Who Carries the Movement?

Women, sustaining labor, and the unfinished ethics of liberation

Content note: Brief discussion of sexual violence and threats.

Political movements are often remembered through their most visible moments: the speech, the march, the confrontation, the arrest, the person standing before a microphone. But a movement does not survive on visible moments alone. Someone opens the room, answers the telephone, prepares the food, or watches the children. Someone types the statement, visits the prisoner, tends to the injured, or settles a disagreement. Someone remembers what was promised and returns the next morning.

Much of that work has been done by women, whose contributions have also included developing political projects, deciding what liberation should mean, organizing resistance, and leading. Care is neither naturally women’s work nor the limit of women’s political lives. Yet work that is essential to a movement can leave the person doing it with less freedom and less say in its direction.

One familiar explanation is that women did the work while men received the credit. Recovering that history matters, although recognition can arrive without changing the arrangements that made women’s work invisible in the first place. A movement may celebrate their contribution while leaving them to bear the same burdens, with little say over decisions and little protection when something goes wrong.

Even placing a woman in leadership may leave the ordinary distribution of labor untouched. To understand what liberation requires within a movement, we have to ask how it supports the people whose labor makes collective action possible, including whether they can build lives beyond the demands placed upon them.

The other image of the Black Panthers

The Black Panther Party provides a powerful case because its history contains both an extraordinary achievement and an unresolved warning.

The Panthers are commonly remembered through images of armed men, leather jackets, political speeches, and confrontations with police. That image leaves out much of what the Party actually built through community survival programs, including breakfasts for children, grocery distributions, medical screening, education, and clothing.¹ These programs were part of its political argument: practical support helped make it possible for people to survive, learn, organize, and exercise power.

Women were central to that work. At a 2022 UC Berkeley gathering, photographer Stephen Shames, who documented the Panthers, described women as nearly two-thirds of the membership and said that they ran most programs in some chapters. Ericka Huggins directed the Oakland Community School from 1973 to 1981. Women organized food, worked in clinics, produced the newspaper, educated children, raised funds, maintained offices, and held chapters together under extraordinary pressure.¹

This work made women participants in shaping the movement, even as they disputed the roles assigned to them. A 1969 discussion among six unnamed Panther women records both gendered restrictions and efforts to change them. The women recalled earlier assignments to clerical work while also describing reorganization and wider participation in writing, public speaking, and education. Their account presents women helping reshape the Party from within.²

That history matters to the argument here because sharing necessary work and sharing the power to shape an organization are connected. The ethical issue is how assignments affect people’s opportunities to develop and lead, including whether they have a say in changing those assignments.

Ericka Huggins later recalled encountering different gender arrangements in different chapters. In Los Angeles, she said, tasks were not divided by gender; at a meeting in Oakland, however, women prepared the food and were told that the men would eat first. Huggins, then pregnant and hungry, refused to wait.³ The incident brings everyday power into view through the most ordinary of needs: who may eat, who must serve, and whose hunger is expected to wait.

Any account that stops at unequal chores would still understate the danger. In an oral history, Huggins described confronting Huey Newton when his behavior and use of school funds were harming the Oakland Community School. Huggins said that Newton threatened her, repeatedly raped her, and threatened her children if she spoke about the assaults.⁴

Her testimony belongs in an inquiry into whether movements support the women who sustain them. I read it as a warning that building protective institutions for a community does not ensure protection for women within the organization itself.

This evidence should not be used to reduce the Party to its failures. The Panthers created real opportunities for women’s leadership, challenged prevailing gender roles, and built institutions that materially improved people’s lives. Understanding the Party also requires attention to the racism, poverty, policing, imprisonment, and federal repression under which its members worked. Those pressures are part of the explanation of its circumstances, not an excuse for abuses committed within it.

Under such pressure, decisions about who bears the work and who receives protection become more consequential. The Party’s history raises a difficult possibility: a movement can advance liberation, create institutions of care, and give women substantial responsibility while still failing to support or protect them adequately. Taking its achievements seriously requires attention to the people who made them possible and the costs they carried.

What must continue—and for whom?

Imagine a neighborhood breakfast program that opens every school morning. The children eat, attendance is steady, and the organizers can truthfully say that it is working. Now imagine that the woman keeping it open has stopped taking an evening class, rarely sees her own family without also doing program work, and cannot find anyone to cover a morning when she is ill.

The program continues. Important parts of her life do not.

