This video from Washington in the USA says about itself:
On April 25, 2004, over 1.15 million men and women from 50 states and over 60 countries gathered on The Mall for the largest march in DC history. The marchers’ concerns included choice, justice, access, health care, abortion, family planning, and the respect for global human rights.
While conservative forces have galvanized around the evangelical Christian and anti-abortion agenda, a large, diverse and progressive women’s movement has grown in opposition. This “Third Wave” marks a new generation of women’s advocacy and organizing in the United States, which addresses issues of sexuality, cultural diversity, human rights, and social and economic justice.
From British daily The Morning Star:
A stalled revolution
(Sunday 03 February 2008)
Material Girls by Lindsey German
(Bookmarks, £12.99)
LOUISE NOUSRATPOUR learns how a class-conscious campaign for equal rights for women could be born out of the Stop the War Coalition.
In her book Material Girls, Lindsey German argues that the women’s liberation is a “revolution stalled,” because it has come up against the limits of class society.
“Neoliberal globalisation has highlighted the limits of liberation within a society based on class exploitation and private property,” she writes.
Women can advance as long as their rights do not threaten profits or the status quo. Any demands for equal pay or full-time free childcare, for instance, will be vigorously resisted.
Despite working in unprecedented numbers and joining unions at a faster rate than ever, women still earn just 82 per cent of men’s wages and they are woefully underrepresented in top jobs, as MPs and in union leadership roles.
Fewer than 20 per cent of MPs are women and only 15 of the 62 TUC affiliated unions have female general secretaries or chairs.
According to the UN Development Fund for Women, the value of women’s unpaid work stands at £6 trillion a year – almost 50 per cent of world GDP.
This virtual slavery is translated into super profits for big business, while leaving many women destitute and with little or no prospect of a career or a decent pension.
German points to a number of reasons why the vibrant and militant women’s liberation movement of the last century has stalled or even regressed in the past decades.
Ironically, the arrival of Britain’s first female leader Margaret Thatcher is where it all went wrong.
Her merciless attacks on the working class, through anti-union legislation and cuts to pay and social services, had a devastating impact on women’s conditions and the progressive wing of the equal rights movement. …
Here, she offers hope that a new and class-conscious campaign for equal rights could be born out of the Stop the War Coalition, which has so many women activists in leadership roles and as speakers and organisers.
“Only now, against a background of growing movements against the ravages of neoliberalism and war, are the ideas of women’s liberation beginning to reconnect with questions about class and how a genuinely equal society can be created,” German says.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 