Wellness, Self-Care and Security: Why This Is Important to Feminism

Katherine Ronderos begins from the feminist proposition that the personal is political and asks why care is so often treated as private business, separate from movement work. Activists’ exhaustion, health and safety are not simply matters of individual self-management; they are shaped by organizational culture, the distribution of resources and the political conditions in which people organize. When a movement depends on members continually sacrificing time and bodies—and treats that depletion as proof of commitment—the costs of keeping the movement alive are quietly shifted onto those already carrying care responsibilities.

The essay approaches care through three connected dimensions: personal, social and political. Rest and attention to one’s own wellbeing matter, but cannot replace support between people or repair risks produced by institutions. Conversely, collective support that ignores activists’ concrete needs can become a slogan. The framework’s value is its refusal to reduce self-care to a consumer lifestyle. It asks at once how individuals recover, how communities sustain one another and what movements, organizations and funders need to change.

Ronderos also broadens security beyond narrowly physical protection. Security includes access to healthcare and childcare, a space in which people can work safely, time for reflection and rest, relationships of solidarity, and recognition that activists’ lives and labor matter. This changes the starting point of a security plan: the question is not only what to do after an attack, but how ordinary organizational practices distribute risk, care and decision-making power. Care is therefore not an optional benefit attached to security work; it is part of the conditions that make sustained political participation possible.

The essay leaves a tension worth keeping in view. Once self-care becomes an institutionalized personal duty, structural pressure can disappear from sight: exhausted people are told to manage themselves better while organizations, funders and political conditions remain unchanged. Its feminist force lies in returning the questions to the collective: who gets to rest, who performs emotional and logistical labor, and who decides which risks are acceptable? Read it alongside AWID’s and domestic-worker movements’ manifesto on the care economy. Ronderos focuses on how activists can be supported within movements; the manifesto insists that care workers themselves must have labor rights and the right to receive care.

Published in 2012, this is a movement-strategy essay offering a framework and practical questions, not a current risk assessment, clinical guide or universal security protocol. AWID’s original article points to materials on activist security; treat those references as paths for further reading rather than as material fully covered by this short essay.