2008 Press Statement
On the Streets on March 8!
This year, while preparing for March 8, we first learned that Ayşe Yılbaş had been killed by the husband she was trying to divorce at the hospital where she was doing her medical-school internship, in the heart of Istanbul. Two days ago, 17-year-old Nagihan İlhan was killed in Batman with 10 stab wounds for refusing an exchange marriage… These are the same weapons that killed Güldünya four years ago, again on a February day, as she dreamed of a future in which she would raise her child alone. The same hands hold all these weapons. The men closest to us kill us women with the power they draw from male domination.
We feminists know that ending male violence against women and achieving women’s liberation are possible only through a major social transformation, and celebrate March 8 as our day of solidarity and struggle against male domination.
Today, as women whose labor is appropriated, condemned to slavery at home and low pay at work, exploited in factories, brothels, homes, wherever we are, forced to endure beatings by fathers, husbands and men, sold into the prostitution industry by international gangs, subjected to harassment and rape on the streets, at work, in war and in custody, we draw our strength from our solidarity. We never forget that we inherited March 8 from women workers’ struggle to the death in the 1800s for shorter working hours and better working conditions. We object to March 8 being turned into a day when women are given roses.
We do not laugh off the transformation of March 8, which draws its strength from the history of women’s struggle, into a day of conflict over the political regime, or those who want to turn March 8 into a day of a military memorandum, with women and men crying “the homeland is slipping away”. Nor do we laugh off the views of those who advocate women living covered up. However, we also say no to denying women who want to attend school covered up the right to higher education, a right never withheld from men under any circumstances.
We feminists see March 8 as a day of struggle against a system that tries to resolve every rebellion of the oppressed through violence. We know that all weapons directed against the Kurdish people, both across and within the border, are also directed against us, and in these days when dying and killing are glorified, we reject the duty assigned to us women of raising children who will die for the homeland.
We know that our invisible labor at home also determines the wages we receive when working for bosses. We see that the burden of housework is placed on our shoulders even when we do paid work. We are also aware that bosses take over the oppression we experience at home. We feminists marched throughout the year with the women strikers at Novamed with whom we marched last March 8. And this March 8 we are again together with the Novamed women, who won their rights after spending months overnight in the strike tent. We celebrate this March 8 by saying no to bosses who exploit our labor twice over, to men who appropriate our labor at home, to the government that openly declares its cooperation with men and bosses through the social (in)security law it has prepared. We shout our fundamental objection to the social (in)security law that makes us women dependent on the family, husbands and fathers.
This year hundreds of men entered 2008 by sexually harassing women in Taksim in front of the cameras. We declared that this was not the vile behaviour of a handful of thugs, but male domination itself claiming entitlement over women’s bodies, and that police who turn a blind eye to men’s harassment and assaults and a judiciary that fails to apply the law and waits for complaints are as guilty as the men. We prepared for March 8 by sharpening our purple pins. Against sexual harassment we say: “Do not stay silent, shout out, stick in the purple pin!” And this March 8 we shout that we take a political stand on women’s side against unjust-provocation sentence reductions that reward men in femicide cases.
On March 8 we are once again on the streets, saying we will not give up being the voice of feminist justice against men’s unjust order, and that our liberation is in our own hands.
We will not submit to male domination.
“Stronger together for our liberation.”
Istanbul Feminist Collective