How Militant Caretakers are Redefining Resistance | CC Dispatch #31

Welcome to Dispatch #31! This week we want to celebrate mothers, women, caretakers, and anyone in the informal economy - the silent laborers whose work is just as valuable and important as those who traditionally work. Though often overlooked, they can be extremely powerful politically when united together, so let’s talk about it! This week we cover the power of sex boycotts, the story of housewives organizing in the Great Depression, feminism in Syria, an anonymous artist collective combating sexism and racism in the art world, and more!

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Little (Movement) Wins

How Sex Becomes a Tool of Resistance

Activist History

The idea of using sex as a political tool is not new; it actually goes back to ancient times. In Aristophanes' 411 BCE play "Lysistrata," Athenian women withhold sex from their husbands to force an end to the Peloponnesian War. But this tactic from a fictional play has been deployed in real-world conflicts around the world, and with great effect. In Colombia, women in Pereira organized a sex strike in 2006 to demand an end to gang violence, reducing murder rates by 25% by 2010. In another Colombian town in 2016, women refused to have sex with their partners until a road was repaired - it got fixed. Similar stories are found in Kenya, the Philippines, United States, and Italy.

Perhaps the most impactful modern sex strike took place in Liberia which helped bring about the end of a devastating civil war that had killed over 250,000 people and displaced 1 in 3 Liberians between 1989 - 2003. Women were a key target during the civil war, often the victim of gender-based violence and rape used as a “tool of war.” At the same time, women were instrumental to keep the country (and their families) running during the fighting. In a push for peace, the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace formed, organized by Leymah Gbowee, Crystal Roh Gawding, and Comfort Freeman, and united thousands of Muslim and Christian women across social classes in 2003. Among their many tactics was calling for a mass sex strike. She told Huffington Post in 2012:

“…when someone dares to bring [sex] to the attention of the public, it has two results. People start saying, ‘who’s this person doing this?’ and they start asking why the person is using sex to highlight an issue. And it gets men thinking... They start talking to their colleagues and beer buddies, saying ‘this war is wrong'.”

Their work forced (then) President Charles Taylor to the negotiation table, eventually leading to his resignation and the end to the civil war. Leymah Gbowee's leadership in mobilizing women to push men toward peace was so significant that she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011. The movement demonstrated that collective action by women, even in societies with severe restrictions, can fundamentally alter the course of violent conflict.

Jineology (Kurdish: Jineolojî) is a form of feminism and of gender equality advocated by Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the broader Kurdistan Communities Union (KCK) umbrella. Core the Jineology is the belief that patriarchy was the first form of oppression in ancient times, turning the woman into a “housewife”, and laying the groundwork for capitalist structures today. Öcalan said that "a country can't be free unless the women are free", and that “the need to reverse the role of man is of revolutionary importance.” Jineology is a component of Democratic Confederalism, a philosophy underpinning the governance of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (also known as Rojava).

In conversations about politics and activism, there is a lot of discussion around the organization of the working class. That’s certainly important, but what about people who don’t “work” in the traditional sense? There are millions, billions even, of stay-at-home moms (and dads), house-wives (and husbands), and family caretakers whose labor is just as valuable and their radicalization is just as important. In capitalism, we are conditioned to view caretakers as the silent laborers, often unseen, and a passive part of society because they do not generate profit. However, its these workers who make up the informal economy that are the engine that keeps society running when hard times strike.

The “tradwife” aesthetic is increasingly popular online, offering a glossy vision of the perfect passive housewife making baked goods and folding laundry. But the real “tradwife” is anything but passive. We see this during the Great Depression in the United States. From the late 1920s through the 1940s, there was a remarkable surge of activism by working-class American housewives.

In Eleanor Roosevelt's 1933 book, It's Up to the Women, she argued that mothers (we would also include any informal economy worker here), through self-sacrifice and creativity, would save their families from the worst ravages of the Great Depression. There is abundant evidence to show that poor wives and mothers not only approached their traditional responsibilities with heightened urgency, they also organized for more. From strikes to boycotts to lobbying, so-called “tradwives” were anything but traditional, they organized militantly and with great results.

Feminist historian Annelise Orleck shares a fascinating history of this time in American history that is often left out of the story. We’ve created a handy study guide to help you navigate the document, summarize key points, and make it easier to read/understand! These militant housewives in the 1930s understood the critical role they played in society, and in keeping the capitalist machine running, and leveraged the power they had with creativity and solidarity with others in a similar position. It’s a similar thought-process that we all need to embody as we figure out how to resist in our unique positions. We all play a part in society and that gives us power - how can we use it?

Conscious Creatives: The Guerrilla Girls

The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous collective of feminist artists combating sexism and racism within the art world by combining humor, bold graphics, and stark statistics into digestible material such as posters, billboards, campaigns, lectures, and public interventions. Members maintain their anonymity and keep the focus on issues by wearing gorilla masks and using pseudonyms of deceased female artists like Frida Kahlo and Harriet Tubman.

The group emerged in 1985 from a picket against the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC and has since tracked the representation of women artists and artists of color in museums and galleries by publicly exposing the discrimination that institutions try to keep hidden, such as the corrupt networks between museum boards, collectors, and galleries, and calling out board members who profit from their positions, mass incarceration, and the war machine.

Despite their confrontational tactics, their wit and data-driven approach has gained widespread public attention, leading to commissions from the very institutions they criticized, accepted on the condition that they could continue their critiques without compromise, allowing their message about gender and ethnic bias to reach global audiences. The Guerrilla Girls, which just celebrated their 40th anniversary this year, are a great testament of how we can all safely, strategically, tactically, creatively, and meaningfully fight back against issues we care about in low-cost ways and still make a large cultural impact.

🛒 Buy Their Book, "The Art of Behaving Badly"

📱 Follow The Guerrilla Girls on Instagram

Resources & Tools

Please share these links with anyone that might find them helpful:

• 📓 The Offline Community Organizing Manual | A practical guide to help you stay connected to your community, share resources, and sustain our movements without relying on corporate platforms and vulnerable technology that can fail us at any time. It covers offline communication, mutual aid mapping, skill directories, safe meeting strategies, and maintaining resilient community infrastructure.
• 📓 A Quick Start Guide for Running for Office in the US | A brief guide is a framework for some of the questions you need to consider and provides resources to help you run your race more efficiently and effectively along the way. They’ve even included a handy glossary of common terms you might hear and what they mean.
• 💝 Mutual Aid Finder | An interactive US map showcasing a growing collection of mutual aid groups across the country that you can get involved with.
• 🛍 Ethical Brand Directories | If you're shopping for the holiday season, find alternative brands to support that have good working conditions, fair pay, give-back initiatives, use high-quality materials, natural and low-waste products.

Want to contribute to our directory? Tell us about a resource you think more people need to know about. By harnessing community knowledge, we can build a digital home for the knowledge and resources needed to build systems rooted in care and sustainability.

Explore More on our Directory

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