I started as director of CSWS in the summer of 2016. Sadly for us, CSWS lost two of our founding mothers within months of each other in 2016. Joan Acker and Sandi Morgen, pathbreaking feminist titans, made the Center a focus of research and activism around women’s economic rights and security for over forty years. To honor their legacies, we launched a three-year theme of “Women and Work.” We hosted social justice activists organizing for fair labor conditions in the restaurant industry and scholars researching the impact of gender inequity in home and domestic labor, explored the impact of climate change on gender, and grappled with the unprecedented misogyny, homophobia, and racism that accompanied the 2016 Trump election.

While concerns of gender equity continue to drive our programming, we are launching a new theme, Gender, Power and Grief. On a daily basis, we bear witness to the state-sponsored violence that renders the loss of certain lives and communities unworthy of grief. Immigrant communities are terrorized and families torn apart or imprisoned for exercising their basic human rights. On a more personal note, I experienced the loss of my 94-year-old father, whom I cared for in my home for nearly a decade. Although my father lived a long life and died at home surrounded by his children and grandchildren, his death invoked in me a profound sense of loss and grief. Anecdotal and scholarly evidence show that women are dropping out of the workforce to care for aging parents shouldering much of the responsibility for elder care that is de facto distributed along gendered lines. Throughout my father’s care I was conscious of my own subject position as daughter, mother, and immigrant who grew up with the cultural expectation that I would care for my parents as they aged. This cultural obligation leeches into broader issues of gender and ethnic identity, as many involved in the home health care industry are underpaid, work long hours, and hail from economically and politically marginalized communities. 

Our coming roster of speakers and programming seeks both to honor the process of grief and the cultural practices of bereavement. They show us that in a time where much of the state apparatus is structured to demean poor people—loving, honoring and grieving those bodies, and acknowledging what we have lost—is a radical emotional act. I encourage you to participate in these conversations with us at the Center, as we hold space for ourselves to grieve, organize, celebrate, and acknowledge that together we are much stronger than we are apart. We have always defied odds, broken barriers, and ignited the change we wish to see in this world. We have to because no one else will ever do it. And if we don’t act together to demand that change, we leave no legacy, nor even an inhabitable planet for our children. 

—Michelle McKinley, Director