Why Can’t Y’all Just Come Together
My husband and I were driving home from the airport and I could NOT get home fast enough. I had just come back from Iceland and I was LIT up.
We were talking about how inspired I was in Iceland, a country run by women, that is ranked the safest in the WORLD.
And, equally inspired by the protests happening worldwide… Students in France protesting teacher shortages. Spain is protesting rent hikes and a lack of affordable housing. Portugal is protesting rent hikes and low wages. Italy is protesting high cost of living, low wages, unsafe schools and hospitals, and on and on and on. In Greece, Belgium, Albania, Serbia, Germany, Britain, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Pakistan. People (mostly young people) in the streets everywhere, refusing to accept rising costs and lower standards of living.
And you know what? We need to follow suit. Women are more than half of this country and we are DONE. We MUST strike for equal pay, equal rights, and for control of our own bodies.
Scott then said something about how in Paris they’re starting to destroy pieces of history. And I said yes, I understand that, and it’s devastating. I also understand why people get to the point of destruction. Because here in America, we knit pink pussy hats and march politely and say good morning to the police, and what has it gotten us? If we are honest? Nothing. We have children getting shot at school. People can’t afford to live. Our healthcare is an expensive joke. We lost Roe. And we keep just asking nicely.
Then my husband, a good man, a man who loves me and votes with me, said this:
“Well, if y’all are more than half the population, why can’t y’all just come together? Y’all could have anything you want.”
I wanted to open the car door and roll him out onto the interstate.
Who do you think you’re talking to?
I said, with all of my perimenopausal fury. Who. Do. You. Think. You’re. Talking. To?
Because his question sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? It sounds like math. Women are the majority, majorities win, so if we haven’t won, it must be because we can’t get our act together. We’re too catty. Maybe we’re too emotional. Maybe we just don’t want it badly enough.
But, that question puts the whole thing back on us. It takes an oppressive system that has been built for thousands of years to keep women divided and it turns it into a personal failing. “Y’all just need to get it together, ladiesssss.”
It’s called Patriarchy. It’s called systemic oppression. It’s called internalized misogyny. And with all the love in the world, a white man has never had to live and understand any of it, because none of it was ever built to stop him.
And, ya know… My husband is one of the “good ones.” He shows up and supports me. He votes the way I vote. And he STILL asked the question. That’s the point. Even the best men we know are steeped in so much privilege that they genuinely cannot see the system we live inside.
Which is exactly WHY we cannot keep waiting on men, even good men, even good male politicians, to treat our rights as urgent. To them, “women’s issues” are something you get to after the economy.
Why we can’t “just” come together.
Simone de Beauvoir pointed this out more than seventy years ago. Every other group that has fought for its freedom could find one another and organize more easily. Workers had the factory floor. Neighborhoods had each other. Women were/are scattered into the houses of the men who held the power. We were tied to fathers and husbands by money, a roof over our heads and our children, more tightly than we were ever tied to each other.
Think about what this means. Every other movement could organize against “them.” Historically, we have had to organize against a system while sleeping next to it, raising its sons, and splitting a mortgage with it.
A woman who depends on a man’s paycheck has a very practical reason to keep the peace. Leaving costs money. Speaking up costs money. Striking costs money. So many women are one argument away from losing their health insurance, house, or custody.
And, there’s something about being put on a PEDESTAL. This one is sneaky. In 2003, Stanford psychologists John Jost and Aaron Kay ran a series of experiments and found that when women were exposed to the “nice” kind of sexism, the women are so nurturing, women are so wonderful kind, their support for the status quo went up. Flattery worked like handcuffs.
That’s why so many women defend the very system that limits them. They’ve been told their place is precious. Few want to fight to leave a pedestal even when it’s really a cage.
Gallup asked Americans whether they feel safe walking alone at night where they live. 84% of men said yes. Only 58% of women did. We are taught from girlhood to clutch our keys and to text our friends when we get home safe. A woman who has spent her whole life managing fear has learned that standing out is dangerous. Organizing means standing out.
And then there’s the church, the family, and the neighborhood. Millions of women are taught from the pulpit that submission is holy and that questioning their husbands is questioning God. Even women who don’t believe that know what it costs to admit that out loud. You can lose your church community, your mother’s approval, your seat at Thanksgiving. Human belonging is one of the most powerful forces on earth and Patriarchy has made sure that for a lot of women, belonging requires silence.
So no, it’s not that we can’t get our act together. It’s that the whole thing was designed so we wouldn’t.
White women have to hear this part.
Now I have to say something to the women who look like me.
When my husband asked why women can’t come together, part of the answer is everything I just laid out. The other part is us… White women.
In 2024, 92% of Black women voted for Kamala Harris. 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump. Women did come together. Black women came together in overwhelming numbers, the way they have election after election. The coalition broke along race and white women are the ones who keep walking away from it.
This isn’t new. In 1913, suffragists staged a huge parade in Washington the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. The organizers asked Black women to march at the back so they wouldn’t upset Southern white women. Ida B. Wells refused. She said, “Either I go with you or not at all,” and she marched with the Illinois delegation anyway. White women have been asking Black women to wait at the back of our movement for more than a hundred years.
