It’s International Women’s Month, and there’s a lot we need to sit with. The charity sector has been going through an inferno-level reckoning—because despite all the missions and the great work being done, progress seems to be going backwards. When we think about the civil rights movements and revolutions that emerged in the postwar era, many of us in the Western hemisphere bought into the illusion that we were making progress. It’s clearer than ever that this was a veil.
The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion landscape, regardless of how much hard work was poured into it, did not make changes that structurally affected the way marginalized people are treated. It didn’t erase the trauma and violence deeply embedded in society. Which is why the performative allyship in the charity sector has been revealed for what it is: loads of missions full of people who very much intend to do right by others and want to save the world. Yet the structure by which charities are built—a foundation on guilt from the white supremacist hegemon we live under—means that without realizing it, we repeat the same colonial tropes we endeavor to fix. Without realizing it, we perpetuate the harm we want to see changed.
So this is why we want to be honest at this time, as it’s a big moment for women of colour all around the world—but mostly because it’s a commercialized period of representation. Like most, we believe every day should be a celebration of women. So I want to narrow in on what it truly means to be a part of the revolution and to consciously think about the part we play in it.
At GirlDreamer, we aren’t doing anything performative for International Women’s Day. This is because it is usually an opportunity for funders and charities alike to join in on a day that on the surface deeply celebrates women. Yet when you see the lack of accountability for women’s rights in not only worldwide violations—like the Epstein files, the human rights abuses that affect women daily (the genocides in Sudan, Congo, and Palestine), and more—you see that the abuse of women, at least what is visible, is simply the tip of the iceberg. We see this because we see you. When we speak and work with you, we witness the toll of every day. What it means to have your value unseen in the world at work. The emotional burden of unpaid diversity and inclusion work. The cultural scapegoating of women of colour in white supremacist cultures that still fundamentally exist in the charity sector. You can’t exist in your fullness and with the full weight of your voice or value without being ostracized and fearing retribution.
While war rages everywhere—with the ongoing violence in Iran as the latest front—we want to say that we are no longer “pretending” everything is okay enough to perform celebrations. We have to be honest and brave enough to consciously reflect on what our stance really is in all of this. So we think instead of having a day this month dedicated towards either complete resting, sitting in grief or joy, or rather our staff will simply choose what they’d like to do. Go to events, celebrate their womanhood, anything they’d like. We want to offer a feeling of liberation to simply “be” this month. So that you can take off the masks we all wear to try and placate a sense of normalcy during what is a wildly unprecedented and unpredictable time for women all over the world.
What we want to say in terms of a resounding solution is that we have been reflecting on feminism as a whole. In schools in the Western hemisphere we are taught to believe that feminism’s origin story started with white women’s fight for freedom. One born primarily of middle class, white views of being set free from the clutches of being wives or property. Obviously a worthy cause but by and large, it misses out the deeply ingrained complicated past of feminism. Women’s fight for freedom is a global phenomenon. Women across all races, nationalities, religion, and more have been fighting for liberation for centuries. The danger of Western imperialism using their progress in feminism absolves the blatant hypocrisy that exists for example when using cultures that seemingly are drenched in sexism as an excuse to invade and assault the lives of people living in muslim countries. Who knew that fighting for humanity meant destroying more. It also evades responsibility and accountability for the deeply entrenched misogyny that still faces the Western world.
So well and truly, we need to look at ourselves with greater humanity and question the progress through which we’ve made. That is why this month we’ve focused our attention on five women of colour around the world who have made their mark in history in the guise of human rights abuse, violence against women, disarmament, and liberation. They are the disobedient ones. They understood that freedom begins in the mind.
Nawal El Saadawi (Egyptian Feminist, Physician, Writer, 1931-2021) spent her life fighting what she called “the veiling of the mind.” A physician and psychiatrist, she knew that bodies aren’t the only things that get circumcised—minds are too. She survived prison under Sadat, death threats, and exile, yet never stopped writing about the intersection of patriarchy, religion, and state control. Her radical proposition? That real education doesn’t teach you to obey—it teaches you to question. “If a law is unjust, I have to break it. It’s my right. This is common sense. Creativity means common sense.”
Randa Abdel-Fattah (Palestinian/Australian Sociologist, Lawyer, Novelist) writes what the white gaze cannot see. A sharp critic of how Western feminism talks about Muslim women—as victims to be saved rather than whole people with agency—her work refuses the infantilization of Muslim women’s bodies and choices. In her novels, a hijab isn’t just fabric; it’s a canvas for multiple selves. Her feminism insists that liberation cannot be separated from global struggles against colonialism, occupation, and the policing of identity.
Cecilia Vicuña (Chilean Poet, Artist, Filmmaker, Eco-Feminist) was forced into exile after the US-backed military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende. She developed an artistic language rooted in Indigenous Andean wisdom and ecological consciousness. Her “precarious” art—deliberately fragile—exposes how empire cracks. She proposes that liberation must be both feminist and ecological, because the earth, like women, like Indigenous peoples, has been treated as a resource to extract rather than a life force to respect.
Leymah Roberta Gbowee (Liberian Peace Activist, Nobel Laureate, 2011) led women across religious lines to end a brutal civil war. They sat in public spaces, wore white, and refused to move. Their nonviolent pressure forced the negotiations that ended the war in 2003. But her memoir Mighty Be Our Powers doesn’t sanitize her story. She writes openly about surviving domestic abuse and nearly starving as a refugee. Her power came not despite her wounds, but because she knew intimately what violence does to bodies, to families, to futures—and refused to let it have the last word.
Pornpen Khongkachonkiet (Thai Human Rights Defender, Amnesty International Chair) did the dangerous work of witnessing. As director of the Cross Cultural Foundation, she documented torture and disappearances in Thailand’s restive south, turning the suffering of the invisible into reports the government could not ignore. For this, the Thai military charged her with defamation. She faced seven years in prison for telling the truth. She showed up to court, defended the evidence, and won. A reminder that the pen, when attached to courage, is still mightier than those who rule by fear.
Five women. Four continents. One truth: the first prison is the mind. Before bodies are caged, before voices are silenced, before revolutions are crushed—there is an education that teaches us to obey. Their work is the antidote. They teach us to question professors who demand citation over thought. To refuse gazes that reduce us to stereotypes. To make art that exposes how fragile empire really is. To organize across differences with wounds unhealed. To document the truth even when the state calls it a crime.
What we must learn from these titans of history is that we as members of the charity sector need not comply with the rules. We must not obey. When we are meant to fight for the powerless, we must not succumb to the rules of the powerful. So like them, we will disobey. In that fight and in that risk is where true liberation happens. Because the fight for freedom—for not just women but for us all—starts with facing our fear to confront the world as we know it and transform it into something new. Every step counts. This is just one of our many steps.
Happy International Women’s Day. May you disobey.
