Every year when calendars mark International Women’s Day on March 8th many people take no notice. But a lot of women around the world do, as we mourn the travesties that are still being perpetrated against females of all ages in most places on the globe. It’s worrying to note that we must begin this year witnessing (or ignoring) a staggering increase in political, personal, and cultural misogyny ranging from sexual abuse, anti-woman legislation, and violence.

Take for example a CNN report about the Taliban which has just decreed that men can beat their wives “so long as they don’t break bones or leave lasting wounds.” A husband could be jailed for 15 days if there is physical evidence of assault. 15 days! That is if a woman seeks justice even though her testimony will be worth half that of her husband’s.

Not all oppression of women is so dramatic. An article in The Guardian cited the street behavior of men who push women aside on the pavement, or ogle and cat-call them. “Loosening the grip men hold over all public space would go a long way toward helping women feel less oppressed,” Lucy Pasha-Robinson wrote in the article, adding that “men who are so angry they are lasing out at random women for their need to feel power.”

In between those two examples there are myriad ways to keep women in their place, which in many cultures, is seen by feminists as the angel in the house or the madwoman in the attic.

Consider the ominous restraints on women’s autonomy articulated in the infamous Project 2025, which are now becoming the mantra of arch conservative legislators here in our so-called developed nation. Bans on abortion. Legislators going so far as to advocate executing women who have them. Imprisonment for miscarriage. Attempts to keep women from voting, and more, as Open Democracy points out citing legislative proposals and policy agendas that are on the table since Congress became dominated by conservative, rightwing zealots .

Then there’s the narrowing of how sex is defined, the reduced funding for reproductive health services which could save women’s lives, the attempts to defund Planned Parenthood and the possibility of reinstating the Comstock Act to remove access to abortion medication. Add to that the lack of childcare, aimed at physically and psychologically limiting women’s autonomy, economic security, and self-determination. It’s all about keeping us barefoot, pregnant, and afraid. All of that suppression constitutes acts of violence.

So does the attempt to establish fetal personhood. The far right also wants to go further by defining “sex” as a biological assignment at birth which of course is meant to discriminate against transgender women. Other proposed bills are designed to eliminate funding for family planning, and limit contraception based on income. Then there’s the SAVE Act that would require people to show proof of citizenship to vote, creating barriers for married women who took their husband’s surname.

All these repressive legislative ideas and proposals are clearly forms of controlling women’s lives, including their access to education, healthcare, economic security, and a public presence in most sectors of society. The draconian idea of incentivizing women monetarily to bear children while restrictions on childcare and parental leave speaks loudly to an insidious agenda articulated by men who fear women’s intelligence, energy, competence, and agency.

When you connect the dots, it soon becomes clear that “the rising global far right is violent, racist and misogynistic – and depends on exploiting women,” as Sian Norris put it in Open Democracy.”

If you prefer a visual that represents political violence against women and girls, you have only to see ICE shooting Renee Good in the face or dragging women by their hair out of their cars and putting them in choke holds. You could watch the Epstein/Maxwell survivors who are brave enough to share their stories. Or you could shudder to see pictures of babies and children being torn from their mothers at schools and workplaces while adolescent girls, called Blue Butterflies, are sequestered in separate spaces likely to be sexually abused or trafficked. If that doesn’t work, look at nearly 200 beautiful faces of Iranian little girls slaughtered in their school, or peek at Burka-clad women with male escorts in Afghanistan streets while their female children are forbidden to attend school.

It’s important to understand that violence against women and girls in any form violates their basic human rights. These violations are grounded in centuries of patriarchal societies who have viewed women as a threat to male power. That threat goes beyond individual men. It occurs at numerous structural levels and in male-dominated institutions in both private and public sectors.

Eliminating the injustices and deep harm these longstanding practices and behaviors cause women is a monumental task. We must recognize it, understand it, care about it, and condemn it for more than one day or month a year, because as writer Rebecca Solnit has said, “We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

# # #

Elayne writes from Brattleboro, Vt.

