It’s Women’s History Month, and though we here at Backpack Brigade focus primarily on preventing childhood hunger, we are acutely aware that children aren’t the only members of America’s families suffering from food insecurity. In fact, women are more disproportionately impacted by food insecurity than any other group, especially when factoring in age, marital status, and race. It’s a problem that persists, not only because of societal biases and expectations for women, but because women themselves are more willing to accept personal hunger so that their children and families have enough to eat.
Unpacking this problem starts at the social level. Even in the 21st century, when so much alleged progress has been made in terms of gender equality, women are still underpaid and underemployed as compared to men. Women with children are even more impacted, as pregnancy, birth, and caregiving take a toll on women’s ability work, leading to fewer hours, lower wages, greater loss of employment, or inability to be employed.
America, in particular, offers few safety nets to women with children. The Family and Medical Leave Act only protects unpaid maternity and family care leave. Childcare is exorbitantly expensive and, especially in rural areas, not readily available. Food access programs like SNAP and WIC are under constant threat from budget shortfalls, and even dual income households – not to mention single-parent households (which are also disproportionately headed by women) – are struggling under rising costs of living and the expiration of COVID-era tax benefits for working families.
In addition, society expects and has conditioned women to believe that the primary burden of caregiving falls to them, not just for their own children, but to aging parents, ailing family members, and their communities at large. Women pay to care give – increased absenteeism, reduced productivity, and inflexible schedules resulting from caregiving duties – cost women real dollars in terms of reduced work opportunities and lost income. As a result, women have a harder time affording basics like childcare, rent, food, and utilities.
When faced with the hard choice of whether to afford rent or food, women will often choose to suffer hunger themselves so that their families have enough to eat. Women in food insecure households commonly skip meals to provide adequate food to their children. The resulting illness, obesity, stress, depression, mood swings, and chronic health issues – the SAME impacts that affect children – lead to greater difficulty gaining and retaining employment. The reduced ability to work leads to a dramatically reduced income, leading to harder economic choices, and the spiral of poverty continues.
So, what can we do? This time, we start at the micro-level: make food available to everyone who needs it. Fund, support, and protect food banks, home meal delivery services, school meal programs, and organizations like Backpack Brigade or Lifelong’s Chicken Soup Brigade which address niche issues of food insecurity. They might not serve women directly, but they do take the pressure off so that women can work, take better care of themselves, and make the contents of the refrigerator stretch a little further.
The next step is to loudly raise your voices in support of policies that improve food security: expanding the Working Families Tax Credit; SNAP and WIC; SUNBucks/Summer EBT; and school meal programs – both breakfast and lunch – for all kids. With legislative budgets under pressure, policymakers are facing some hard choices. They need to hear from you, their constituents, to help them prioritize spending for the next fiscal year. Meeting basic human needs – like enough food to eat – should be priority number one. If you believe that, too, make sure you call, write, or email your state and local representatives and let them know.
Finally, we as a society can do a lot to improve circumstances for women so that basic survival becomes less of a struggle in this country. For starters, we can all go ahead and acknowledge that women are equal to men in every way and ensure that they receive the same rights and freedoms as men. We can insist on wage equality, and push for greater corporate transparency when it comes to wage structures. We can ask lawmakers to enact policies that support families, including expanded tax credits for childcare, and we can even talk about the importance of subsidized childcare for low-income households. We can ask for greater protections for our sick and elderly citizens, so that the burden of care isn’t disproportionately placed on women already working and caring for small children. And we can come together as communities, to support our friends and neighbors, to lend a hand or provide a meal, to offer assistance when policies and dollars threaten to let vulnerable women and children slip through the cracks.
This Women’s History Month, we encourage you to find a way, whether at the micro level or with a big initiative to change the big picture, to change women’s history, so we can move toward a hunger-free future.
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