My article for the School of International Service
Editor’s Note: Ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, SIS professor Antoaneta Tileva authored this piece reflecting on several of the feminist issues she feels are currently going unaddressed in America. At SIS, Tileva teaches courses on identity, gender, class, and culture.
In her beautifully succinct yet expansive definition, bell hooks writes that feminism is “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” Her seminal book, Feminism is for Everybody (2000), establishes feminism as a movement for everybody and every body. Patriarchy—or institutionalized sexism—affects people of all genders. Feminist issues are not just “women’s issues.” Feminism today is concerned with intersectionality–looking at the intersections of class, gender, race, religion, and the way they shape people’s experiences.
Let’s look at abortion rights through this intersectional lens. While abortion access has been labeled the feminist issue of this election, with most Americans favoring abortion rights, a conversation centered strictly on bodily autonomy misses the wider impacts.
Increasingly restrictive laws majorly affect maternal and women’s healthcare outcomes. Maternity care “deserts”—defined as areas where access to maternity health care services is limited or absent—limit access to birthing services but also pose challenges in securing early and continuous prenatal and postnatal care.
A shortage in OB-GYNs means that mothers have to travel greater and greater distances to get treatment, but it also means that women can’t get preventative, routine healthcare and that infants can’t get postnatal care. States with more restrictive abortion policies have higher total maternal mortality, measured as death during pregnancy or within one year following the end of a pregnancy. This is within the wider context of the US maternal mortality rates which remain consistently higher than those of other wealthy countries.
For the second straight year, fewer students in MD-granting US medical schools are applying for OB-GYN residencies in abortion-restricted states. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, applicant numbers in those states decreased by more than 10 percent. The explanation for this is that residents know they will simply not be trained on how to offer comprehensive maternal care, which includes performing abortions in cases such as high-risk patients for whom pregnancy may be life-threatening, or patients who experience ectopic pregnancy or incomplete miscarriage.
Furthermore, maternal healthcare is not the same across class and racial lines—Black women are more than three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts.
Some other feminist issues of this election include affordable/universal childcare, the wage gap, and, yes, also the war in Gaza.
The US stands out among advanced economies for its lack of universal childcare. This has not always been the case. During World War II, the government successfully established Lanham Centers to provide childcare for working women. On December 9, 1971, President Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CDA), which would have created federally-funded public childcare centers across the US Influenced by Pat Buchanan’s trip to the Soviet Union and his resultant panic over childcare centers representing a communist turn, Nixon essentially stymied any progress on this issue. Funnily (or perhaps not so), even in his old age, Buchanan doubled down, stating, “Mothers should be home with ‘cake and pie’ at 3 p.m.”
The 2024 State of Parenting survey found that only approximately 40 percent of participants feel supported by their employer. A lack of affordable childcare costs the US economy $122 billion annually.
The wage gap remains, with women, on average, earning 84 cents on the dollar to what a man makes. For Latine, Native, and Black women, the gap is more like a chasm than a gap.
The war in Gaza is also a feminist issue. According to recent estimates, since October 7, 70 percent of civilians killed in Gaza have been women and children and nearly a million women and girls have been displaced.
Ultimately, these “feminist” issues are everybody’s issues. Feminism is not about representation alone—it is not enough to have people of certain identities in leadership roles.