[News] We Stand With the Women of the World & A Time For Militant Sisterhood!

[Anti-Imperialist News]

International Women's Day, 2007

http://www.counterpunch.org/marshall03082007.html


We Stand With the Women of the World

By LUCINDA MARSHALL

For the past 5000 years, give or take a century 
or two, there has been a persistent tendency to 
leave unexamined the impact that social, 
economic, environmental, and military policies 
have on the lives of women throughout the world. 
As a result, women make up the majority of those 
living in poverty, millions of women have died 
needlessly due to lack of healthcare and safe 
living conditions and there is a worldwide pandemic of violence against women.

For those reasons, International Women's Day 
(IWD), which is observed on March 8 is a time not 
only to celebrate women's lives and achievements, 
but also a chance to join hands in solidarity 
with women around the globe and to focus much 
needed attention on the many problems women face today.

It has been said that the health of a society is 
measured by how it treats its women. With one in 
three women throughout the world likely to 
experience sexual assault during her lifetime, it 
is not a stretch to say that this society is in 
crisis. In recognition of the systemic and 
pervasive violence that impacts the lives of 
women every day, the United Nations' theme for 
its 2007 observance of IWD is "Ending Impunity 
for Violence against Women." As Eve Ensler, 
author of The Vagina Monologues has pointed out, 
"When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, 
and terrorize women, you destroy the essential 
life energy on the planet. You force what is 
meant to be open, trusting, nurturing, creative, 
and alive to be bent, infertile, and broken."

Here in the U.S. for the sixth year in a row, 
President Bush's annual budget request for 
funding the Violence Against Women Act once again 
falls short of the amount of its Congressional 
authorization. And while the President will no 
doubt serve up the usual annual platitudes about 
honoring women on March 8th, his administration 
has, as it has every year since 2001, also 
requested cuts in funding for maternal and child 
health as well as family planning.

Meanwhile, more than half a million women 
worldwide will die this year from the 
complications of pregnancy and childbirth, 
including 68,000 from illegal and unsafe 
abortions. According to The Lancet, "an estimated 
90% of deaths from unsafe abortions and 20% of 
obstetric mortality could be avoided with 
improved access to contraception. Yet the latest 
figures show that donor funding for family planning has decreased by 36%."

It is particularly ironic that the supposedly 
liberated women of Afghanistan suffer the second 
highest maternal mortality rate in the world with 
1,600 deaths per 100,000 live births. In the U.S. 
more than 20 million women live in poverty and 
out of 173 countries, the U.S. is one of only 
five countries that has no guaranteed maternity 
leave. The U.S. is also one of only seven 
countries that has not ratified the Convention on 
the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).

The ongoing militarism that plagues our planet is 
also extremely detrimental to women. Violence 
during war and conflict is not incidental, it is 
systemic. Rape, a cheap alternative to bullets, 
has always been a de facto weapon of war. Women 
who are raped during conflict are particularly 
vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. Conflict frequently 
leaves women without homes, food and medical care 
and many become refugees. Obtaining work may 
become difficult, forcing many women into 
prostitution in order to survive. Hundreds of 
thousands of women are sexually trafficked every 
year and violence makes it impossible for 
hundreds of thousands of girls to attend school.

Pollution is also an important problem for women. 
Recent studies have found numerous toxins in 
breast milk and one out of six women in the U.S. 
has enough mercury in their wombs to cause mental 
retardation, autism and other diseases. Women who 
breathe polluted air are four times more likely 
to have children who develop cancer. Other 
pollutants such as PCBs, dioxin and DDT are known 
to impact reproductive health and have been 
linked to breast cancer. Chemical and nuclear 
weapons impact women's reproductive health, 
causing low birth weights and gross birth abnormalities.

It is for all of these reasons that on March 8th, 
we once again affirm the human rights of women 
throughout the world as well as celebrate their lives and accomplishments.

*This essay is adapted from commentary by the 
author that was originally published by the 
<http://www.leoweekly.com/>Louisville Eccentric 
Observer. "We Stand with the Women of the World" 
is the theme for the 2007 Louisville, Kentucky/US observance of IWD.

Lucinda Marshall is a feminist artist, writer and 
activist. She is the Founder of the Feminist 
Peace Network, 
<http://www.feministpeacenetwork.org/>www.feministpeacenetwork.org.

**************************************************************************************

For International Working Women’s Day
and Women’s History Month, March, 2007

A TIME FOR MILITANT SISTERHOOD!


With over 3000 US troops killed and close to 
50,000 wounded;  with nearly a million Iraqis 
slaughtered and half-a-dozen wars percolating in 
hitherto peaceful places, this year’s 
commemoration of International Working Women’s 
Day and Women’s History Month can only be a call 
to forge even stronger bonds of militant 
sisterhood against imperialism and for women’s and people’s liberation.

Over and over again, we have been assured that 
this or that method would bring the war in Iraq 
to a successful conclusion.  But the maimed and 
the dead continue to increase, while much-needed 
resources in the billions of dollars are wasted 
in “reconstruction projects” which are never 
completed; in war materiel destroyed, and in 
natural wealth polluted and damaged.  After the 
unleashing of a sea of blood in Afghanistan, Iraq 
and half-a-dozen other places, the Minotaur of 
war remains insatiate.  This is The Plan:  an 
endless state of war, a war that spans more and 
more countries;  a war without resolution.  And 
in the chaos, death and destruction, 
imperialism’s multinational corporations, from 
Halliburton to Black Water, continue to extract 
profits, enriching the few in the deaths and injury of the many.

Even as imperialism renders uninhabitable various 
places in the world through wars, pillage and 
pollution, it strokes xenophobia within the 
United States, the better to exploit the 
vulnerability of undocumented workers.  Majority 
of the 12 million undocumented workers in this 
country are women and children;  20% of them are 
employed in private households, as housekeepers, 
nannies, cooks.  They are allies of American 
women in the defense of the American family which 
is embattled by imperialism’s desire to isolate, 
atomize and separate the individual from the 
group, the group from the collective, the collective from society.

  Let it be our task for this 8th of March to 
show the world how strongly we reject 
imperialism’s culture of violence, its culture of 
exploitation, its culture of destroying the 
social nature of humankind itself.  Let us 
prepare to descend upon Washington DC on the 17th 
of this month, to protest the war in Iraq, the 
war in Haiti, the war in the Philippines, the war 
in Palestine
  Let us march mantled by grief for 
our sisters and brothers in those countries; let 
us march waving the banner of our outrage at the 
continuing deceit and lies;  let us march in 
condemnation of all the wars of imperialism;  let 
us march in condemnation  of US-led imperialism itself.

JOIN THE MARCH 17TH MOBILIZATION AGAINST THE WAR!

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