2009 Press Statement
Today is March 8, International Women’s Day…
The day of unity, struggle and solidarity for all women…
Every March 8, we women shout in the squares against male domination: “Long live women’s solidarity!” Every year at our March 8 march, while trying to make the voice of feminist struggle heard by all women, we feminists shout our rebellion and say against patriarchy: “Long live our feminist struggle!”
Nothing has changed on the front of male domination since last year! The alliance of men, the state and capital continues its oppression and exploitation of our labor, bodies and identities.
Over the past year, we women were again Pippa and were murdered; we were beaten by our fathers, harassed on the streets and at work, made into men’s honour and killed, subjected to state violence for being leftists, Kurdish, prostitutes, in fact simply for being women. While the cooperation between men, the judiciary and the state ignored the beatings, harassment and rape we suffered, it also tried to protect the men who murdered us by invoking unjust provocation. We were not silent and will not be silent,
Shout so everyone hears, let male violence end!
Conservatism continues to repress our spaces of life. Nationalism, with its “may the homeland live” nonsense and its spirit hostile to the siblinghood of peoples, tells us to give birth for dying and killing; religious conservatism tells us to give birth to glorify the family and male-dominated religious values.
Where we cover ourselves and how we dress remain a battleground between militarism and political Islam. Neither the length of our skirts, our hairstyle, our shirts nor our trousers are invitations to men. We dress as we wish, fish as we wish, and roam the nights and streets to our hearts’ content. Our bodies belong neither to fathers, husbands, the state nor any otherworldly authority.
Our bodies are ours!
In working life, which we enter at lower wages than men while also shouldering housework, we are now, under the pretext of the crisis, either made to work in men’s place with equal pay for work of equal value forgotten, or the first to be laid off. Capital tries to secure its internal reconciliation by making us pay, through the neoliberal state, the bill for the struggle for survival that has begun within it.
After all our rights, such as childcare and healthcare services, were slashed by the SSGSS and employment laws passed in 2008 by the AKP, an enemy of women and workers, at the request of the IMF and capital, the choice set before us is hunger or working for slave wages. The alliance of patriarchy and capital continues to appropriate our labor through men in our prisons called families. Under fathers’ and husbands’ physical and emotional pressure, we remain responsible at all times for cooking, dishes, laundry, and caring for children and older people.
Enough now, our labor is ours!
Let us stop doing housework, let the world stop!
Invisible labor, raise your voice!
“We continue to pay the price of policies of hatred and violence whose decisions we did not make. While denial and annihilation of the Kurdish people continue through war policies, we know that every cross-border operation, every bomb dropped from planes, every exploding mine will return to us women as poverty, harassment and rape. The voice of the Kurdish women’s movement rising from Dersim, Diyarbakır, Dolapdere and Bağcılar adds its voice to ours. Our 15 women friends standing as mayoral candidates for the Democratic Free Women’s Movement in winnable positions in Kurdish provinces also raise the voice of struggle against male domination alongside the voice of peace and siblinghood.
We demand a democratic political solution to the Kurdish question!
Woman, Life, Freedom
We are again in an election period. Patriarchy’s identical parties want our votes, but promise either a corner of paradise or public spaces filled everywhere with uniform skirt suits. Male politics does not see us women as political subjects. But in these elections we said enough… We feminists of Istanbul also said: “We are in politics too, we have something to say to Beyoğlu!”
In this year’s local elections, “women have a voice! Feminists have a voice!”
If we want to make decisions, not merely cast votes!
Let us support our candidate Saime Ülfet Taylı Taş!
Let us support and strengthen the feminist movement!
Today, March 8, 2009, we feminists wish all women a happy March 8. Saying that we want the world, not just one day, we call for us to meet in Taksim next March 8, in 2010, the hundredth anniversary of the gift to all women of every nation, rural, urban, housewives, working, mothers or single, of the history written in working women’s blood.
Long Live Women’s Solidarity!
Long Live Our Feminist Struggle!
Long Live Women’s Unity!
