Investing in a Feminist Economy
Policy Stances and Priorities
This is one of the Policy Planks of the United Frontline Table’s toolkit A People’s Orientation to a Regenerative Economy. The policy planks are one of three tools in the kit, together with series of Strategy Questions and the Protect, Repair, Invest, and Transform Framework. Make sure the check out the section on How to Use This Resource to Enhance Your Work and the Working Definitions.
Investing in the Feminist Economy
In a feminist economy, we recognize, value, and center reproductive labor as low-carbon, community-generating, life-affirming, and skilled work that is necessary for the well-being of everyone and to sustain human society and nature itself. Feminist economy focuses on four principles to re-envision our world: ensuring bodily autonomy and self-determination as it relates to feminized, transgender, and gender non-conforming people; socializing reproductive labor; being in right relationship with people globally; and being in right relationship with nature and Mother Earth.
Policy Stances and Priorities
PROTECT
Protect Women and Girls from Violence in Extractive Industries
Protect women, girls, transgender, and gender non-conforming people in the U.S. and across the Global South from violence perpetrated by those working in extractive industries. Women and girls, particularly Indigenous women, suffer violence at the hands of men working in deeply extractive “man camps” in remote locations with no accountability or justice. Man camps—along with the larger dynamics of colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy—create conditions that contribute to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women across North America. Advance protections for environmental defenders in frontline communities in the U.S. and in the Global South.
PROTECT
Strengthen Worker Rights and Protections
Strengthen labor laws that protect “worker rights to organize” in critical frontline industries, particularly essential workers in health, caregiving, food production, and the service economy who are mostly Asian and Pacific Islander, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous women. This includes policy tools such as the Essential Workers Bill of Rights for example.
PROTECT
End US Sanctions
Permanently lift U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and 25 other countries. Sanctions have been used as a weapon of resource control around basic survival needs, often forcing sanctioned governments to rely on extractive industries to provide resources for their populations. Sanctions destroy governments’ ability to provide basic resources leaving women to take up the burdens that result from the chronic impact of war and militarism.
REPAIR
Pay Our Climate Debt
Make ambitious and urgent carbon emission and pollution reductions to address U.S. climate debt to the Global South. Transfer resources to repair the harms to impacted communities, especially rural, Indigenous, Afro-Descendent, trans, and gender non-conforming, women-led communities throughout the Global South who are most impacted by the climate crisis.
INVEST
Invest in the Care Economy
Use public funding to greatly expand financial support for housework, childcare, and elder care. Demand social recognition of this historically, and current, unpaid and underpaid work as valuable, low-carbon, community-based, and critical work in a Regenerative Economy.
TRANSFORM
Transform Health Care & Reproductive Justice
Transform Health Care & Reproductive Justice: Reject false population growth alarmism and arguments that affix the blame for climate change on people’s, especially women’s, reproductive capacities. Invest in healthcare access, globally and inside the United States, that respect bodily autonomy—particularly in environmental justice communities where toxic chemicals pollute the water, air, and land jeopardizing our health, including reproductive health, often with a disproportionate impact on Black, Indigenous, and Latinx women.
