Jack,
This weekend, Fran was the keynote speaker at Milwaukee’s International Women’s Day celebration. We wanted to share her remarks with you, and we hope you’ll forward this message with someone you know who might be curious about Fran’s candidacy – or excited to vote for Wisconsin’s first female governor.
If you like what you read, show us some love.
With gratitude,
Team Hong
Here’s the speech:
I want to talk about the unrelenting expectations placed upon women and the traps set for us by the people who benefit from keeping us down.
One of the best parts of my job is that I get to talk to a lot of young women. Many of them are like me — like who I was — and are hesitant to run for office or be in charge of something. But more and more young people ask me about the journey and how to push forward. This gives me hope. Still, I talk to so many women who have to grind, every step of the way, to get to positions of authority they objectively deserve.
Sometimes the grind becomes your own worst enemy. You know; impostor syndrome. It's a scam. We are manipulated into questioning our roles as decisionmakers and, through our doubt, doing the work of the oppressor for him. And that prevents us from fully articulating the power of those positions — which, especially in democratic spaces, have often been taken from us, and which are ours by right.
There exists this expectation in patriarchy and in capitalism that our greatest aspiration should be to give, give, give of ourselves; that we should play a supporting role in our own lives. When we give all we have, when they've taken all they want from us, we can be discarded.
This is a distraction — a total inversion of what makes us powerful. This suffocating expectation of endless self-sacrifice jeopardizes the integrity of community and care. It mistakes compassion for weakness. It denies us our potential.
There's a competing vision that I find just as bad: the myth of scarcity — that there's not enough in this world for women. We're taught that protecting ourselves requires playing the game: that our success and ambition and safety is a competition that can only be guaranteed at the expense of our sisters; that the only way up is by climbing over others, whether in the workplace, in the government, or internationally under imperialism. This idea — that we must restrict compassion from our hearts in order to "win" — is also a tool of capitalism and also a tool of patriarchy. This is not how we build a better world.
This system forces us to choose between sacrificing ourselves or competing against one another because the people who profit from it know what happens when women come together and what happens when we form community.
Because community is not a zero-sum game. Care is not a zero-sum game. When we build spaces where we care for each other, and where we are cared for in return, we build something much bigger, much more powerful, much more sustainable, than the sum of our parts.
We can see this in nature. There's a good metaphor for this kind of mutual care not too far from here, up north: the aspen forest. You'd probably recognize a quaking aspen tree if you saw one — a tall white tree with papery bark and dazzling yellow leaves. After the sugar maple, it's one of the most common kinds of trees in the Northwoods. But what you can't see is what makes these aspens special: they share resources and grow collectively.
A single aspen tree will stretch its roots really, really far and connect with other trees, forming a sort of super organism — it's not inaccurate to think of aspen forests as being one giant plant with thousands or tens of thousands of trunks. This gives aspens real advantages in the fight for survival: if rain falls unevenly, areas that absorb more water share with areas that received less. It's the same with other nutrients. These trees, these beautiful and complex forests, are able to flourish because they're so effective at distributing resources across themselves: what fortune benefits one aspen benefits the whole forest. Each tree, simply by being alive, protects and supports its sisters — and is made stronger for it.
This is community. This is the type of community we build with and among ourselves. It is through this kind of collaboration, through this kind of mutual nurturing, that we all protect ourselves and grow the movement for justice.
We live in a country, under a system, in which it's so easy to imagine ourselves as only predator or prey.
But we must imagine more — we must demand more — for ourselves and for those who come next. This is not an amorphous demand. It contains clear political and legal goals:
We demand the right to a living wage and safe working conditions. We demand the right to clean air, clean water, and universal healthcare. We demand the right to live safely within a legal system free from the shadows of bigotry and oppression. And, most importantly, we demand the absolute right to control our bodies. That means the right to have, or not have, children and the right to seek, or not seek, gender-affirming care. These two struggles are one.
We demand our right to live in a society where our incredible resources, our talents and time are deployed for the benefit of all — where none of us are left behind.
Grace Lee Boggs was a legendary civil rights and feminist activist who worked in Detroit. She's very important to me. One line of hers that I like is — to paraphrase slightly:
"The world is always being made fresh and never finished. Activism can be the journey rather than the arrival. Struggle doesn't always have to be confrontational, but can take the form of reaching out to find common ground with the many others in our society who are also seeking ways out."
We have a responsibility; we have an obligation; we have an opportunity to model the world we demand. We can reclaim the word "nurture" from a society that robs compassion from us. We can develop new and radical visions of care and community. We can grow within ourselves and within each other the leadership, the ambition, and the hope required to change the world.
This movement is long. It goes back further than any of us can see, it touches every corner of the earth, and it will continue long after we're gone.
I have to admit: things are bleak. Right now, perhaps this literal second, missiles paid for with our money are tearing the earth apart. Our money, that could have gone to public housing or public schools or feeding hungry people, is being used to shatter the lives of women halfway across the world. I'm scared of what all this suffering will do to our shared humanity; what this creates for all of our children.
But we persevere — collectively; in community; through the gift of care. When ICE invades a city, like in Minneapolis, we see mutual aid resources and rapid response projects emerge from the community networks people have spent years developing — community networks, by and large, led by women. Coast to coast, women are showing up to defend, care for, and fight alongside each other. It is through the collective strength of a resistance rooted in radical care that we define the future. That's our only way out.
If these words meant something to you, chip in what you can today.
