KYT

There are many reasons. The first and perhaps most important reason is that the election of Donald Trump as president has unearthed a tremendous outpouring among women in opposition to his regime and agenda.

This was most palpably demonstrated on January 21, when an unprecedented outpouring of protest overwhelmed cities across the country. Where thousands were expected to demonstrate, millions of men and women clogged the streets around the country to show the deep revulsion and opposition to Trump.

The outpouring was surprising, but the sentiment of opposition and resistance was not.

Trump has breathed new life into the old insult of “sexist pig.” He has been accused of sexual assault by many women; he has bragged about sexually assaulting women; he has made violent and abusive comments about women’s appearance, intelligence and more. More importantly, he is pursuing a political agenda that will make ordinary women’s lives harder.

January 21 showed the potential for the re-emergence of a feminist movement, but March 8 is a call for a particular kind of feminist movement. If there is a critique of the J21 action, it is about the reluctance of its organizers to embrace politics, opposition, and militancy. Instead, they did not want to pose the march as being against Trump and seemed to downplay politics.

So we see March 8 as not just a call to protest the Neanderthal in the White House, but to put radical politics at the center of the resistance.

For the last several years, “lean-in feminism” — which was kind of embodied in Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president — has been elevated as a goal for all women. Those who espouse its politics have made shattering glass ceilings that impede their ascent into corporate boardrooms, electoral politics, and other destinations in white and wealthy America as the real objective of feminism.

We see March 8 as a reclamation project in that sense — as an effort to reconnect with the militant and radical politics of socialist feminism and Black feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, which located the oppression of women in capitalism and the free market.

For years, International Women’s Day has gone unnoticed or was depoliticized. Most people no longer even know that its roots lie in the struggle of women textile workers in the United States — or that a mobilization of women in Russia to oppose World War I in 1917 was the spark for an uprising that led to the overthrow of Tsar and set off the Russian Revolution.

This March 8, we are hoping that women and those who support them will join together in political actions across this country to draw attention to the conditions of working-class women’s lives and the struggle needed to transform those conditions.