Viv did it when it was impossible

Women's History Month, Social Work Month, Both Feel So Personal Right Now

My very first boss at my very first job out of undergrad was the first person to tell me there are no such things as coincidences. At the time, I was like okay, Adrian, whatever you say. Something like 14 years later, I am a believer, and probably overuse the phrase. 

So to me, it is no coincidence that Women's History Month and Social Work Month are both celebrated in March. I've been sitting with that overlap this year more than usual. I have been weighing whether or not I want to speak on it. How I’ll come off, the point of calling it out, but as we round out March, it feels too important to me not to address.

I wish I could find the paper I wrote in graduate school about my upbringing. I don't remember the exact assignment, but I remember what I wrote about: being raised by strong women, and how early that shaped everything about me.

My mother became my primary caregiver when I was ten after she and my dad separated. My eldest aunt was divorced and remarried sometime in the early 2000s.  My mom’s youngest sister, also divorced. My cousins, both women. And our extended family, led by my great-aunt, who provided care and support to my grandmother as she navigated raising those three daughters alone. 

My maternal family, all women. My grandmother raised three daughters on her own. For context, my mother graduated in 1979. It wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 that women in the U.S. gained the full, independent legal right to own property, obtain credit, and secure mortgages without a male co-signer. She was doing the single mother thing when it was nearly impossible for women to be independent. 

What I knew early, even if I didn't fully understand it yet, was that the women in my family were doing extraordinary things. Nobody was calling it resilience. Nobody was giving them a month (Women’s History month wasn’t officially designated by congress until 1987!) 

Growing up as a singular child in a world that felt so different from what I saw in my life, I often felt othered. I wasn't always sure where I fit or belonged. But I was endlessly curious about people, their lives, their choices, what shaped them. Looking back, I think that curiosity was my way of trying to understand how we all fit in this world together. 

Turns out, that feeling was the beginning of my social work identity. I just didn't know it yet.

I want to be honest here, because I've said this before and I stand behind it: social work is not perfect. I am not perfect. I have been part of systems during my career that caused harm, even when that wasn't the intention. I’ve worked at the intersection of what a person needs and what is available. What they need vs what they qualify for. To be so sick or so in need, but not sick enough, not poor enough, not disabled enough. 

But what I love about this profession — what keeps me in it — is looking at people as humans not as problems to fix. We look at people like human beings shaped by the systems around them, not by judging them, labeling them, or defining them by their circumstances. 

At the core, social work is about understanding how power works. Who has it. Who doesn't. And what happens to people when the systems meant to protect them or support them stop working. A lot of the time, these systems were never built for them in the first place.

That framework has a name: intersectionality. It's a term coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how different parts of a person's identity — race, gender, class, ability — don't exist in isolation. They overlap. And those overlaps create specific, compounded experiences of both privilege and oppression that you can't understand by looking at just one piece.

I think about both of my grandmothers. One, a single mother, during a time when women’s independence could only be found at the intersection of having a husband. The other, she met an American Sailor that brought her from the Philippines to the US. Two women, from different places, raising children in a much different era, with a different set of rules, standards, and expectations. Each one of the layers mattered. And you can’t understand them fully without looking at their experiences and those layers all together. 

That's intersectionality. And once you learn it, you can't unsee it.

Women have faced systemic oppression for centuries. That's not being hyperbolic. It's documented history. The right to vote, to own property, to access education, to make decisions about their own bodies: none of these came without a fight, and none of them arrived all at once.

What feels different right now is the pace and the openness of the reversal. The timeline doesn’t make sense.

We are watching legislation move backwards. Creating systems uphold limitations to women's reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. We are currently seeing proposed policy that would make it harder for women to vote — specifically targeting name changes and newly required documentation that disproportionately affects women after marriage or divorce. There is active conversation about moving toward one vote per household. If you follow that to its logical end, you understand what it means. And if it didn’t quite register, it means the husband will vote (speak) for the household.

At the same time, the cultural conversation has shifted with the legislation. There is a real, visible rise in what I'd call serious toxic masculinity. This is not just locker room talk, but a coordinated pushback against women's visibility, authority, and independence. A pull toward an older paradigm where a woman's place is at home, domestic, defined by her relationship to a man. One where women are property to be used as a man pleases. 

I think about where we are now. I sit wondering and waiting when men in power are going to be held accountable for their crimes against women and children. But the longer I sit with it, and the more time that goes by without repercussions, I realize how women and children have been preyed on since the beginning of time. Using rape as an act of war and colonization. These things were never truly happening in silence or in the dark. They were just happening in systems of money and power. Where those with money and power abide by a different set of rules than the rest of us. 

I am not saying this to be dramatic, to be anti-man, to be overly political. I am saying it because I live in a woman's body, one that wants to bear children. One that needed a medical procedure that’s considered an abortion to end a non viable pregnancy. One who may possibly have a daughter. One to carry on the legacy of strong and empowered women, but then I look at the systems I once trusted to protect me, and they no longer feel reliable or protective. 

I feel like along the way, people stopped considering women as an oppressed group — especially American women. I get it. When we think about oppression, we often think about the most extreme, visible versions of it. We think about oppression in a historical context or reserve it for places far far away.

But oppression doesn't always look like what we picture. It’s not always a war torn or 3rd world country. Sometimes it looks like a policy. Sometimes it looks like a culture that quietly rewards certain kinds of women and punishes others. It looks like a woman not having access to life saving medical care because the procedure is considered an abortion

Social work asks us to look beyond the individual choices people make, and at the environment those choices are made inside of. When you start looking at women's lived experiences through that lens, you can see the real complicated truth. 

Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all of this. I've been sitting with how uncomfortable it is to not know what to do or how to help. To wonder when the next shoe is going to drop. To be filled with rage. 

There's a version of this essay where I wrap it up with something actionable. 

Stay informed. 

Vote. 

Support women-owned businesses. 

Believe women. 

And absolutely do ALL of those things, but I have to admit that also feels like bringing a knife to a gun fight. 

Here’s the thing: you cannot cope your way out of systemic oppression. I cannot deep-breathe my way into bodily autonomy. I cannot journal my way into having a voice in a system that is actively working to silence it.

What I refuse to do is pretend things are fine when they aren't. I can call out what I'm seeing even when it's scary and uncomfortable — especially when it's uncomfortable.

I will forever honor the women who raised me. Who did extraordinary things in difficult systems without anyone calling it remarkable. I will let that remind me that survival in itself is an act of resistance.

My grandmothers didn't have language for intersectionality. They didn't have a month celebrating them. They had circumstances and they figured it out.

My mother never thought she would see Roe be overturned in her lifetime. 

It's in my nature to fight, to solve, to fix, but the helplessness seems to get louder as the days go by. And since there are 5 days left in March, and this blog is my own personal void to scream into…that’s what I’m doing.

If you need to scream into the void, you know I’m your girl. If you want to give your nervous system, mind, soul a little break, there’s always sound. And you know I’m your girl for that too.