She Wasn't the Speaker. She Built the Room.

Four days from now, your inbox will be full of pink. Brands will celebrate "women who inspire." LinkedIn will fill up with posts about glass ceilings and leaning in. Your office will send a newsletter.

And I'll be thinking about Septima Poinsette Clark, who got fired from her teaching job in 1956 for being a member of the NAACP—after four decades in the classroom—and responded by going to work full-time training the people who trained the people who made the civil rights movement actually run.

You probably know Martin Luther King Jr.'s name. You probably know Rosa Parks. But Septima Clark? She ran the Citizenship Education Program out of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, training thousands of everyday Black Southerners—domestic workers, sharecroppers, ministers' wives—to teach others to read, because literacy was the prerequisite for voter registration, and voter registration was the prerequisite for everything else. MLK called her the "Mother of the Movement." Andrew Young said she was "the most important person in the civil rights movement." She died in 1987.

Most people have never heard her name. That's not an accident. It's a pattern.

What organizing actually looks like

I grew up in union halls. My dad is a labor organizer—the kind who drives two hours to a county where three workers at a non-union poultry plant want to talk, sits in a parking lot with the windows cracked because the plant manager has lookouts, and then drives two hours home. That's the job. No TED Talk. No profile in Fast Company. No branded moment.

The women who built the movements we're going to celebrate on Sunday mostly did work that looked like that. They built infrastructure. They trained people. They made the phones work and the meetings happen and the relationships hold when everything was falling apart.

That's not a lesser form of activism. It's the form. The speeches and the marches are the exhaust from the engine—the visible proof that invisible work was done first.

Here are four women I want you to know this International Women's Day. Not because their stories are inspiring (though they are). Because understanding how they worked changes how you understand what's possible.

Septima Clark — the woman who taught the teachers

When Highlander School director Myles Horton handed Clark resources to design a literacy program, she didn't build a curriculum. She built a multiplier.

Her insight: you don't teach people directly. You find the "natural leaders"—the person everyone in the community already trusts, already listens to—and you train them to teach. Then you go find the next community's natural leader.

From the late 1950s through 1970, her Citizenship Education Program spread across the South. Historians who've studied the program put the teacher count in the thousands—some estimates exceed 10,000—and those teachers helped register voters in numbers that materially reshaped Southern politics. The franchise rights that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 protected? The political groundwork that made it possible? Clark's infrastructure is a big reason that pipeline existed.

Her method was also explicitly feminist before the word was in common use: she specifically recruited women because women were already doing the community work, already trusted as teachers. She understood that the people doing the unpaid, invisible labor of maintaining community already had the skills. They just needed the political framework and the confidence that their knowledge counted.

Luisa Moreno — the organizer they deported

Born in Guatemala, educated in Mexico, Luisa Moreno came to the United States in the late 1920s and spent the next two decades doing some of the most sophisticated labor organizing in American history. She organized Puerto Rican garment workers in New York. She organized Black and Latino pecan shellers in San Antonio. She rose to a national leadership role in UCAPAWA—the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America—at a time when Latina women did not hold those positions. In 1939, she helped convene El Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española, one of the first national assemblies of its kind for Spanish-speaking people in the United States, which explicitly connected labor rights, anti-discrimination, and immigration protection as inseparable issues.

She was doing intersectional organizing in 1939. The word wouldn't be coined for another fifty years.

In 1950, the U.S. government deported her under the McCarran Act—part of the post-WWII purge of labor organizers deemed "communist." Rather than face prosecution, she accepted voluntary departure. The government's official position was that her organizing work made her a threat to national security.

They weren't wrong about the threat. They were wrong about which side that threat was on.

Crystal Lee Sutton — the real Norma Rae

In 1979, Sally Field won an Academy Award playing a textile worker who helps unionize a J.P. Stevens plant in North Carolina. The movie was called Norma Rae.

The real woman was Crystal Lee Sutton. She helped organize that plant with ACTWU (the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union), including the actual moment recreated in the film—standing on a work table holding a handwritten sign that said "UNION" while the machines were cut off around her and workers slowly stopped to watch.

Crystal Lee Sutton died in 2009. She had no health insurance for the last years of her life. She died of brain cancer. She spent years trying to get the studio to acknowledge that her story was hers—she'd been paid a flat fee and had no ongoing rights to the film—and received a settlement she described as inadequate.

The movie that made her story famous made her nothing. The union she helped build—J.P. Stevens eventually signed a contract in 1980 after years of boycotts and sustained pressure—made real improvements in workers' lives. But the gap between what Hollywood did with her story and what her story actually meant for her is a lesson in who gets to tell which stories about which women.

In interviews she gave late in her life, she put it plainly: "I didn't do it for the glory. I did it because it was right."

María Moreno — a farm worker woman who spoke on camera

In 1960, Edward R. Murrow produced Harvest of Shame, a CBS documentary about migrant farm workers in America. The film included testimony from María Moreno, a Mexican American farm worker and mother of twelve who had been organizing with farm labor unions in California.

The footage shows her articulate, specific, and utterly unintimidated. She had been sleeping in a converted chicken coop with her children. She told the camera exactly what that was like and exactly what needed to change. Historian Lori Flores, who recovered and documented Moreno's story, situates her as one of the earliest farm worker women on record speaking publicly on film about labor conditions.

She kept organizing through the 1960s, but she's largely absent from the histories that center the UFW's better-known names. She struggled with poverty her entire life. The archive of her organizing work—recordings, documents—was largely preserved through Flores's efforts; she found boxes of Moreno's materials decades later and wrote the book that gave her story back.

Most of what we know about María Moreno exists because one historian decided her story was worth finding.

What this has to do with Sunday

International Women's Day was originally a labor holiday. The deeper point isn't just about the corporate takeover of the day—it's about what we mean when we say we're honoring women who make change.

Clark, Moreno, Sutton, Moreno—these aren't stories about individual genius or exceptional courage, though they had both. They're stories about method. About building relationships before you need them. About training people instead of speaking at them. About doing the boring, specific, repeated work of maintaining trust across communities.

That's what organizing is. That's what actually moves power.

The version of feminism that IWD corporate marketing has settled into—individual achievement, representation at the top, symbolic firsts—is exactly the framework that erases these women. Because their work wasn't individual. It wasn't about reaching the top of an existing hierarchy. It was about building new structures and training people to use their power in them.

Koa Beck's White Feminism makes this argument rigorously: when we reduce feminism to individual advancement, we not only fail to change the underlying conditions—we actively produce a framework that benefits the women already closest to power while asking everyone else to wait for the trickle-down.

The women I named above weren't waiting for a trickle-down. They were building the pipes.

A practical thing you can do this Sunday

Before you share a corporate IWD post, before you buy something pink, before you attend whatever panel your organization is hosting about "empowering women"—ask one question:

Who is being asked to fix a structural problem with their personal behavior in this message?

That question is the diagnostic. When the answer is "women, by working harder, leaning in, believing in themselves more, investing in themselves"—you've found the ideology that Clark and Luisa Moreno and Crystal Lee Sutton and María Moreno were up against.

When the answer is "the structures that distribute power, pay, safety, and recognition"—you've found the feminism that actually works.

The unglamorous version. The kitchen table version. The version that gets you fired and deported and undersettled and forgotten until a historian finds your boxes.

That version.

Bell Hooks is currently asleep on my feet as I finish this, which feels appropriate. — Maya