This is an imagined example, not a claim about a particular Panther program. It brings into view the question at the center of the ethical theory I am developing, Living Continuance: what must people be able to carry forward in their lives, and what do we owe one another in making that possible?

By continuance, I mean more than staying alive or keeping an organization running. A person needs some real room to learn, maintain relationships, recover, pursue worthwhile activities, reconsider a commitment, and help shape the life she shares with others. These possibilities depend on material things—food, shelter, health, time—but also on how people treat her.

A woman may formally be allowed to leave a role while facing threats, humiliation, or the loss of her community if she does. To understand the choice she actually has, we need to consider what leaving would mean in the circumstances of her life.

Caring for people can involve demanding commitments, and some losses cannot be prevented. The question is whether those commitments leave people reasonable room to carry forward lives of their own. Keeping an organization going tells us little about this unless we also ask whose opportunities are being preserved and whose are being used up.

The argument here begins with a moral judgment: the children’s opportunity to eat, learn, and participate in life matters, and so does the woman’s. Neither becomes morally invisible because the other depends on help.

A reason to help is not an assignment for life

The children’s need gives us a real reason to consider helping, even as we ask what that help demands of the woman. Part of what I want Living Continuance to explain is this positive side of ethical life: why another person’s worthwhile activity can count in favor of our support before we have promised anything.

My proposal starts from the importance of that person’s life, not from what helping might earn us. A child’s opportunity to learn can give a volunteer a reason to help even when the child is a stranger and no reputation, gratitude, or repayment is at stake. Showing that a program helps people does not, by itself, explain why that benefit gives a particular person a reason to help. Developing that further argument remains part of my work on the theory.

Even if we accept that there is a reason to help, we still need to work out what help is needed, who can provide it, and what it would cost them. Existing commitments matter, but so does how the work should be shared.

Suppose the woman agrees to prepare breakfast on Monday. The organizers and children then have a reason to rely on her for that morning, within the limits of what she has agreed to do. A claim to every morning that follows would need a further justification, as would an expectation that cooking should become her permanent role simply because she does it well.

There are three different questions here: whether there is a reason to help, whether this person owes a particular contribution, and whether someone else has the right to direct or compel her. The answer to the first does not automatically answer the other two. A movement needs to justify the responsibility it assigns, and it needs a further justification for the authority it exercises.

That distinction matters especially when care is involved, because questioning who must provide the children’s breakfast need not diminish the importance of their being fed.

The caregiver has a life, too

The woman’s losses count for more than their effect on the program. If we care about her exhaustion only because it will make her less effective, we are still valuing her mainly as a way of keeping breakfast on the table.

Her education, relationships, safety, and future matter because they are parts of her life, and their importance remains when she becomes useful to someone else. Even if the movement could replace her tomorrow, it would still owe her fair treatment today.

The children may benefit while the woman bears costs that have never been fairly discussed or shared. Assessing the program’s success therefore requires us to look at the working arrangements through which that benefit is produced.

The comparison must also be honest. If we describe the children’s learning, health, and family circumstances in rich detail while reducing her losses to “a few hours,” we may conceal the only time she has to study, rest, or be with her own children. Equally, an account that describes her plans vividly while treating the children as an inconvenient demand leaves out their hunger and dependence. Both lives need to remain visible in the description.

Taking both lives seriously does not mean that every need has equal urgency or that either side always comes first. If no substitute is available, a missed breakfast may hurt children who have done nothing wrong. A prior commitment may also create responsibilities for notice or a handover. These are difficult questions, not reasons to erase either person from the account.

Living Continuance does not yet supply a complete rule for every such conflict. The argument here is narrower: the good a movement does cannot, on its own, justify treating the people who do the work as indefinitely available.

How contribution becomes confinement

An open-ended responsibility can develop through ordinary habits, without anyone formally deciding to create it. Return to the imagined breakfast program. The woman volunteers for a morning, then covers another because someone is absent. As she learns which supplier will donate food and which children need extra attention, she becomes the person everyone calls. Other organizers gradually stop learning the work because she already knows how to do it.

Shared work necessarily involves some reliance, but here that reliance grows without a corresponding agreement about her responsibilities, the support she needs, or who will take her place. Her contribution gradually becomes the organization’s plan. When the organization then presents its dependence on her as the reason she cannot leave, the competence that made her valuable has become a source of confinement.

