Tomorrow is the Women’s Strike, the fourth of ten actions that have been called for by the organizers of the Women’s March on Washington. The strike was planned to coincide with International Women’s Day, and the march organizers, in tandem with a team organizing protests in forty countries around the world, have asked women to take whatever form of action their lives allow for. Take the day off from “paid and unpaid labor,” including housework and child care, if you can, or avoid shopping at corporate or male-owned businesses, or simply wear red in solidarity. There will be rallies in at least fifty cities around the United States.

Comparisons between the strike and the post-Inauguration march—now estimated to be the largest political demonstration in U.S. history—are inevitable, and likely to be unfavorable to the strikers. The decline in unionization has insured that most American workers are unfamiliar with striking and what it entails. And it is, of course, much harder to strike on a weekday than to protest on a Saturday. It is also more difficult to facilitate, measure, and publicize absence than it is to celebrate presence, the way one does at a march. When tens of thousands of immigrants went on strike on February 16th, they did attract some favorable public attention—as well as employer retribution—but a general strike the next day, and a tech-industry strike one week later, escaped public notice almost completely.

What’s more, among some liberal-leaning women writers, one finds an oddly defeatist assumption that a strike can only perpetuate the conditions that it explicitly seeks to draw attention to and combat. Meghan Daum, for instance, in the Los Angeles Times, has predicted that the strike will “mostly be a day without women who can afford to skip work” and “shuffle childcare and household duties to someone else.” (She adds that women are “too essential to play hooky,” which is, of course, the animating basis for strikes in general.) At Quartz, Maureen Shaw noted that “in practice, most American women cannot afford to opt out of either paid or unpaid labor,” and so “tens of millions of people have neither the benefits nor the flexibility to take the day off in protest.” Sady Doyle, at Elle, argued that women’s work is missing a common definition and project, and that “without a specific, labor-related point, after all, a ‘strike’ is just a particularly righteous personal day.” The piece was headlined “Go Ahead and Strike, but Know That Many of Your Sisters Can’t.”

There’s an underlying note of guilt and aversion in these arguments—a sense that privilege renders a person politically ineffective. In reality, though, as the Women’s March demonstrated, privileged women are uniquely positioned to use their surfeit of cultural leverage to clear space for the causes of everyone else. And that seems to be the fundamental idea of the Women’s Strike: that it could help to forge solidarity between women with favorable working conditions and women who have no such thing.

In response to Doyle’s piece, Magally A. Miranda Alcazar and Kate D. Griffiths pointed out, in T__he Nation, that, in recent years, female workers who enjoy far less of a safety net have been forming diverse coalitions and engaging in smaller, significantly riskier strikes. Last year, there was a wave of prison strikes, which were supported by Black Lives Matter organizers, who also supported the action at Standing Rock. The last big strike in the U.S. was the immigrant strike in 2006, in which more than a million people boycotted economic activity and took to the streets. The Women’s Strike has been endorsed by immigrant groups; by the bodega owners who recently went on strike in New York City; by associations of migrant workers, domestic workers, and restaurant workers. It feels strange to watch women with privilege recuse each other from participation on behalf of less-privileged women whose actual, vocal positions they do not appear to have taken into account.

This isn’t to say that inequality between women doesn’t seriously complicate the idea of a unified strike. The public-school systems in Alexandria, Virginia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, will both close down tomorrow, after a critical mass of employees requested a single day’s leave. The chain of women’s labor—teachers, day-care providers, mothers who work in or out of the home—has been strained considerably; without the notoriously unreliable aid of men, there is simply no way for all those women to strike at once. And the financial burden of a strike falls hardest on the people with the fewest resources—the Washington Post_ _quoted a day-care provider who said, with good reason, that she could better support the movement by going to work. And yet, something worthwhile has already been registered: the indispensability of these school districts’ female employees, the inextricability of their work from the community’s functioning, and the seriousness and commonality of women workers’ concerns.

A strike illuminates the system in which it takes place, and the messy space between perfection and failure within which change tends to happen. It pushes people to think about the entities that pay them, the people whom they rely on, and also the people who rely on them. At n+1, Dayna Tortorici made the case recently that the Women’s Strike helps to highlight the interrelatedness of labor conditions across all demographic lines. “The effort to break unions and make labor more ‘flexible’ has forced an unprecedented number of us into labor conditions that were once, as Maria Mies has written, ‘typical for women only,’ ” Tortorici argues, noting the precedents set, in centuries prior, by female mill workers, textile workers, and washerwomen. “This includes work not covered by trade unions, work without a proper contract or means of collective bargaining, work that falls outside the protections of labor laws . . . . The more people find themselves indirectly employed, for instance by tech companies and temp agencies, the more they learn from women’s labor movements of the past.”

Reflecting on the Women’s Strike made me feel embarrassed about the ease of my own working conditions: I work from home, on a flexible schedule, with no children or dependents, and if I were to go on strike for a day, the only person likely to notice is my editor, whose day might even improve as a result. (On Monday, Condé Nast employees received an e-mail from human resources sanctioning the use of a personal day or a volunteer day for A Day Without a Woman.) But I can’t see much use in becoming emotionally or ethically paralyzed by the difference between my situation and that of, say, an undocumented housekeeper and mother of two. I’d rather strike, and look for structures that can fill the gap between us. Her concerns, regardless, are my concerns, too.