they’ll go away. It’s time to treat gun violence like a feminist issue—not just when it plays out in domestic violence or mass shooting but also when it impacts marginalized communities. We will either work to make it possible for all of us to be safe from gun violence or none of us will be.
HUNGER
My first marriage ended in divorce, and afterward, I was on food stamps, I had a state-funded medical card that gave me and my son access to medical care, and I was living in public housing. I was fortunate at the time that this particular set of social safety nets allowed me to leave my abusive ex and stay gone. I could raise my child in relative comfort and safety. Today, many of those safety nets have been greatly diminished, and in the case of public housing, it has nearly fallen away completely in many areas. We know in the abstract that poverty is a feminist issue. Indeed, we think of it as a feminist issue for other countries, and that we are in a place where bootstraps and grit can be enough to get anyone who wants it bad enough out of poverty. But the reality is that it takes a lot more than gumption. I was lucky: I’m educated. My grammar school and high school curricula prepared me for a college education. I joined the army to pay for my degree, and since I was in Illinois, a state that has a tuition-free Veteran Grant Program for state schools, it didn’t matter that I was doing this in the days before the GI Bill paid enough to be useful.
I was poor, and it wasn’t easy, but I had the handholds it can take to be upwardly mobile when you’re marginalized and life is working against you in other ways. A childcare subsidy meant that when my ex didn’t pay child support, my child was still able to attend the high-quality preschool on my college campus. I got a bachelor’s degree in four years, went on to work full-time, and took a host of other perfectly boring but necessary steps that brought me to where I am today, with an advanced education, a wonderful family, and a career that I enjoy. If this were the usual heartwarming, feel-good tale about single parenting and poverty, you might come away thinking, “Well if she could do it, why can’t everyone else?” And you might expect me to say, “It was hard, but I learned so much, and I remember that time fondly.”
What I remember is hunger. And crying when I couldn’t afford a Christmas tree. I remember being afraid that I couldn’t make it. That I would lose my child because I couldn’t provide. It’s hard to take a rich woman’s children; it is remarkably easy to take a poor woman’s, though. As a society, we tend to treat hunger as a moral failing, as a sign that someone is lacking in a fundamental way. We remember to combat hunger around the holidays, but we judge the mothers who have to rely on food banks, free or reduced lunches at school, or food stamps for not being able to stand against a problem that baffles governments around the world. Indeed, we treat poverty itself like a crime, like the women experiencing it are making bad choices for themselves and their children on purpose. We ignore that they don’t have a good choice available, that they’re making decisions in the space where the handholds are tenuous or nonexistent.
The women in these circumstances may not have a grocer that sells fresh produce, or at least not one that sells produce they can afford. They may be working too many hours to be able to prepare food, or they might be dealing with food storage issues. The story behind that pack of chips and soda at a bus stop is often far more complicated than any ideas of a lack of nutritional knowledge, laziness, or even neglect. Sometimes the food you can access comes from gas stations, liquor stores, and fast food restaurants and not a fully stocked grocery store, much less a kitchen.
We know that food deserts exist, areas where groceries are scarce and what is available may be unfit for human consumption. But food insecurity is more complicated than simply the ability to access food. There’s the question of what food costs versus what people can