Philadelphia Needs a Feminist Mayor

By: Kelly Sheard, Director, Gender Wealth Institute

“If history and experience have taught us anything, we know that shared identity is not enough to assume common ideology and collective goals. Representation alone is not justice, and increased participation in a broken system is not enough to dismantle it and create new structures. Therefore, a feminist mayor is best understood through demonstrable action - a mantle anyone with awareness, critical thinking, and commitment can take.”

Friends, it’s the most wonderful time of the year - mayoral candidate forum time! Are you rolling your eyes, yet?

The deluge of these events is optimistically meant to provide community members with opportunities to understand the declared candidates' strategies and intentions as they seek the path to becoming Philadelphia’s 100th mayor. In a crowded primary, it can be helpful to cut through the canned talking points and discern the differences in experience, approach, and ideology. Accordingly, you’d be wise to ask — How can and should candidate forums offer an opportunity to cut through performative politics and reach for an experience and discussion that will actually be of use to voters? WOMEN’S WAY believes offering a framing of identity politics and intersectionality allows us to discern which candidates can lead us towards a just future.

In “Our Time is Now,” celebrated national leader and best-selling author Stacey Abrams devotes a chapter to explaining the significance and utility of identity politics. Reflecting on the personal experiences that shaped her engagement with her community and leadership in government, she makes the case for using social identities as a filter for political decision-making.

For some, this may seem fairly obvious - How can we endeavor to make critical decisions that impact the lives of our loved ones and neighbors without considering how our journeys have been shaped by our social locations? For marginalized folks, this is a daily reckoning. Navigating the very real challenges, barriers, and threats levied at us becomes business as usual- the price we pay for daring to exist and for demanding a semblance of dignity in a world hell-bent on our erasure, or at the very least, our suffering. In this way, voting decisions governed by who we are, what we have experienced, and how we need government to function seem to be a natural skill set in our quest for survival.

For others, however, identity politics seem frivolous at best and threatening at worst. For those compelled by the vision of unity, how can we ever achieve our shared ambitions if we view our challenges through differing social identities?

For identity politics to work in alignment towards collective justice, we have to choose the practice of intersectionality: analyzing the varying experiences of oppression enacted by multiple systems of oppression. This requires that we contest unbridled power in its multitude of forms.

When considering identity politics, calling for a feminist mayor might seem to be limiting in scope, but I’d like to suggest that a feminist mayor is beyond these limited definitions and is more of a justice orientation than a trite label. Feminism is more than a particular consciousness- it is a commitment to choice and action that critiques and dismantles all power structures that shape the experiences of gender oppression. Multiple dimensions of power shape the lives of women in varying ways. Fighting for gender equity means advocating along multiple dimensions - racial, economic, disability, nationality, and more.

A feminist mayor is not just aware that women have unique challenges - a feminist mayor is committed to understanding the nuanced experiences of those who are intentionally marginalized, is intentional about connecting the dots between various systems of exploitation, and is dogged in leveraging their own positional authority to create and sustain conditions for justice. A feminist mayor recognizes a system that is fundamentally unequal, and seeks to redress and repair harm, as well as redistribute power.

If history and experience have taught us anything, we know that shared identity is not enough to assume common ideology and collective goals. Representation alone is not justice, and increased participation in a broken system is not enough to dismantle it and create new structures. Therefore, a feminist mayor is best understood through demonstrable action - a mantle anyone with awareness, critical thinking, and commitment can take.

On April 26th, WOMEN’S WAY, along with The Forum of Executive Women, League of Women Voters of Philadelphia, and Every Voice, Every Vote, hosted Sparking Conversations on Women’s Issues: A Mayoral Candidate Forum as an opportunity to hear more from candidates about how they will support women and girls during their time in office.

Heading to the primaries, we will keep our eyes and ears attuned to strategic and transformational change for women in our city. This is not contained in any one issue - reproductive justice is connected to public safety, public safety is connected to economic justice, and so on. Transformational change alters the infrastructure, the rules of the game, and the outcomes worth fighting for. Who is best positioned to lead this charge? We remain committed to evaluating this decision with an intersectional lens because all of our lives depend on it.