The State of Feminism

I identify myself as an organizer and some people know me as a labor leader. And thanks to Gloria Steinem and Ellie Smeal, I consider myself a feminist. It took me a while to get there, but I always thought feminism was just that women were just in power, but [it’s] beyond that. And, of course, I had to work that out, which was good because the people I organized, I had to get them to cross that bridge also. Because we have the influence of the church, which is so deep in the Latino community, and to try to make women understand that they're not going to go to hell if they have an abortion, and how that affects us politically.

And I know people wonder, why did so many Latinos vote for Trump? Well, [abortion] is one of the reasons. So I think that's something that we have to continue to work on, because we have a lot of people, communities of color, that are so dead set, thinking that they're going to go to hell. And they don't understand that the churches are so wrong on so many issues.

I think that's one thing that we lack in the feminist movement, is to confront the churches more. I say that the silence is deafening. When the transgender community was being attacked, we didn't hear the church say anything in defense of gay and transgender people. So I think that we just have to do a lot more work on the ground.

And I think we have an opportunity now with the Equal Rights Amendment. I think if we start organizing more around the Equal Rights Amendment to a lot of women out there who don't really know what that is — even educated women don't know what that is. We assume that they do, but they don't. I think it's something that can bring to their tables and say, "This is one thing that we can all work on together, the Equal Rights Amendment, and we have a good opportunity to do this." So now we can make [the ERA] an issue for the next Congress, because we know a lot of Democrats are going to be elected, but they don't have that on their agenda. So we've got to make sure that they put it on the agenda and make that part of our electoral work that we do right now. I think that will help us bring the issue of feminism.

And another thing, too — before, we would say, "We want to get more women in power." Okay, well, there are women in power now, but they're not [all] feminists, and [some] are following the patriarchal line and being very mean to women and everybody else, people of color. So we know with everything that's going on around us right now, that we are in a precarious moment in our country. And all of us are working very hard to save democracy. We really have to keep our eye on the prize, which is to make sure that we have a feminist future. As Ellie Smeal says, "the future has to be feminist." And feminists have to lead the fight for the future of our country.

These remarks have been edited for clarity and length. Portions of these remarks appeared at Women’s Media Center.