It shows up in our paychecks too. When we talk about equal pay, we usually quote the gap between white women and white men. Black women make 65 cents for every dollar paid to white men. If we strike for equal pay and only mean our own gap, we’ve missed the damn point.
“Black women will save us” gets said every election, and Black women have been telling us for years how exhausting that is. They are not our rescue squad. The ask is for white women. Show up, follow their lead, and stop breaking ranks when it counts.
We already know how. Black women showed us in 1881.
If you want proof that women can come together, and win, under the worst conditions imaginable, I want you to meet the washerwomen of Atlanta.
In 1881, sixteen years after the end of slavery, in the Jim Crow South, almost every laundress in Atlanta was a Black woman. They earned somewhere around four to eight dollars a month and worked seven days a week. They made their own soap and starch and built washtubs out of old beer barrels. They hauled the water, picked up the dirty laundry, and delivered it back clean and pressed. One laundress, Sarah Hill, remembered, “I cooked and ironed at the same time.”
In July of 1881, twenty of those women formed The Washing Society. They went door to door, organized through Black churches, and held rallies and prayer meetings at night after working all day. Within about three weeks they had roughly 3,000 members, and a handful of white laundresses joined them too, which historians call an extraordinary act of solidarity across race in the South at that time. Some women walked off mid-job and left white families with wet, half-washed laundry.
Their demand was simple. One dollar for every dozen pounds of wash, a rate they set themselves.
The city of Atlanta came after them. The Atlanta Constitution called their prices “unreasonably high” and predicted they would fail. Wealthy residents talked about raising money for a steam laundry staffed by “Smart Yankee girls.” Police arrested strikers for “disorderly conduct and quarreling.” Matilda Crawford, Sallie Bell, Carrie Jones, Dora Jones, Orphelia Turner and Sarah A. Collier were tried and fined. Then the city council threatened every member with a $25 fee, which was months of wages.
And the washerwomen wrote to the Mayor. They said fine, we’ll pay your fee, as long as we get to control the washing in this city. They pointed out that the city already regulated their husbands’ work. They ended the letter with one of the greatest lines in American labor history:
“We mean business this week or no washing.”
The city backed down! The washerwomen won higher wages and more control over their own work, and right after them, cooks, maids, nurses and hotel workers in Atlanta started demanding better pay too. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture calls it the largest strike ever by Black Americans.
Formerly enslaved women with almost no money and every reason to be afraid came together and made the City of Atlanta concede.
Then, there’s Iceland…
I just got back from Iceland and it changed something in me.
On October 24, 1975, about 90% of the women in Iceland refused to work. They didn’t go to their jobs, and they didn’t do the unpaid work at home either. The whole country ground to a halt. Fathers had to bring their children to the office. Within a year, Iceland passed a law guaranteeing equal pay. Five years later, Icelanders elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, the first woman in the world to be democratically elected president.
And they didn’t stop. In 2023, Icelandic women walked out again, and the prime minister joined them.
Today Iceland is ranked the most peaceful country on earth, and one of the very best countries in the world to be a woman. I felt it in my body as I walked around at night without once checking over my shoulder. That is what organizing gets you.
American women already know how to do this, because Black women in the South did it with far less than we have.
What polite has gotten us
I loved the Women’s March. I loved being in a sea of women. And I have to ask what it got us. We knitted hats, made clever signs, marched peacefully, went home, and then lost Roe anyway. We keep asking politely for rights that should never have been up for a vote.
Here at home our children are being shot in their classrooms, women are being turned away from emergency rooms in the middle of a miscarriage, and we are still being told to keep our voices down.
I’m not asking anyone to set anything on fire. I’m asking us to stop being so damn polite about it. The washerwomen didn’t ask nicely. Icelandic women didn’t ask nicely. They withheld the work the whole system depends on and the system had to answer them.
That’s the power we keep forgetting we have. Everything runs on women’s work, paid and unpaid. When we stop, everything stops.
So, now what?
So here is my answer to my husband, and to every man who has ever asked some version of his question.
We can come together. We have, over and over, against odds you can’t imagine. What keeps breaking us apart was built on purpose, and it lives in our bank accounts, pulpits, dinner tables and our own heads.
Obviously, the first thing we do is vote, and vote early if you can. On Tuesday, November 3rd, every woman reading this needs to vote like her rights depend on it, because they do. White women, I’m talking to us most of all. This is our chance to stop being the reason the coalition breaks.
And then we organize. I came home from Iceland wanting to plan a strike and I meant it. Not a march where we ask nicely. A day when women in this country stop doing the paid and unpaid work everything depends on, so they can finally see what it’s worth. The washerwomen did it. Icelandic women did it twice. We can do it here.
I don’t have every detail yet. What I do know is that I’m done waiting for a man, even a good one, to understand why it matters.
We mean business this week. Or no washing.
P.S. Talking about it isn’t enough. It’s time to organize. Join me for the Strike Club Town Hall on Tuesday, November 10 at 6pm Central (7pm Eastern / 4pm Pacific). We’ll talk about what a US women’s strike could look like, why now, and what part you can play. It’s free and it’s on Zoom. The first rule of Strike Club is…. you tell everyone, so grab your seat and bring a friend.
Susan Hyatt
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