The Labour of Other People’s Silence
Darlene Meissner is a radical and intersectional feminist strategist, author, and women’s rights advocate with nearly three decades of experience supporting women activists and leaders in high-stakes justice work. She helps women navigate structural forces and sustain their work without self-erasure or burnout.
People have always resisted oppression. They have organized, marched, boycotted, gone on strike, refused cooperation, built movements and put themselves at risk to challenge the people and institutions with power over their lives. None of this is new. Neither is silence.
Alongside every movement for change have been people who opposed it, people who actively benefited from keeping things as they were, and people who may have agreed that something was wrong but did very little about it.
There is also a familiar response to resistance itself. Instead of focusing on what people are resisting, attention shifts to the people creating the disruption. Why are they protesting there? Why are they boycotting that company? Why do they have to bring politics into everything? Why are they always saying something? Why can't they just let it go? The person refusing to accept what is happening becomes the problem.
This is an effective way of protecting the status quo because it changes what everyone is being asked to examine. The conversation moves away from the harm and toward the behaviour of the person objecting to it. Their tone, tactics, anger or persistence become the issue, while the institution, company, government or system they are challenging begins to disappear into the background.
This response does not come only from people who openly oppose the cause. It can come from people who insist they believe in the same things. They oppose injustice. They believe in human rights. They support equality. They just become uncomfortable when those beliefs begin requiring something from them or when somebody else's refusal makes it harder to continue as though nothing is happening. Agreement can be extraordinarily comfortable when it requires very little.
In The World Was Changed by Women Who Refused, I wrote about the women who challenged what was considered normal, acceptable and inevitable. They did not change the world because they privately disagreed with injustice. They changed it because refusal moved beyond belief and became action.
The people who speak and act are not exhausted only because oppression is powerful. They are also carrying work that other people have decided not to do. People who remain silent do not merely fail to help. They transfer more labour onto the people who refuse silence.
Silence, in this context, is not only about whether someone speaks. It can look like knowing and carrying on. It can look like agreeing with a cause while refusing to examine where your money goes, who benefits from your choices, what your workplace is doing or which institutions you continue to support. It can look like making one easy change and deciding you have done your part.
None of us can investigate every purchase, company or institution all of the time. Ethical purity is neither possible nor the point. We live inside systems we did not individually create, and people do not have equal access to money, alternatives, safety, time or power. But there is a difference between being unable to avoid every harmful system and making almost no effort to question your participation in any of them.
When enough people stop at agreement, the work becomes concentrated. A smaller group researches, organizes, challenges institutions, changes where they spend their money, looks for alternatives, asks difficult questions and continues paying attention after everyone else has moved on. Then they are asked to explain themselves.
Why are you boycotting them? Why won't you work with that organization? Does any of this really make a difference? Why does everything have to be political?
The person who acts is expected to justify the action. The person who continues as usual is rarely asked to justify doing nothing.
This is how silence becomes labour. People who are already resisting oppression are also compensating for the people who will not participate in resisting it. They have to speak more often, organize harder, answer more questions and generate pressure that would be far easier to create if more people who claimed the same values were willing to act on them.
Oppressive systems do not depend only on people who actively defend them. They also benefit from people continuing to participate without questioning very much. A person can disagree with a system and still contribute to its stability through routine participation.
That does not make someone who remains silent equivalent to someone deliberately creating or directing harm. Power and responsibility are not distributed equally. But not being the person directly causing the harm cannot be the end of our responsibility.
The world was changed by women who refused because refusal became action. Creating change becomes considerably harder when too many other people decide that agreeing with change is enough.
We do not need perfect people making perfect decisions. We need more people willing to accept some responsibility for making their stated values visible in how they live. If our values require nothing from us, they are remarkably easy to hold.
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Darlene Meissner, Intersectional Feminist Strategist & Coach
Darlene Meissner is an intersectional feminist strategist, author, and longtime women’s rights advocate with nearly three decades of experience in advocacy and feminist analysis. She works with women activists and leaders to understand the structural forces shaping exhaustion, strengthen political clarity, and sustain their work without compliance, collapse, or self-erasure inside patriarchal systems. She is the author of Preventing Activist Burnout and writes under Women Who Refuse, where she explores refusal, clarity, and sustainable resistance.
