This time when you celebrate International Women’s Day, make it a point to remember that it started off as International Working Women’s Day until the bourgeoisie hijacked it and removed its class component to present a false and unified ‘sisterhood’ so that women were discouraged from participating in the struggle against upper class hegemony.
Make it a point to remember that womanhood is far more complicated than sharing a gender. Make it a point to remember that sisterhood is less about insincere chants of calling another woman your friend or sister while turning blind to the unique forms of inequality she faces and more about addressing how womanhood is incredibly complex and that, no, we do not face the same injuries and that, yes, it is absolutely necessary to understand how race, class, geo-political status, religion and more impact us as women and how they intersect and clash.
Make it a point to remember that the only way forward in healing and empowerment (the word rings hollow now) is by accepting we are different and that women in the world do not constitute a global sisterhood by virtue of the same jins. You are not my sister if you are complicit in the precarity and abuse that affects me. We may share the same gender but we certainly do not share the same pain.
