Radical Women member, Maudie Osborne, gave this talk at RW’s International Women’s Day event, Capitalism is femicidal: Women resisters speak out, in March of 2026. She was part of a dynamic panel of speakers: Natalie Feliks, co-founder of Trans Action Network, Kelly Flanagan, Wiradjuri activist and member of Formerly Incarcerated Girls Justice Advocates Melbourne (FIGJAM), and Rathy Barthlote, co-founder of Refugee Women Action for Visa Equality (WAVE).
Maudie met RW as a high school student, when she joined the Fertility Control Clinic defence against religious zealots. She is an anti-fascist organiser and public sector worker active in the Democracy4CPSU rank-and-file caucus of the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU).
I’m honoured to stand here on International Women’s Day, among those refusing to be silent in the face of the systemic abuse and killing of women simply because they are women. Femicide thrives in this profit system and its patriarchal buttress. I’m speaking, not only as a feminist and anti‑fascist, but as a unionist and socialist, shaped by the everyday struggles of workers fighting for dignity on the job and in the streets.
We live in a world where capitalism is collapsing, wars rage, and profit outweighs human life. Women bear the heaviest burden — poverty, unsafe work, and environmental catastrophe. Capitalism doesn’t just exploit us, it kills us. Femicide is its sharpest edge, the logical outcome of a system that treats women’s bodies as commodities and our lives as expendable. Whether through domestic murder, state neglect, or wartime atrocities, women’s deaths expose how little value society places on our survival.
Ending systemic femicide means confronting the underlying system — and women and gender‑diverse people are leading this fight. I learned this firsthand when standing with Radical Women at Melbourne’s Fertility Control Clinic, facing far‑right mobs who wanted to strip women of control over their bodies. That fight was about survival and showed how deeply tied femicide is to the denial of reproductive freedom. Just look at the U.S. since the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade. The latest statistics from August 2025 showed 59 more pregnancy-related deaths than before the Supreme Court ruling. In states where abortion is banned, these figures will keep rising.
Maudie Osborne making the case that capitalism is femicidal. Photo by Lissie Shaw.
Wars of genocide focus on women and children. Defined as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group,” genocide requires femicide. We heard Rathy speak movingly of the Sri Lankan state’s massacres of her Tamil people. We have watched this unfold in Gaza. Palestinian women are forced to give birth without medical care, live in overcrowded camps, and endure hunger, disease, and constant bombardment. Many are killed by bombs or by being denied healthcare. All this is structural femicide carried out by an occupying power. Israel has increasingly employed sexual, reproductive, and other forms of gender‑based violence as part of a broader effort to annihilate Palestinians’ right to self‑determination — these are all forms of the same gendered extermination. Zionists have openly advocated the rape of Palestinian women, and since the 1948 Nakba, Israeli Defence Force soldiers have used rape as a weapon of war. From Palestine and Sri Lanka to Rwanda, Sudan, this continent and everywhere troops invade, this is what occupation is for women and girls.
So femicide is more than an individual tragedy, as liberal feminists see it. It’s collective violence. How many remember the performance, The rapist is you!, which originated in Chile and became a global feminist anthem in 2019? In the choreography, women point directly at the judges, the cops, the state and the president. From women murdered in Mexico to First Nations women disappeared in Australia, to Palestinian mothers killed with their children — each death spotlights whose lives are deemed disposable. Femicide will end only when we dismantle patriarchy, racism, imperialism, and capitalism itself.
Palestinian feminist Mariam Barghouti said, “Feminism cannot be selective. Its framework comes from true and absolute liberation, not just of women but of all peoples. Feminism that ignores colonialism and capitalism is no feminism at all.” The far right’s attacks on abortion, contraception, and gender‑affirming care — in the U.S. and here in Australia — are part of the same assault. Stripping bodily autonomy endangers the lives of all women and gender non-conforming peoples, and reinforces the machinery that drives femicide.
As a unionist, I see every day how bosses try to divide us — by gender, race, visa status, or sexuality — because they fear what we can win when we fight together. In 2020, as a member of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union at the electronics retail giant JB Hi‑Fi, I organised with co-workers across the country in an anti‑sexism and workplace safety campaign during COVID. We challenged unsafe practices that exposed retail workers — many of us women — to unnecessary risk, while calling out everyday harassment, unequal workloads, and management’s tolerance of sexist banter. Linking workplace safety with sexism and broader gendered violence helped turn the shop floor into a site of resistance.
