“Who else is gonna do it if we don't?” Gender, education, and the crisis of care in the 2018 West Virginia teachers' strike

Abstract

AbstractIn 2018, a sequence of powerful education strikes and work stoppages across the United States sent shock waves through the country's public education system. This eruption of collective workers' organization was strongly led by women teachers responding to the current crisis of care, demanding resources, dignity, and justice for themselves, the children they teach, and their communities. While mainstream reports often represent these actions as traditional labor and/or feminist struggles, our research demonstrates that they were sites of more nuanced response to “care extraction” in education, and for understanding how constructions of gender and gender injustice both gave rise to the strikes and shaped their unfolding. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 10 teacher‐activists who participated in the West Virginia strikes, we examine how teachers' labor is being transformed in a context of postindustrial austerity, illustrate the complex political identity of the strike actions, and explore the relationship between specific constructions of gendered labor and collective organizing in US public education today.