April 29th, 2005
Feminist Tax Resistance
“The analysis of feminist tax resistance recognizes that violence exists in many forms besides war and in many spheres beyond the military. Our experiences as women oppressed by a (hetero)sexist society ha[ve] taught us a great deal about the many forms of violence. ‘We know more about violence,’ Andrea Dworkin writes, ‘than any other people on the face of this earth. We have absorbed such quantities of it–as women, and as Jews, as Blacks, as Vietnamese, Native Americans, etc….’ And from our experiences we have come to understand that ‘nonviolence must begin for us in the refusal to be violated, in the refusal to be victimized.’ (’Redefining Violence’ in Our Blood, Andrea Dworkin, Harper and Row, 1976)
“Women are especially targets of violence–of not only the violence of rape, battering, and pornography, but of the violence of budget cuts as well. A feminist analysis of racism, classism, ageism, sexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression leads us to broaden our resistance to the social institutionalization of violence: the government does not represent us as women, as lesbians, as mothers, and therefore as feminists, we do not support the government. We refuse to pay for the violation and victimization of others.
“Would you in your daily life give money to people you knew to be dishonest and destructive? To someone who locks our sisters away in prison, nursing homes and juvenile halls, who sterilizes them, who refuses them prenatal care or abortions? To someone who takes children away from their lesbian mothers, prosecutes [sic] women on reservations and in countries where ‘life is cheap’? Would you give money to someone who can afford $1 billion a day for war in the Middle East, but who never seems to have enough money for day care centers? To someone who spends $226 million for one F-22 fighter plane, but cannot even find enough loose change for adequate nutrition for women and children on welfare? Of course not.
“Yet, this is exactly what we do when we pay income and telephone taxes. Our taxes support the military, Bureau of Indian Affairs, federal and state prisons, the ‘justice’ system, the ‘welfare’ system, the FBI, the CIA–all part of a destructive, women-hating government–to the exclusion of affirming, life-giving programs.
“We do not have to turn over our hard-earned money to be used against us and our sisters. We can regain control of our money; we can refuse to pay these taxes.”
The paragraphs above were written in 1981 by Betty Johanna with help from Jane Meyerding. The War Resisters League updated the numbers for publication in the fifth edition of War Tax Resistance: A Guide to Withholding Your Support from the Military (2003). Most of the war tax resisters I know are explicitly focused on opposing war, and most of them are men. For some time I have realized that the source of my resistance is broader and deeper than simply opposing war. The source of my resistance is feminism, which leads me to an understanding of militarism and war as symptoms of capitalist patriarchy–and hence to my understanding that a true end to war will only come when we are able to identify and resist all causes and acts of dominance and power-over, be they ‘personal’ or ‘political.’
When women learn that I am a war tax resister, they often say things like, “Wow, that’s really brave; I could never do that, I’m too scared.” Or “I couldn’t do that, I’d lose my job/license/practice.” And these concerns are real and need to be carefully considered; I am not trying to minimize them. But do you really think that I am not afraid of the consequences of refusing to pay taxes? That my livelihood and future financial security are not as much at stake as anyone else’s would be? My point is that the decision to resist income taxes is a considered choice, not one that I made lightly. I spent more than a year getting to know other war tax resisters and educating myself as much as I could, before I decided on and implemented my particular resistance strategy. It’s easy to say you want to resist but it’s too hard, or you’re scared, or you have too much to lose; why not seek out the information that might help you determine exactly to what degree that’s true?
Tax resistance isn’t a viable option for everyone. In particular, many women are completely or partially responsible for the financial support of others, and they have to consider the needs of those others when evaluating the risks. But I would like to see more feminists seriously investigating tax resistance–because there are a range of strategies, from the actual to the symbolic, many of which carry very little to no risk to the resister. The editors of War Tax Resistance commented that there has been “no active feminist tax resistance campaign in recent years.” What with the Bush administration’s constant onslaught against women, via the military in Afghanistan and Iraq, globally through (for example) defaulting on the $34 million US Congress appropriation for the United Nations Population Fund, and penalizing women and children here in the US by cutting education and social services–maybe it’s time to get that feminist tax resistance campaign under way.
