Speech from Tamara Winfrey-Harris, president of Women’s Fund, for International Women’s Day

 

Good morning and Happy International Women’s Day!

Before I begin, may I ask you all to close your eyes, if that is available to you. If not, you may soften them.

I would just like us to take a  moment to feel the energy of this space.

Feel the joy of being in connection with other women and allies.

Feel the power of people coming together all over the world today to celebrate womanhood.

I never feel more loved and inspired, energized and affirmed than when I am in the company of women.

Take a deep inhale, exhale and let that feeling sink in.

And now I ask that we collectively take a moment to acknowledge the women who are not in this room. It is important to say out loud that being able to gather downtown on a Friday morning for a breakfast at the Arts Garden is a privilege. There are many women who cannot be here…

Because they started their work shift early this morning.

Because they don’t have transportation.

Because they don’t have childcare or adult care.

Because they lack access to feminine hygiene products.

Because they are unsure if their language will be spoken here.

Because they are unsure if they will be accepted as women here.

Because they are enduring the effects of war and other violence.

Because they are incarcerated.

Can we take a few seconds to send all the wonderful energy of this space to them–wherever they are and whatever challenges they are facing.

Thank you.

I am honored to be here. Just as I am honored to lead Women’s Fund of Central Indiana, where we convene, invest and advocate to ensure that everyone who identifies as a woman or girl in our community has equitable access to opportunity to reach their full potential–no matter their place, race or identity.

I’d like to talk about that this morning–place, race, identity.

Now, the theme for this year’s International Women’s Day is “Inspiring Inclusion.”

Women are the global and American majority.

Anyplace where we are not included in numbers that reflect that we are a little more than half of the population…

Any workplace.

Any board.

Any hospital.

Any place of higher learning.

ANYPLACE.

Is not doing its job.

I encourage you to visit the website for International Women’s Day to discover some ways to inspire inclusion, such as:

Forging women’s economic empowerment.

Recruiting, retaining and developing diverse talent.

Supporting women and girls into leadership, decision-making, business and STEM.

Designing and building infrastructure meeting the needs of women and girls.

Helping women and girls make informed decisions about their health.

Involving women and girls in sustainable agriculture and food security.

Providing women and girls with access to quality education and training.

Elevating women and girls’ participation and achievement in sport.

Promoting creative and artistic talent of women and girls.

Women MUST be included in every aspect of American life. Any system where we are absent is a system that is not working.

But I’d like to talk about inclusion in a slightly different way.

I want to talk about what we mean when we say “woman.”

To borrow from American poet and essayist Walt Whitman, Womanhood “is large; [it] contains multitudes.”

Some of us are in the C-suite. Some of us are barely making it.

Some of us are fresh-faced with a lifetime ahead. Some of us are defiantly embracing wisdom, wrinkles and elegant gray.

Some of us have skin that is brown, some pink and some mahogany.

Some of us are city girls. Some of us are suburban girls. Some of us live down on the farm.

Some of us learned to speak English as our first language. Some of us learned to speak Burmese or Spanish or Tagalog.

Some of us are trans women. Some of us are cisgender.

Some of us are mothers. Some of us are caregivers. Some of us are not nurturers at all.

Some of us love men. Some of us love women. Some of us love both or neither.

Some of us show our devotion in church on Sunday. Some do it by chanting or standing beside the ocean. Some of us just sleep in.

Some of us are healthy. Some of us are healing. Others of us are dying.

Like I said: Multitudes.

Because of all the richness and diversity within womanhood, some of our joys are different.

And many of our challenges are different, too.

The wage gap is a problem that impacts all women. As a collective, we earn 77 cents for every dollar a White man makes.

But many women, including most women of color, make even less. Native women, for example, earn 51 cents on the dollar.

Transgender women working full-time are paid 60 cents for every dollar.

We should all be concerned about infant and maternal mortality rates. The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed countries and is the only developed nation in which that rate is rising.

Within the United States, Indiana has the third highest maternal mortality rate among all reporting states at 44 deaths per 100,000 live births as of 2022.

But, in 2020, the maternal mortality ratio for Black Hoosier women was 208 per 100,000 live births, compared to 108 for white women and 71 for Latinas.

Women are affected by food insecurity more than men. Women living with disabilities, women of color and women who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community are even more at risk.

Women are disadvantaged as homeowners and renters. But Asian, Black, and Latina women face higher levels of housing insecurity and fall behind on rent and mortgage payments at a higher rate than white women.

Before the pandemic, low-income Black women renters were nine times as likely to be evicted as White women renters with low incomes.

Rural women tend to marry earlier, have limited access to good healthcare, and experience higher rates of domestic violence.

You get the picture, I hope.

It is impossible to paint just one picture of what it means to be a woman, because my womanhood, your womanhood, our womanhood is colored by our experiences and intersected identities.

Too often, in a false notion of sisterhood, we demand that women ignore our differences and flatten our experiences so everyone is comfortable.

We hear, “Don’t be divisive; let’s just focus on how we are alike.”

Too often those who claim to serve women and girls, and make decisions about the lives of women and girls, fixate on the majority of us and not the most vulnerable of us. Leaning into the idea of sameness is easier than wrestling with critical differences.

But difference is not our problem. Difference is our strength as women.

In her book, Sister Outsider, writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist Audre Lorde wrote, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

There is this well-known saying by feminist writer Flavia Dzodan. Now, I was going to clean it up a little, because it is before noon and I’m being professional. But I decided that I needed to call a thing a thing and repeat this with the full power in which it was intended.

“My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.”

That quote is recognition of a legal concept coined by professor Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another, overlap and affect how we experience life.

Last year, Women’s Fund of Central Indiana undertook its most comprehensive community listening, landscape analysis and organizational assessment effort in our history, which resulted in a bold new strategic plan.

As one of our four driving goals for the next three years, we vowed to amplify the experiences of women and girls, especially those often ignored and underrepresented.

We are working this year to produce a comprehensive State of Women Report including disaggregated current data and community voice. We will explore areas, including women’s health (reproductive health, infant and maternal mortality, mental health), economic mobility, career/workforce, and intimate partner violence/personal safety. And we will make the information widely available to women-serving not-for-profits, community stakeholders, and decision-makers.

We plan to host our second annual Night of 100 Women, bringing together women across age, experience and identity to talk about what they need to thrive. And we will share their voices with the Central Indiana community.

We know that if Women’s Fund cannot see, welcome and advocate for women and girls in their full humanity, inclusive of all the identities and experiences that shape and color their lives, we are not doing our job.

That is true for everyone in this room.

If you work on behalf of women and girls…

If you make decisions on behalf of women and girls…

If you love women and girls and consider yourself an ally…

You are not helping women unless you really see them.

Today, I ask you to lean into the richness and diversity of womanhood.

Make sure women are included in your work, your research and your decisions.

But also, make sure your understanding of womanhood is as deep and wide as the female experience.

And, now that I have come before you and made a commitment on behalf of your Women’s Fund to be inclusive of women and girls in all the ways they show up in the world, I invite you to hold us to that, to push us and to call us in when we fall short.

I never get tired of sharing quotes from Audre Lorde. She also said, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”

My sisters–we are different. We are the same. We are women. Let’s get free together.

Thank you.