Women across the country strike two years after Dobbs

In the United States, women disproportionately provide free labor that keeps households, families and communities functioning. On June 24 – the second anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision – women chose to strike to protest gender inequality.

Calls to protest

The calls to strike began on TikTok, with several separately organized protests happening across the country, said Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the executive director of Women’s March and Women’s March Network.

“Our digital team woke up one day and we had about 65 to 70 strikes on our map and we went ahead and published them,” Carmona said in a conversation with Charity Nebbe on Talk of Iowa . “Because we believe that the movement is stronger with all of us moving multiple tactics and doing everything that we can towards the same goal.”

In Iowa, women chose to strike at the Capitol Building in Des Moines from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with a formal speaking event at noon. There was also a day of action hosted by Tracy Jones at Vanderveer Park in Davenport on Saturday, June 22.

Striking for reproductive access

Ongoing research has shown that a majority of both women and men in the United States believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. While abortion access is seen as a predominantly women's issue, and is part of the women's strike, it is also a whole family issue.

Jones said that speaking out on gender issues, especially abortion, is personal for her.

“Our mom had sought an abortion. She had always had very complicated pregnancies. This particular pregnancy that she had, she had recently divorced my father, had gotten pregnant. She was a single mom, didn't have the resources to obtain an abortion,” Jones said. “She was also slightly hindered by her upbringing, because she was raised in a very conservative household ... She already had three children that were depending on her. She finally saved up enough money to go to New York. And by the time she got there, she was too far along. And she came home and died a couple of weeks later, because she could not get the medically-necessary abortion.”

Jones' mother died six months before Roe v. Wade decriminalized abortion in 1973. Jones was 15 months old.

“It’s critically important for every family in the United States to understand that they are one life-threatening pregnancy from changing the whole direction of their, their future generations,” Jones said. “I've never had an abortion, but it's impacted my entire life. And it's not just a women's issue. It's a whole family issue.”

Women, motherhood and the economy

Women face a persistent and large pay gap, and are not often in roles of leadership or high-income leadership as well.

Jessica Calarco, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, wrote the book Holding it Together: How Women Became American’s Safety Net . She joined Talk of Iowa to discuss how having children and how a lack of access to abortion financially impacts women.

“I talk about in the book how trapping women in motherhood, forcing them to have children with the wrong times for them or in moments of their lives that are not ideal, makes them easier to exploit,” Calarco said. “And essentially this has to do with the fact that other countries use social safety nets to help people manage risk, to protect people from poverty, to give them a leg up in reaching economic opportunities and give them the time and energy to take care of their families and their communities... In the US, we try to DIY society instead. We tell people that they shouldn't need a social safety net, as long as they just make good choices, they should be safe from risk.”

During World War Two, more women joined the workforce to support the home front. To encourage their participation in the economy, the U.S. government used defense spending funds to organize child care. However, when men returned from the war and came back to their jobs, those affordable, government-funded child care centers were shuttered, Calarco said. In fact, women were told it was their patriotic duty to go back home and care for the house and children.

“That was certainly a key moment of diversion in the sense where we see most of Western Europe moving toward things like universal paid leave, universal child care, universal health care in the wake of World War Two — in part to help rebuild their economies,” she said.

In the United States, women do an average of four and a half hours of unpaid work a day, compared with less than three hours for men, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The pay gap and lack of women in high-earning leadership roles is another motivator for the strike.

Bearing the weight of the pandemic

Additionally, women are continuously disproportionately impacted by local and global events — such as the pandemic.

Calarco said in the U.S., instead of government-funded programs to support families, women’s unpaid domestic labor does the work of social safety nets. The pandemic highlighted this situation.

“Many of the families that my team and I interviewed and surveyed for our research — that work just disproportionately fell to women. Many of the couples that we talked to, couples never even discussed who would be the one to take care of children when schools and child care centers closed,” Calarco said. “That work just fell to women, who were expected oftentimes not only to care for kids, but also to make sure that Grandma got her medication or make sure that elderly neighbors were taken care of and that they had groceries delivered, or helping to take over the labor of colleagues who got sick with COVID and needed someone to cover their shifts.”

While there were policies implemented in the pandemic that improved life for families — including women — most of those policies were temporary during the pandemic or have been vastly pulled back since.

"For example, the child tax credits lifted millions of children and families in the US out of poverty. We realized that we could flip a switch, essentially, and substantially reduce the hardship that families face in the U.S. Now, we turned that switch off very quickly. But... we showed them that it's possible to do these large scale programs that make a substantial difference in people's lives. And so I think part of the frustration that we're now seeing with politics and with our country is that we got very close, we got very close with Build Back Better... But we took them away. And we failed, in many cases to build back better," Calarco added.

The post- Roe working world

Mary Noonan, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Iowa, said research shows that women are less likely to graduate from school, are less likely to work and are more likely to take time off work if they live in states with more strict abortion regulations. Additionally, women might be less likely to move to another state for a job if that state has more strict abortion regulations.

“She may not be interested in sacrificing her access to a full range of reproductive health care to follow what might otherwise be a really good job for her,” Noonan said. “And so, in this way, women's decision-making ability is going to be constricted.”

Reflecting on women’s role in the economy in a post- Roe America, Calarco shared the story of a woman she calls Brooke in her book. In college she became pregnant unintentionally. She didn’t want to be a mother, but her mom talked her out of getting abortion. They couldn’t afford child care and college, so Brooke ended up dropping out of school, going on welfare and moving into a shelter in an effort to access affordable housing.

“This is, I think, an unfortunately telling example, for me, of how attacks on reproductive freedom can push women into precarious and low-wage work and make it difficult … So this is an easy path to precarity and a way to force women into doing those kinds of jobs that are deeply devalued in our society, but that someone has to fill.”

For more discussion on womanhood, listen to Unsettled , hosted by Charity Nebbe . Caitlin Troutman produced this episode.