While most workplace fatalities in Australia occur in male‑dominated industries, women in sectors like retail, nursing, manufacturing, warehousing, agriculture or construction are still routinely exposed to danger and neglect. And women have been killed.
Workplaces have long been deathtraps for women. The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh killed more than 1,100 women garment workers. Often described as a tragedy, it was actually industrial murder driven by profit. That same greed fuelled the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York, when 146 women garment workers – predominantly Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe – died behind locked factory doors. These examples show how the drive for profit causes women’s deaths. Two years earlier, in 1909, the 5-week strike by these same Triangle factory workers — 20,000 of them — for higher pay, decent conditions, union recognition and collective bargaining rights inspired the creation of International Working Women’s Day (IWD). On IWD 1917, in the throes of the first world war, women textile workers in Petrograd went on strike, demanding “Peace and Bread.” Their courageous action, which brought thousands of workers to the streets, ignited the world’s first socialist revolution.
We’ve just heard Kelly’s powerful story of surviving the prison system. That eighty percent of imprisoned First Nations women are mothers is a fact of genocide. The number of First Nations people dying in custody continues to rise, and we remember many women, such as Tanya Day, Sistagirl Veronica Baxter and, most recently, Chelsea Bracken. Aboriginal women are the fastest‑growing prison population — imprisoned at over 21 times the rate of non‑Indigenous women, more than five times as likely to be charged for minor, non‑violent offences, and punished more harshly for them.
The prison system works as a slave-like labour market. It incarcerates those most impoverished and abused by the profit economy and then extracts their labour for very little pay. For First Nations women, this happens alongside a colonial legacy. The same empire that stole land, committed mass genocide, forcefully removed children and banned culture now locks up Aboriginal women at high rates and makes money from their underpaid work. Their bodies and time are treated as things to control and use, instead of lives that should be valued and centred.
These situations aren’t “accidents” or “coincidences.” They too often end up in death, sharpening the need for union power and revolutionary socialist feminism.
Women everywhere are embroiled in an uninterrupted, permanent struggle for equality. More than half the human race is striving to throw off the shackles of universal humiliation and super-exploitation, which carry lethal consequences.
How will we end this? Start by knowing our history. Society wasn’t always like this. Before private property evolved, it was egalitarian, and women were respected as leaders. If we know what we had, we know that we can win it back, on a higher plane of technology.
Globalise the resistance! We see it around the world in the bravery of women and girls fighting against tyranny and oppression — like the Spontaneous Movement of Afghan Women (SMAW), who organise against the repressive Taliban regime. Since its seizure of power, women have courageously protested in the streets and clandestinely. In a recent message to Radical Women to commemorate IWD, SMAW said, “On February 28, 2026, a group of brave Afghan girls once again came to the streets of Kabul city and shouted the cry of ‘Bread, Work, Freedom, Education.’ ” Says SMAW, “They proved that the will of a nation cannot be killed with violence.”
Iranian women today carry the legacy of their sisters at the forefront of the country’s 1979 revolution. Kurdish women have led an enduring resistance against genocide in their Kurdistan homeland within Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria, and against ISIS. Their words, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” have inspired freedom struggles throughout the world. First Nations women in our own genocidal state have been at the forefront of resistance, standing up to state force as well as Nazis. Women of the U.S. dominate the streets, demanding that Black, immigrant, queer and women’s lives matter — in defiance of increasing repression.
“Same struggle, same fight” is not just a slogan, it’s our reality. We should solidarise with each and every resistance in the world, because it’s our struggle, too. We, today, in this room, discussing this topic are proof of this. We can grow into a force by forming united fronts around our common fights — against fascism and the far right, against imperialism and war, against sexism and racism — and we can ultimately tear this femicidal system down.
The world situation is becoming so dire that the only way out is through revolution. Through the globalisation of resistance, we’re beginning to see this possibility. And through a unifying revolutionary leadership, we can make it happen.
