BY RENATA KOBETTS MILLER

Guest blogger Renata Kobetts Miller is an associate professor of English at the City College of New York, where she teaches Victorian literature.  She recently concluded being chair of her department, and this summer she will become deputy dean of Humanities and the Arts. As a working mother, she reflects here on her decision to stay home on “A Day Without a Woman.”

The email came in as I was driving my 12-year-old daughter to her Tuesday evening swim practice.  My son’s head of school was announcing that his school would be closed on Wednesday because many teachers were taking the day off for “A Day Without a Woman” on International Women’s Day.  The email was apologetic for the impact on families, and on women specifically.

My initial response was an expletive—a reaction to the unexpected inconvenience for me as a working mother.  Although I am a college professor on sabbatical this semester, my day included a meeting of a faculty committee with our college president on the subject of support for research.  My mind went through the usual range of options that it scans when I receive word of a snow day for my kids that typically is not a snow day for my college: I could stay home, I could make shift to figure out emergency childcare coverage, or I could take my kid to work with me.  The meeting was important and I felt that my participation would make a meaningful contribution to the outcome.  I did not consider non-attendance to be an option.  Within a half hour, I had rearranged my morning and my mother-in-law’s day in order to ensure that my son would be cared for and I would attend the meeting.

Washington, DC rally on “A Day Without a Woman.” Photo by Catherine Everitt, AAUP.

My daughter made me rethink this plan.  She had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me at the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., in January, and she was baffled by what she characterized as my lack of commitment and solidarity to a cause about which our entire family feels strongly.  I have studied the British women’s suffrage movement, and I had myself argued for the need for a women’s general strike, inspired by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St. John’s 1909 suffragette play “How the Vote Was Won” (1909), in which English working women of all classes go on strike in order to demand the rights of citizenship.  My daughter did not accept my assertion that I would be making a contribution by participating, as a woman, in a meeting on an important matter, and that my missing the meeting would avail nothing.  This, she pointed out, was the equivalent of saying that my one vote does not count.  What she made me realize was that I did not want to be a weak link for feminism.  I owed it to her to be a role model of activism; and I owed my solidarity to other women who were making courageous and difficult decisions.

Every woman can argue that her place in the workforce is in itself a feminist act, one that obviates participation in a women’s strike.  But the fact that the United States faces political changes that may lead my daughter’s generation to confront far greater fundamental gender inequalities than I have known in my lifetime—including unequal access to healthcare and a lack of fundamental control over our own bodies and life choices—calls for a disruption of business as usual.  I realize that today will fall short of shutting down markets and bringing the country to a stand-still.  But for me to in essence neutralize the effect of other women who had chosen to strike, by making adjustments and efforts to prevent my own work schedule from being altered, amounts to walking across a picket line.  The women who teach in my son’s school are passionate educators who take their responsibilities to their students seriously.  I appreciate that it was not an easy decision for them to leave their jobs for a day and, in turn, I can’t say that I feel particularly comfortable with the decision that I made to take my voice out of a discussion in which I felt my participation was important.

The discomfort of today is meaningful for feminism.  It is cause for some encouragement to reflect that today is a day that pushes women to move beyond feeling grateful for the privileges that we have earned through decades of struggle: those of being in the workforce, having a seat at the table, and providing a woman’s perspective.  But it is also cause for discomfiture that we have reached a point at which women feel compelled to still for a day the work that our hands, minds, and voices do in the service of others—the work in which we take satisfaction and ground our identities—because our daily work does not secure for us the rights that we deserve.