All issues are women's issues - and there are several that are

The words of Eddie Bernice Johnson, “All issues are women’s issues—and there are several that are just women’s business,” resound with the authority of truth long ignored. They remind us that women do not live in a separate realm, detached from the struggles of society, but stand at the very heart of every concern—political, economic, social, and moral. To claim that only some matters belong to women is a blindness; in reality, every law, every policy, every burden of society touches their lives, and thus every issue belongs to them as surely as it belongs to men.

The origin of such wisdom springs from centuries when women were pushed to the margins of governance, told that politics was not their domain, and that their concerns belonged only to the home. Yet history revealed the falsehood of this thinking. Wars left women to manage farms and businesses; economic crises pressed them into labor; injustice in education, health, and law fell first upon their shoulders. To say that all issues are women’s issues is to acknowledge reality—that no sphere of life can exclude the presence, the labor, and the consequence borne by women.

Consider the struggle for suffrage in the United States. When women fought for the vote in the early twentieth century, critics argued that politics was a man’s business. But the suffragists answered: how can taxation, war, wages, schools, or laws be “men’s issues” when women bear their effects in equal or greater measure? Figures like Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth declared with fiery voices that until women had a say in every matter, justice itself was incomplete. Their victories proved Johnson’s claim—that every issue touches women, and therefore belongs to them.

Yet her words also point deeper, to those sacred matters that are women’s business alone. The experiences of childbirth, reproductive health, safety from gendered violence—these are realities only women can fully speak to, and therefore they demand that women’s voices be heard with special weight. To silence women in such matters is not only injustice but folly, for wisdom comes from those who know the path by walking it.

Johnson’s statement is therefore both universal and particular. It is universal, for no concern of the world can exclude women. It is particular, for some struggles belong uniquely to them, and in these they must be honored as the foremost authority. Together, these truths form a vision of equality grounded in reality, not abstraction.

Let future generations learn: to divide issues into men’s and women’s is to misunderstand life itself. Every law, every decision, every struggle belongs to all. Yet let them also honor the business of women, which is sacred and cannot be spoken for by others. For in embracing both truths lies the path to justice, and in justice lies the strength of humanity entire.