Feminism should be for everyone. Everyone.

You go, girl!

Nowadays many women claim to have {more or less} equal rights to men. You’ll hear in your workplace, amongst your friends, and in the streets:

Things are different now!

We are CEOs, Bankers, portfolio managers, lawyers…

We have the right to vote!

Women are breadwinners in their household!

We can be President!

Things are different now!…

But are they really?

This is a question we should be asking ourselves. Who are we referring to when we say that things are different? When women sit on board meetings at our companies, who are these women? What is their story? What is their background?

No one is denying that things have improved in the last 100 years, however, to whom have they really improved? I, as a white Brazilian woman, need to know my own story and understand what kind of privileges helped shape the way for me to be where I am today. It is impossible for me (and for other women like me) to deny the kind of upbringing and circumstances that made us who we are.

I never had to work a day in my life until I was “old enough”. When I started working, I could wait and choose which internship was most suited for me and what kind of job I wanted. If work was too far away from my house, my parents would help me pay for accommodation near the office or the university. Yes, I got to go to University. I have a father that nourishes my intellectual and that supports women’s rights and made me believe from a young age that I could do the same (if not better) job that men were already doing. My mother was seen as an equal in her relationship with my father and worked just as hard (if not harder). I had role models from birth right at home. But this is not the same for other women. I would dare to say this is not true for most women.

In Brazil, for example, 97% of domestic workers (maids, nannies, cleaners for private family homes) are women and a huge majority are non-whites. Domestic work is amongst the lowest-paying positions in the job market in Brazil (and the world). Research shows that when the economy picks up, and people are able to find other positions, they leave this kind of employment. In 2018, out of the over 6 million domestic workers in Brazil, only around 1,7 million are actually legally registered and can actually exercise their rights.

And who, might you ask, usually employs these women? Other women. Although some domestic work is done for a one or two-person household, I can tell you from first-hand experience that it is mostly white women from the upper-middle-class up that request this kind of service. They need their help since they have to go to work (gotta break that glass ceiling, right?).

Because if the woman is working, who’s taking care of the children? The house? Groceries? Cooking? Laundry? Well, this will, more often than not, fall into the hands of other women. Poorer women. most times, black women. Women from the northeast of Brazil or other poor states searching for a better life in the south. Mothers who don’t have time to look after their own children because they need to work for other mothers to put food on their table and keep a roof over their family's head.

It doesn’t stop there

Jordana Cristina de Jesus, a Brazilian demographer, was able to prove through the analysis of PNAD (Brazilian National Household Sample Survey) that women work, on average, 4h per day on domestic work. Men usually work around the house for 1/4 of this time. Based on a salary paid to domestic workers, the work performed by women would generate R$ 580 billion (around 150 billion EUR) in a year.

It is important to sink in these numbers because they reveal a reality that a lot of people seem to not be quite ready to face: domestic work is extremely feminized and under-appreciated. We do not value this kind of work in a capitalist society, because, in a sense, it is a given that these are female obligations and it is natural for the women in their household to either take all this workload or to pass it along to other women, who unlike them aren’t able to compete with men for better-paid labor in proper 9–5 jobs.

Do we think about this when we’re “taking a seat at the table”? Do we have these women in our minds when we’re leaving our children with them to go to that super important meeting?

Girl Power isn’t all it is set out to be.

In the first pages of “Feminism for the 99%”, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser highlight the fact that there are two types of beliefs very contradicting within the Women’s Rights Movement. They call it two voices that represent two separate paths. One wants “a world where the task of managing exploitation in the workplace and oppression in the social whole is shared equally by ruling-class men and women”.

The other voice is reaching for a “world free of sexist oppression, exploitation, and violence… for rebellion and a struggle against the alliance of the patriarchy and capitalism that wants us to be obedient, submissive and quiet”.

If we want our feminism to be inclusive, we cannot buy whatever the major corporations want us to. We need to question ourselves what do we really want not only for our own reality but for a future where all women are really free and wealth is not to be accumulated but to be shared. We should be thinking of a time when we would be truly free of oppression, and not sharing the role of oppressors with men.

We’re not free until all women are free.

When we started our project, we always had in mind that it would not be a conventional business. We want to be able to share our successes, we believe that it would not be ok to profit on top of women empowerment quotes for our personal gain alone.

We also believe feminism should intersect with other movements, we should not be excluding women and generalizing their struggles that might be very different from ours. Even more than this, we should recognize our differences and the overlap of structural oppression within our movement in order to be able to push forward together.

For this women’s day, let us rejoice on how far we’ve come. But let’s also take the time to remember that there’s still much to be done. The fight for equality does not end when white women have a seat at the table. We should be constructing new pathways and not repeating old patterns that still keep women in their place.

Image is an original print from Odile Bree