The same process can separate responsibility from influence. She may be expected to keep the program operating without being able to question its schedule, obtain more resources, or challenge promises made by leaders. Others announce an expansion; she must somehow make it happen. When she objects, the objection is described as a lack of commitment to the children rather than a warning about what the work requires.

Children, families, other workers, and the wider community also have claims, so doing the most work cannot by itself confer a right to rule the movement. The claim here is more specific: a person who is held responsible for delivering an outcome should have a meaningful say over the conditions under which she must deliver it.

Suppose repeated understaffing leaves her so short of sleep that she misses a morning’s commitment. The missed breakfast still needs an answer, but calling her unreliable without examining the workload the movement helped create turns a consequence of the arrangement into evidence against her character.

This is the pattern I examine in my work on how harm becomes evidence: an institution contributes to a person’s difficulty, removes that history from its account, and then uses the difficulty to justify distrust, exclusion, or further control. A fair account can hold her answerable for a mistake while also examining how it came about and who had the power to prevent it.

Praise can make the arrangement harder to question. Calling her indispensable may sound generous while concealing the fact that no one is preparing to take over when she needs rest. Even an award recognizing years of work can leave the next morning’s schedule untouched. Gratitude matters, but repair requires attention to the conditions in which she is expected to continue.

What support would mean in practice

Supporting women means helping create conditions in which they can contribute while retaining choices, relationships, and a future of their own. That includes respecting a woman’s wish to take part in strategy or leadership, even when the work is demanding or dangerous. Excluding her in the name of protection can take away the voice she needs to shape those conditions.

In the imagined breakfast program, support might involve training substitutes, sharing early shifts, providing child care, paying expenses, and deciding together what the program can honestly promise. These arrangements should also leave her a realistic path into another kind of work if she wants one. A larger role in administering “women’s programs” is little help if it closes off the work she hoped to do.

Several kinds of change matter here, and they serve different purposes. Recognition begins with an accurate account of the contribution: who designed the program, secured supplies, prepared meals, kept records, and built relationships with families. Such an account makes the judgment and leadership within that work visible alongside the willingness to serve.

Fair distribution requires looking beyond titles and scheduled hours to the unexpected calls, the paid work someone gives up, and the responsibility that follows her home when she is supposedly off duty. People may reasonably take on different tasks, but the organization should be able to explain those differences without assuming that women will absorb whatever remains.

Meaningful influence gives her ways to question demands, help set workable limits, and reach people who can change decisions. This is what I mean by answerable authority: people with decision-making power must be required to explain themselves, hear those affected, and correct decisions when warranted. A meeting in which she may speak but nothing can change is not enough.

When a movement has already done wrong, repair must address the particular harm. It may include payment for unpaid work, restoring a lost opportunity, correcting an unfair account, changing a harmful arrangement, or acknowledging a loss that cannot be undone. An apology may matter deeply while leaving other responses necessary.

Protection from harassment and violence belongs throughout these concerns, and it cannot be reduced to workload management. A woman who reports harm needs a credible route to help that is not controlled by the person she is accusing. She should not have to choose between her safety and the continued existence of the program she helped build. Nor does her contribution create her right to protection: that right is not a reward for useful service.

These distinctions help explain why a visible improvement may leave the underlying problem in place. A title can recognize someone’s contribution while giving her little control over resources, just as payment can improve her finances while leaving her exposed to threats. To judge the change, we need to ask what it makes possible in her life and what burdens remain. That is the thought behind the principle I propose here:

A movement acts unjustly when it depends on a person’s continuing work but denies her the support, protection, reasonable limits, and meaningful say needed to remain a participant in both the movement and her own life.

In ordinary terms: if a movement relies on someone’s work, it must also face what doing that work requires of her. It cannot count her contribution as shared while treating its costs as hers alone.

Applying this principle requires care, especially when resources are scarce and commitments are demanding. We need to examine what could reasonably be done, what has been agreed, whose needs are at stake, and whether people can challenge the arrangement without punishment. Shortage alone does not establish a refusal of support, and a demanding commitment may still be one a person has good reason to accept.

When there really is not enough

The hardest objection concerns what movements can do when there really is too little to go around. Repression, unstable donations, and urgent needs abandoned by larger institutions may leave them with no spare worker, no money for wages, and no easy way to reduce a program without harming people.

An appeal to self-care will not create a replacement, and telling the organizer to step away may leave her facing an intolerable choice between her own needs and people she knows will suffer. That difficulty gives the movement a reason to face the shortage together, rather than allowing it to remain a private emergency inside one woman’s life.

