and the actions of his administration have inspired unprecedented strikes and demonstrations in the six-and-a-half weeks since he was sworn in as president. Throngs of protesters flooded airport entryways after Trump announced a ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Yemeni bodega owners, including some with families detained at airports, staged a strike across New York City in protest of the travel ban and a large protest in downtown Brooklyn.

#daywithoutawoman @womensmarch alternative for women who can't not work: live-tweet tweet your work day #neededlady — Gina Gullo (@GulloGal) March 6, 2017

Presidents’ Day in many cities morphed into “Not My President’s Day”. Trump’s executive order taking aim at protections for transgender students was met with a spontaneous protest outside the White House gates. And the street outside Trump Tower in Midtown has periodically pulsed with similar demonstrations.

The largest of all of these, of course, took place when millions of women and men protested Trump’s inauguration around the country on 21 January.

8 March is being greeted by many as the follow-up to those rallies. But to the organizers of A Day Without a Woman, it is more important thatthe day has many follow-up acts.

“We want to ensure that 8 March is not a one-off day,” said Bhattacharya. “We all agree that this is going to be quite a long four years. 8 March should be just the beginning.”