IT IS difficult to think of how to celebrate International Women’s Day when one of the world’s biggest economic and military powers has been democratically transferred to a cabal of men unapologetic about their history of violence against women and girls.

Donald Trump himself is the first US president to be convicted in court of sexual offences and at his side, the world’s richest man juggles being a dad of 14 and closing off the workplace and healthcare to women and black people in the US and abroad. 

It is a hard to call what the White House will do next — an executive order dictating a blanket ban on abortion? Or perhaps a frat party celebrating the homecoming of sex trafficker and misogynist prodigal son Andrew Tate. The only bright side of this state of affairs is perhaps the death of the tired argument that allegations of sexual harassment ruin men’s lives. 

This is not to conflate US and British political and social life — we have plenty of our own miseries. Poverty remains gendered and recent rises in inflation have hit women hardest. When the economy struggles, women as a demographic in particular are even worse off financially and their jobs and housing even less secure. Disabled women, racialised women and those with caring responsibilities are hit the hardest and have less financial resilience to keep themselves fed, warm and housed. 

Based on current PwC estimates, the gender pay gap in Britain will take at least three decades to close and, according to Maternity Action, less than 15 per cent of workers who are pregnant or new mothers receive occupational maternity pay from their bosses, with the majority being awarded only the basic rate, amounting to half of the National Living Wage. 

Lack of investment in care, sluggish action on workplace discrimination and sexual harassment continue to create barriers for women at work. Devastating erosions to public services and Kafkaesque social security logics make staying in work impossible for many women. 

Indeed, Britain’s performance on gender equality in the workplace has reached lows not seen for a decade — Britain’s paltry levels of female full-time employment put it 27th out of 33 of the OECD’s rankings, and significantly below the OECD average. 

While the most dangerous place for a woman is still her own home and those most likely to harm her are her partner or her male relatives, it is little wonder that women are finding themselves at home rather than at work. If the workplace for women means precarity, unequal and low pay as well as misogynistic cultures hostile to parents and carers and rife with sexual harassment, one can understand why choosing domestic labour in exchange for financial dependency on a male partner might feel like a more predictable and reassuring option. 

The disappointments of the working world for women in the West have created the ground for the kinds of aspirational “tradwifehood” performed by US Christian fundamentalists on social media as seemingly the most straightforward way for women to benefit from the grossly unequal economic landscape we are expected to inhabit. 

Against this backdrop, why bother with International Women’s Day at all? Because while the picture in Britain, Europe and the US is incredibly bleak, we in the West still our owe solidarity to the millions of women and girls around the world who live with the real and immediate prospect of being murdered through genocide, of experiencing war crime acts of sexual violence and of losing freedom, homes, loved ones, education and healthcare. 

Women in the global South don’t have the option of giving up. The Morning Star Women’s Readers and Supporters group last month gathered to listen to the struggles and resistance of women in Palestine and Sudan who have been effectively organising and building in circumstances of extraordinary hardship.

While the fantastic Women in Revolt exhibition which toured London and Edinburgh last year stirred nostalgic pleasures of victories gone by, we are decades on from the golden years of Women’s Liberation. 

In 2025 across Europe we see far-right movements led by women at every turn — Giorgia Meloni (Fratelli d’Italia), Alice Weidel (Alternative fur Deutschland) and Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National). Protection of women and girls is given by extreme social conservatives as justification for a range of racist, xenophobic and homophobic violence. Being a woman doesn’t make a person a feminist — these women are the far right’s chief propagandists and thousands of women are being recruited into the far right in their wake. 

The effect of this is deeply damaging — we can clearly see direct relationships between the ways the language of feminism and women’s rights is being weaponised by US and European far-right forces and the catastrophic scale of murder, sexual violence and suffering experienced by women of the global South. 

Western feminists have lessons to learn and we need to learn quickly. This month Penguin Modern Classics reissued Andrea Dworkin’s long out of print 1983 Right Wing Women — a searing account of women’s collaborationism in reproductive violence and anti-feminism. Newer books by Sophie Lewis, Lois Shearing and Sian Norris lay out with alarming urgency how issues of gender and fascist politics intersect and invite Western women to collaborate in patriarchal oppression. 

Those of us still idealistic enough to hold on to the idea of feminism as a liberating force ought to take a serious look at the walls closing in around us and seriously evaluate our priorities, tactics and alliances going forward. We might also do well to consider our own relationship to power, access to resources and willingness to commit or permit violence and exploitation. It’s time for feminists to decide who our enemies are.