Seizing Electoral Power, Women Demand 'Solutions as Complex as Our Existence'

More than 1,000 activists and organizers are gathering this week in Maryland to help advance a comprehensive economic agenda for women—one that calls for universal healthcare, affordable child and elder care, wholesale immigration and criminal justice reform, reproductive justice, and sensible gun control, among other things. 

The We Won’t Wait summit is centered around “an economic security agenda meant to address the fact that women’s economic well-being doesn’t hinge on any single issue but rather the intersection of several,” according to a press statement sent ahead of the two-day event in National Harbor, Maryland.

As one participant wrote on Twitter:

In particular, the effort seeks to engage women of color and low-income women in the 2016 election campaign, and to make candidates responsive to their needs.

“Women of color are key to the outcome to every election, but even with those numbers our issues are often forgotten,” Tracy Sturdivant, a spokeswoman for the campaign, told the Washington Post last month. “This election cycle it is so important for us to focus on all of these issues from an intersectional frame.”

While the nonpartisan campaign will not make any endorsements, several aspects of the We Won’t Wait platform are in direct conflict with that of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Consider the matter of paid family leave. The We Won’t Wait agenda calls for 12 weeks of guaranteed and paid family and medical leave “so that all parents can take paid time off when they are caring for a new child, for a seriously ill family member, or recovering from their own serious illness.”

MomsRising co-founder and executive director Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner—who spoke to summit attendees on Monday morning—wrote in a blog post last week:

“Solutions are necessary,” she wrote, before lamenting that Trump’s paid leave proposal “falls far short.”

“To start, he provides no new funding,” Rowe-Finkbeiner explained, “it’s limited to only new birth mothers, and he’s proposing to raid an already underfunded unemployment system.”