By HUDSON BAKER and BLAIR MANSFIELD
University of Massachusetts students gathered in Machmer Hall on Thursday, Oct. 8, for “Not One More!”—a forum on femicide, which is the targeted murder of women and girls. The forum outlined the systems underpinning this issue, and the necessity of a revolutionary mass movement in putting a permanent end to gender-based violence. UMass Young Socialists and the University Staff Association (USA) began planning this forum in the wake of the murder of USA member Emma MacDonald on the UMass Amherst campus this past April. Her husband, Jeffrey, has been charged with her death.
The forum featured perspectives from the local, national, and international level. The first speaker was Kyle Chambers, the vice president of USA, who recounted the contrasting responses of the union and the university administration to the news of Emma’s murder. Immediately after hearing of the incident—which “shook us [USA] to the core”—USA, in collaboration with other unions, organized a memorial vigil for Emma, in an effort to recognize the importance of providing all who were affected with a space to process and grieve. The vigil was held on Founders’ Day, a day which celebrates the culture that has been fostered on the UMass campus since its founding.
According to the university, it is a tradition “honoring everything that makes UMass special: the people, places, programs, and progress. 1” It is intended to allow people to “reconnect with what makes this place meaningful,” and to “explore, reflect, and spend time with your community.2” With these claims in mind, it is evident that the university failed to honor the community that gathered in the wake of Emma’s murder.
UMass administration chose to prioritize the continuation of Founder’s Day events during a time when students and staff were focused on the loss of a beloved community member. Workers who personally knew Emma were denied time off, and chose to walk off the job as a response to the disrespect afforded to Emma’s death. Nevertheless, the vigil was well-attended and proved the importance of building coalitions between unions in order to provide for one another’s needs when the university administration neglects to do so.
Even with such a tragedy happening on our campus, the entire university remained open and the administration neglected to issue a statement until two days after the murder. Most egregiously, the staff who worked with Emma were refused time off, and were allegedly told that continuing to work would be “what [Emma] would have wanted.”
In the forum, Chambers pointed to the excessive corporatization of the university as a factor that enables administrators to evade responsibility for decisions that harm the campus community: “[They insulate] themselves through so many layers of bureaucracy” that it becomes impossible to hold any individual accountable. This is in the context of an assault on campus in the same week as Emma’s death, where the university police only responded with an email providing safety tips to students which included advising students to look confident when walking ‘to avoid appearing vulnerable’”.
The second scheduled speaker was Mandi Coelho, an experienced activist within the Brazilian Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU) who had sailed toward Gaza on the latest Global Sumud Flotilla. Coelho was unable to attend in light of the mass demonstrations in Brazil opposing the far-right presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro and her need to participate in a large meeting of activists. Despite this, she was able to submit a statement to be read at the forum regarding the role of femicide in Brazilian politics.
Her statement labeled femicide “one of the main problems affecting the Brazilian working class,” and discussed the nationwide Levante Mulheres Vivas demonstrations last year and the current controversy over the Maria da Penha Law. This law, which supports victims of gender-based violence, is under attack by the country’s far right, who claim that it creates inequality by granting “privileges” to women and not to men—ignoring that men generally have the privilege of not facing gender-based violence in the first place. Coelho also called out Brazil’s capitalist left, led by Lula da Silva, for not putting up an effective resistance against the far right’s attacks on women. Not only have they failed to direct funding toward the issue of femicide while in office, they have neglected to even present an ideological alternative to the rhetoric of the far right. Nor have they addressed or acknowledged the structures that make women vulnerable in the first place, giving the far right free reign to shape the narrative.
Against the far right’s outright denial of the reality of misogyny and femicide, and the deafening silence of the capitalist left, the PSTU has taken the only logical path: the independent mobilization of the working class to fight for their own rights, rather than relying on bourgeois parties who have proven their inability to do so.
The final speaker, Lekha, is a member of Workers’ Voice, the Rutgers University Anti Caste Collective, and a representative for Rutgers’ administrators union. Additionally, she was a special education teacher in Oakland, Calif., where she was a member of the Oakland Educators Association for two years, including participating in their 2019 strike. As a university employee, the news of the femicide on our campus was especially startling, prompting questions of what the administration at Rutgers would do if such a thing happened at that university. And, even as the initial shock and grief from this incident passes, that question remains important.
Often, in the United States, what is more broadly known as “gender-based violence” in neo-colonial countries is simply called “domestic violence.” This only serves to restrict the scope of conversation to the home and neglects to make the gendered character of this violence explicit. This is a form of U.S. exceptionalism, in that the rhetorical goal of calling it “domestic violence” makes it seem as if gender-based violence in the United States is a deeply private and individual problem.
This framing ensures that the focus of activists wishing to address this issue is redirected toward the neo-colonial countries, meaning that the systems of gender-based oppression in the economically predominant West are not targeted to the same degree. Feminists in the in neo-colonial countries push back against this idea, as gender-based violence refers to a worldwide systemic issue that plagues not only the domestic sphere, but those of politics, economics, and every other area of women’s lives. Patriarchy itself precedes capitalism and is perpetuated by social structures that uphold oppressive laws and limit the power of women.
Our task, Lekha argues, is the waging of an ideological fight. We must not only do battle within the structures that uphold patriarchy and try to reform their character, but fight against the ideology and beliefs that keep the oppressive structures intact. This comes with the recognition of how certain smaller structures, such as the family, themselves enforce and are shaped by patriarchy and gender-based violence.
The carceral system, too, actively discourages—and even punishes—women defending themselves in the face of systematic gender discrimination. Three-quarters of incarcerated women in the United States report having faced gender-based violence as adults, a problem which extends beyond the actions of individual abusers. Building a movement to effectively combat gender-based violence involves both supporting the rights of women to report abusers and take them to court, while also recognizing that femicide and gendered violence are social problems that cannot simply be locked away and removed with increased policing.
The SlutWalk and #MeToo movements represent the potential beginnings of a mass movement against patriarchy and gender-based violence, but the co-opting of these ideas by the nonprofit-industrial complex and the Democratic Party apparatus dulled the class character and demands of these social movements. In building grassroots mass movements, we must keep in mind the ways in which the family and other patriarchal structures are oppressive through both the imposition of gendered norms and the perpetuation of unpaid reproductive labor.
As part of building a socialist feminist mass movement, our transitional demands must include universal health care and child care, fair wages for all who perform social reproductive labor, and the full socialization of social reproductive tasks such as child rearing and laundry (i.e. this labor would be divided among community rather than taking place on an unpaid, individual basis). Only an independent movement of the working class that refuses to stop short of these demands will be capable of ending patriarchy and the capitalist system that perpetuates it, protecting all women and Queer people from gender-based violence.
Photo: A vigil was held for Emma MacDonald on May 6, 2026, outside the Hotel UMass in Amherst, Mass. (Jill Kaufman / New England Public Media)
1 UMass Founder’s Day Webpage
2 UMass Founder’s Day Instagram Post