Sandra Fluke, an attorney and women’s right activist whose name achieved celebrity status when Rush Limbaugh publicly referenced her as a “slut” and a “prostitute,” spoke to a group of students, academics, and community stakeholders in Hartford about an array of social justice issues affecting modern day politics and life. The discussion spanned from reproductive healthcare, Roe v. Wade (and Planned Parenthood v. Casey for the constitutional law enthusiasts out there), to social welfare programs, poverty, labor movements, and even immigration reform.

At first glance, these issues appear to stand alone as isolated social and political agendas. However, Fluke, a Georgetown Law graduate, demonstrated how each of these issues intersects with gender equality, providing a context for modern-day feminism that is often disregarded as being abstract or far-fetched. But as Fluke pointed out, what is a theoretical debate in one circle represents another community’s day-to-day reality of living on the margins of society – despite desires to break free from the structural barriers they face to legally proscribed rights.

Fluke cited the family cap on public assistance as one example. The cap is a policy that denies mothers and families who receive welfare additional assistance after the birth of another child. Essentially, it’s a child exclusion policy. Fluke said, “That child is cut off from any kind of basic assistance. Basic needs. If you think about why we have this policy [and] what that policy is about, it’s about controlling the reproductive choices of somebody who’s poor. It’s about saying we don’t want to have a lot more poor children, so lets try to tell poor people not to have more kids. …. [It] links to very racist ideas about who should be having kids and who shouldn’t.”

The policy clearly raises questions related to race and class, but if the link to gender equality and women’s rights isn’t clear, let’s look to California’s family cap policy, which goes one step beyond child exclusion. It provides exceptions to mothers on certain types of birth control. Given that women on public assistance are already impoverished, it logically follows the approved forms of contraception would be the most affordable and easily accessible. Wrong. California’s family cap policy requires the most invasive, expensive, and longest lasting types of contraception, including sterilization and IUDs.

For those who are curious, CT also has a family cap policy, but ours doesn’t go quite as far. Rather, CT provides partial benefits for children born to a family receiving public assistance. Think of the three-fifths compromise, but applied to a child’s access to health and nutrition instead of the right to vote for a person who was enslaved during the 18th century.

Fluke’s example demonstrates how “reproductive justice” means different things to different communities. Whereas the privileged, white woman generally thinks of such issues in terms of access to abortion, many women of color are fighting to have and keep the children they want to parent.

Fluke also pointed out that members of the millennial generation—regardless of race or class—understand the connection between economic issues and modern-day feminism. But not once in the discussion did the term “wage-gap” surface. True, from a messaging perspective, closing the wage-gap is inextricably linked to furthering gender equality. In practice, however, economic issues intersect with gender equality in a way that’s not directly seen:

“Economic issues … are the future of a lot of social justice movements, including the gender equality movement. So beyond the fact that women are the majority of those that are poor, how do we attack this from a gender equality angle? …. [The] majority of minimum wage workers are women, specifically women of color. The majority of fast food workers are women of color, [and] about 2/3 of them are women. Sound like a gender equality issue now? This is a women’s issue. …. [It’s] one of the reasons that women are disproportionately driven into poverty in this country …. [And] it’s a way that we can be working with the workers rights movement on a gender equality issue.”

Fluke provided several other compelling arguments for abandoning the practice of isolating social justice issues that disproportionately affect the genders and moving towards a feminist movement that connects the different realities of several communities. Whether you’re an immigrant woman on a twenty-year waiting list for a family visa that reunites you with your family, a full-time fast-food employee who’s tempted to work overtime on Thanksgiving, a rape victim being told by the Hartford Police Department that her case isn’t worth pursuing because her innocence isn’t easily proved, or an executive getting paid less than your male equivalent, these all prevent true gender equality. And that hinders progress for all of society.