“Give Women Your Money”: Radical Feminism in an Age of Choice

Erica West Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 18, 2016

In mid 2015, Lauren Chief Elk and others started the hashtag #GiveYourMoneytoWomen, to address the emotional labor that women frequently, and oftentimes unknowingly, provide to men on a regular basis. The current state of feminism — a feminism that seems to center exclusively around empowerment, choice, success and equality — makes the emergence of Chief Elk’s movement all the more exciting.These days, mainstream feminism is embodied by Sheryl Sandberg’s concept of “Lean In” and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, where she and her supporters proudly tout that Clinton would become the first female President of the United States, supposing this achievement will translate into success for other women as well. For many women of color, immigrant women, and LGBT women, this strain of feminism feels frustratingly shallow.

Chief Elk defines emotional labor, in part, as “Acting as a therapist to men. Putting on a perky face for that. Having to be a yes person, always saying “Oh yes,” and “You’re so right,” and “So great.” Absorbing whatever kinds of outbursts they have — it’s mostly always anger — and having a happy face on and nodding.” Her movement recognizes emotional labor not as a choice, or an innate personality trait, but legitimate labor that is worthy of compensation. While #GiveYourMoneytoWomen is an ideological movement, it is also very literal — Chief Elk has a link to donate to her in her twitter bio. To twenty-somethings whose ideas of feminism are mostly Lena Dunham, Taylor Swift or, on a good day, a Kardashian or two, this movement feels completely out of left field, but it is nothing new. Chief Elk and her colleagues join a history of radical feminists whose examinations of women’s oppression include the unpaid labor we are expected to provide on a near daily basis.

In the late 1960s and 70s, as social movements of all kinds were picking up steam, their analysis often turned towards capitalism. Martin Luther King Jr famously began to critique capitalism and embrace socialism at the end of his life. The Black Panther Party was openly socialist, and understood the importance of fighting racism and capitalism simultaneously. The women’s liberation movement at this time was no different. Marxists argue that under capitalism, we are all exploited in that we are forced to sell our labor, while bosses, who own the means of production, profit off of that labor. Marxist feminists go one step further and analyze women’s unique relationship to capitalism as women. Specifically, they examine the myriad of ways women are expected to support men under capitalism.

In “Wages Against Housework,” Silvia Federici writes, “In the same way as god created Eve to give pleasure to Adam, so did capital create the housewife to service the male worker physically, emotionally and sexually — to raise his children, mend his socks, patch up his ego when it is crushed by the work and the social relations (which are relations of loneliness) that capital has reserved for him.” The boss is only able to work the worker as hard as he does because, traditionally, the worker will always have a wife to come home to who will provide the labor to get him ready for the next day. This doting and subservience is seen as innate in women, both due to ideology and the fact that the labor is unpaid. Exactly 40 years after Federici’s landmark piece, Jess Zimmerman writes in The Toast — “Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.” To ask for money for this labor is to push against the idea that food on the table at 6pm or a listening ear at all hours of the day are natural parts of being a woman. Federici and others did not see wages for housework as the end goal, but instead as a mechanism for legitimizing this labor and one step towards abolishing patriarchy and capitalism.

While most feminists at the time agreed on the oppressive nature of domestic work, some disagreed about the best strategy to combat it. Angela Davis and others proposed a socialization of housework, rather than wages for this labor. In “Women, Race and Class,” she imagines, “Teams of trained and well-paid workers, moving from dwelling to dwelling, engineering technologically advanced cleaning machinery, could swiftly and efficiently accomplish what the present-day housewife does so arduously and primitively.” Davis acknowledges that women of color, and Black women particularly, had been paid for their domestic labor for years, and they were no closer to liberation (this is still true, with immigrant women doing much of this labor now). These debates lasted well into the 1970s, but look very different than the debates feminists have today. It was not about whether or not women should breastfeed, or take their husband’s last name, or any individual choice — it was a strategic and theoretical debate about the best way to go about the full liberation of women. We can and should critique activists of the past, but the truth still remains that that kind of theoretical dialogue and collective thinking is nowhere to be seen today — which makes Chief Elk and her colleagues such a refreshing presence in the feminist scene today.

In addition to being a strategy to legitimize emotional labor, Chief Elk also positions #GiveYourMoneytoWomen as a strategy to abolish the prison industrial complex and provide an alternative form of justice to victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. This continues in the tradition of radical feminists, who push against a carceral feminism and instead imagine restorative forms of justice and the abolition of all prisons and jails. While it can be empowering and healing to put a perpetrator in jail, #GiveYourMoneytoWomen strives to move beyond a nebulous idea of empowerment and instead intends to change the material conditions for those who have experienced sexual assault or domestic violence. Regarding victims of domestic violence, Chief Elk explains, “Trying to get out of violent situations costs a lot of money: you need transportation, somewhere else to stay, you need to feed yourself, you need medical attention for the abuse you’ve accrued, for your children. You’ve gotta eat. You have to probably quit your job if it hasn’t already been sabotaged. This can accumulate to hundreds of thousands of dollars, very quickly.” This is true of victims of rape as well. They may need to change jobs to avoid a perpetrator, take time off of work to heal mentally or physically, or access professional mental health support. Sexual and interpersonal violence are all too often a stark reality for women, and any feminism that does not address these issues directly rings hollow for many women.

Feminists and prison abolitionists’ opposition to incarceration range from its ineffectiveness — less than 5% of rapists will ever see a day in jail — to its inherent racism, with jails and prisons disproportionately affecting Black, Latino, and poor people. Like Chief Elk, Federici acknowledges the potential for wages for housework as a form of alternative justice for victims of domestic violence — “The demand also had an important economic dimension in that we saw how many women were forced into dependence of men because of the unwaged nature of this work. Power relations were embedded in this work, because women for example could not leave an abusive relationship because of their dependent situation.” Angela Davis is a famous prison abolitionist, seamlessly tying together issues of racism, sexism and capitalism in her activism and in her writings. Poor women, women of color, immigrant women and other marginalized women know from their own lived experiences the havoc the prison industrial complex can inflict on families and communities. If we want a feminism for all women, we need a feminism that does not stay within mainstream confines, but instead is able to reimagine what justice can and should look like.

While subversive, we should acknowledge that #GiveYourMoneytoWomen has emerged in a very different time than the radical feminisms of the 1960s and 1970s. The level of social struggle during that time goes unparalleled. Additionally, Chief Elk’s movement leaves something to be desired — she never fleshes out her concepts farther than tweeting a link to donate her. Would wages be paid by the state, spouses, all men? We need to develop this concept beyond simply a hashtag, but in this current context, the small work Chief Elk and her colleagues are doing remains radical.

Giving your money to women may seem simplistic or unrelated to women’s oppression, but Chief Elk and feminists before her have theorized about the potential of money — for unpaid labor, as justice, and as liberation. #GiveYourMoneytoWomen pushes us to expand our feminism and not simply strive to be the first female in a certain position of power, but to theorize about our collective experiences as women, and our subsequent collective liberation. This movement proves that there is the potential for a feminism that is radical, restorative and transformative in this age of choice feminism.