2008 March Leaflet
As feminists in Istanbul, we were shaken by a news report while making our preparations for March 8. Ayşe Yılbaş was killed by her husband at the hospital where she was doing her medical-school internship, in the heart of Istanbul, where she worked. We know this is the same gun 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. This is the violence of male domination exercising control over women’s bodies and, sadly, of the men closest to us…
As feminists who know that ending male violence against women and achieving women’s liberation are possible only through a major social transformation, we celebrate March 8 as our day of solidarity and struggle against male domination.
Today, as women whose labor is appropriated, who are 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. Throughout the year we stood alongside the women strikers at Novamed with whom we marched last March 8. This March 8 we are again together with the Novamed women, who won their rights after spending months overnight in the strike tent.
We see March 8 as a day of struggle against a system that tries to resolve every rebellion of the oppressed through violence. We see all weapons directed against the Kurdish people, both across and within the border, as directed against us too. In 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 do not simply laugh off the transformation of March 8 into a day when women are given roses. We do not laugh off the transformation of this day of 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”. We do not laugh off the views of those who advocate women living covered up. We reject the denial to women who want to attend school covered up of the right to higher education, a right never withheld from men under any circumstances. But we do not laugh off those who impose on us, as freedom, not letting our hair fly freely in the air.
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 celebrate by saying NO to the government that makes us women dependent on the family, husbands and fathers. 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.
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 will once again be 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 women will not submit to male domination.
Stronger together for our liberation!
Pazartesi magazine special issue / feministler@gmail.com