From West Virginia to Kentucky to Arizona, women have worked very consciously - to involve church groups, to serve hot meals during the strikes, to involve parent groups to help with the picket lines, in West Virginia, strikers carried food to the houses of the students. This was an amazing consciousness of women who were leading the strike - not just in a workplace kind of way, but in a deeply social way. They were thinking about society in totality, not just in the workplace.

Historian Tithi Bhattacharya explains why women are leading teacher strikes and building a new labor movement across America - by challenging both neoliberal attacks on workers and their own union leadership's myopic agenda, and building lasting connections of care and solidarity across communities.

Tithi wrote the Guardian op-ed Women are leading the wave of strikes in America. Here's why.