Opinion
Gloria Steinem died this week having spent nearly a century arguing, correctly, that a woman should be able to open a bank account, attend a university, end a pregnancy, and call harassment by its name. She won all of that, against real and organized resistance, and it would be dishonest of us to write anything today that treats those victories as small.
It would be equally dishonest to stop there. The right to sign your own name to a credit application does not by itself pay off the balance. Formal equality — the right to compete for a job, a loan, a seat in a classroom — was always the easier fight, precisely because it costs the existing economic order nothing to grant it. The harder fight, the one still mostly unfought in this country, is who does the unpaid labor of care and housework that formal equality never touched, and who profits from the fact that most of it still isn’t paid at all.
This isn’t a new argument, and it isn’t ours alone; women inside the socialist movement were making it against the liberal wing of their own movement while Steinem was still building hers. We make it now not to diminish what she won, but because taking her seriously means finishing the argument she was already having. Equality on paper was always the floor. We haven’t built much above it.
This is an editorial. It argues a position and reflects the view of The Communard, not a neutral news report.