In 2025 the National World War 2 Museum declared on their website that “The concept of genocide has fundamentally altered international law, history, and global geopolitics forever, transforming the way we understand mass violence in the modern world.”

The word, coined by a Polish Jewish Lawyer in response to the Holocaust, referred to a historic practice as it relates to post war actions. Derived from the ancient Greek word meaning race or tribe and the Latin word for killing, as in homicide, infanticide, and femicide, the lawyer added that “genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation. It signifies a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”

After the Department of Education declared women-dominated professions like nursing, teaching, social work, and other careers did not align with their definition of a “professional degree,” which “distinguishes programs that qualify for higher loan limits, not a value judgement about the importance of programs.” Tell that to any healthcare professional worthy of recognition, respect, benefits, and professional pride.

Take nursing for example. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, “nursing is the nation's largest healthcare profession, with nearly 4.7 million registered nurses (RNs) nationwide. Of all licensed RNs, 89% are employed in nursing.”

Here’s a Facebook post by one of them. “Can you imagine obtaining three college degrees, three national certificates, obtaining thousands of hours in clinical practice before even entering the work force, and then holding people’s lives in your hands, caring for them during the hardest moments in their lives, diagnosing and prescribing for them. And then being told that you aren’t a professional.”

The president’s recent verbal attacks aimed at women journalists reveals another disrespected sector where females often prevail. His rants against them are staggering. They include telling a reporter to be “quiet, Piggy,” followed by calling another reporter ugly, and third one a "terrible person."

It seems the perfect time to coin another new word: Gendercide. By that I mean the disappearing of women from professions, public squares, politics, pulpits and tables of decision-making. It’s pure Handmaids Tale, and it’s designed to send women back to the suburbs of post WWII where, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in her 1898 book, Women and Economics, “Women were going mad all for the good of the gold ring” in her era. Or as Betty Friedan said after WWII, they were dying from “the problem that had no name.”

The reason for disappearing women isn’t just born of ridiculous politics. It’s noteworthy that several healthcare professionals are mandated to report sexual abuse, and female reporters ask tough questions.

The problem of female oppression and dismissal or removal is even bigger. It resides in sex assault and trafficking of women and girls, because its survivors courageously share their stories.

It’s part of the tragedy of domestic violence. The United Nations reported in 2024 that 50,000 women were killed that year because of the violence perpetrated by someone they lived with or knew. The report noted that’s one death every ten minutes.

Child marriage is still legal in 34 states in America with some exceptions like judicial or parental approval, and the disappearance and murder of indigenous women and girls remains a silent crisis that includes homicide, sexual assault, and trafficking. On some reservations murder rates are more than ten times the national average.

The discrimination against and silencing of women have a long history and continuity that includes abuse and violence. It goes back to ancient history. Philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome believed women had no place in politics or public discourse. Pilgrim puritanism treated women and girls harshly, demanding obedience. In colonial times girls were married by age 14 and those who weren’t wed by 25 were socially humiliated. (Even as late as the 1960s women were pitied if not married in their early 20s). How about the Salem witch trials of the 17th century. And Joan d’Arc who was burned alive because men were fiercely afraid of her.

In Victorian times married women were the legal property of their husbands and had no control of their finances whether by owning land or inheritance. They couldn’t vote or appear in court as a witness. At the turn of the century Edith Wharton’s novels about the Gilden Age reveal these conventions for a fin de siècle generation. Later, suffragists were beaten and force-fed in filthy prisons for wanting women to vote.

Today, women who face the fear of dying or imprisonment if they have an abortion, miscarriage, or high-risk pregnancy are disposable. Some male legislators have suggested that women who have abortions be executed. That’s how far we’ve fallen into the legacy of patriarchy and its desperate hatred and fear of women. Whether affluent or poor, single or married, white or black/brown, we are all at risk of Gendercide - the killing of women professionally, economically, emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

In these times, we must realize the context and connection throughout women’s history and understand how it relates to our lives and our place in the world now. It only takes one nurse’s, one teacher’s, one social worker’s, one victim’s testimony to see that we need a new word: Gendercide.

We must say it, explain it, and refuse it.