The organization can ask whether others can learn the work, whether a partner can share it, whether promises exceed actual capacity, or whether less urgent activity should give way. Each choice has costs, and reducing a service may leave a real need unmet. A movement should say so honestly rather than describe a program as fully supported because one person has quietly supplied the missing time, money, and sleep.

An urgent situation may justify an extraordinary effort without settling who must make that effort each time urgency returns. When a crisis recurs, decisions about responsibility need to be renewed openly so that an exceptional contribution does not silently become one person’s permanent assignment.

Existing commitments still matter: where it is safe and feasible, someone leaving a role may owe notice, information, or help with a transition. Those responsibilities need limits, especially when the organization has made no serious effort to train anyone. In that situation, “You may leave once you find your own replacement” can amount to a prohibition on leaving. And a duty to help with a handover is not a duty to remain exposed to violence.

People can freely make care central to their lives. Respecting that choice means sharing responsibility for the conditions under which they give it, rather than treating their devotion as a reason to leave them carrying the costs alone.

What a movement should ask itself

A movement can begin with questions that do not require any philosophical vocabulary:

• Who does the work before and after the visible event, and who decides what that work will be?
• When a person says the load is too much, what can actually change?
• Whose education, health, relationships, or future plans are being sacrificed to keep the program running?
• Can someone report harm without the accused controlling the response?
• Can a person change roles or leave through a realistic transition?
• When something goes wrong, do we examine the arrangement as well as the individual?

The answers matter more than the presence of a policy or the language of appreciation. A commitment to support women becomes credible when it changes what they can do, what they must endure, and whom they can call upon for help.

A movement people can live inside

Recovering women’s work in political and social movements gives us more than a fuller list of people to honor. It also gives us grounds to ask how their work came to be overlooked, who benefited from it, and what support they were denied.

The Black Panther Party’s community programs made care part of political action by helping create conditions in which people could live, learn, eat, heal, and act together. The ethical lesson I draw from that history is that the people who build such conditions must be able to share in them. Their work should help open a future they can inhabit, too.

A movement’s promise of a better shared world cannot, by itself, justify narrowing the lives of those who carry it. Its own survival is not sufficient evidence of success if women must surrender their safety, voice, or future to secure it. Their lives matter beyond what they contribute to the cause, and that is part of what makes the cause worth pursuing.

The movement that wants a livable world must become a place where the people keeping it alive can also live.

Author’s note

Living Continuance is an ethical theory I am still developing. This essay explains the part of its argument relevant here rather than asking readers to rely on an unpublished account. It also draws on my work on institutional harm and repair. It does not offer a final rule for every conflict between people who need care and those who provide it. The breakfast-program example is illustrative, not a reconstruction of Panther history; the historical claims are linked to their sources.

Sources and further reading

The four sources below support the historical discussion. The books listed afterward offer a wider reading context, including feminist work on care, dependency, and democracy.

1. UC Berkeley. “Women of the Black Panther Party.” Discussion with Ericka Huggins, Judy Juanita, and Madalynn Rucker, preceded by a photographic presentation by Stephen Shames. Event held in October 2022; transcript published February 10, 2023.
2. “Panther Sisters on Women’s Liberation.” Interview at Black Panther Party Headquarters, Oakland, September 17, 1969. See the scanned interview reprint, beginning on the first PDF sheet and continuing across the next sheets, and the archive introduction at UC Berkeley’s The Berkeley Revolution. The discussion of earlier assignments and subsequent changes appears on the first three sheets; other material is printed on facing pages.
3. Phillips, Mary Frances. “How Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party Attempted to Liberate Black Women in America.” NYU Press, February 14, 2025.
4. Huggins, Ericka. An Oral History with Ericka Huggins. Interviews by Fiona Thompson, 2007; Oral History Center, UC Berkeley, 2010. Printed pp. 94–95 address the school confrontation and threat; pp. 100–101 contain her account of the assaults and threats against her children. See also the archive introduction. The essay attributes these events to Huggins’s testimony.

Further reading

• Brown, Elaine. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. Pantheon, 1992.
• Farmer, Ashley D. Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era. University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
• Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. Routledge, 1999.
• Nelson, Alondra. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
• Phillips, Mary Frances. Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins. NYU Press, 2025.
• Spencer, Robyn C. The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland. Duke University Press, 2016.
• Tronto, Joan C. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York University Press, 2013.