15 - 21 March 2001
Issue No.525
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 15 - 21 March 2001 Issue No.525 |
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'Broken bodies, shattered minds'
Subjected to increasing violence, women did not have much to celebrate this year on International Women's Day, writes Faiza Rady
"When she was 15, Ms G's parents traded her to a neighbour as a wife in exchange for his assistance in paying off the mortgage on their farm. Her husband routinely raped and beat her, resulting in injuries which required hospitalisation. Ms G went to the police twice for protection, but was told they could do nothing because the problem was personal. When she was 20, she ran away with her two children, but her parents and husband found her, and her mother held her down while her husband beat her with a stick. He took the children, whom she has not seen since."
-- A Salvadoran woman's story from the Amnesty International report on violence against women, released on 8 March 2001 --As part of a long-standing tradition, women worldwide commemorate 8 March as International Women's Day (IWD). But what exactly is being commemorated? Different versions of the alleged origins of IWD have been circulating for several decades. According to the most recent variant, the UN decreed in 1977 that 8 March would henceforth be celebrated as IWD. In reality, however, the UN role was strictly limited to acknowledging and registering 8 March on its official calendar of commemorative events.
Another fabrication has been peddled by the Western mass media since 1955. According to this version, IWD memorialises the militant 1857 strike by American seamstresses, which denounced the exploitation of women's labour in New York's sweatshops and demanded more humane working conditions and better wages. But however worthy the seamstress strike may appear as the founding myth of the women's movement, the New York strike did not historically establish 8 March.
The idea of choosing a day to pay tribute to the worldwide struggle of specifically working-class women was first sponsored by German socialist and feminist activist Clara Zetkin at the 1910 Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen. Meanwhile, the date, 8 March -- which corresponds to 23 February in the Russian Tsarist calendar -- was chosen in 1921 by Lenin to commemorate the 1917 strike by thousands of St Petersburg needle-workers, who took to the streets demanding "peace, bread and land." According to French feminist Françoise Picq, this historic women's demonstration was one of the catalysts of the February 1917 Revolution, which was to lead to the establishment of the world's first socialist state.
It is interesting to note that the American seamstresses' story was first proposed as the origin of 8 March in the mid-1950s, a period of intensifying Cold War confrontation. For the capitalist North, spearheaded by the US, rewriting history was part and parcel of its concerted assault against communism. Accordingly, it was crucial that the US displace the Soviet Union as the champion of international women's rights and claim 8 March as part of its political heritage.
The media brilliantly followed through in this campaign to appropriate IWD. Over the following decades, and even to this day, the fable developed its own kind of self-referential truth, as generations of journalists -- however unwittingly -- continued to use the American version of the story.
Over and beyond strategic Cold War machinations, this specific case of rewriting women's history has to be viewed within the broader context of women's struggle for equal rights. "Contrary to appearances, the controversy surrounding the origin of 8 March is not negligible," writes Françoise Picq. "It denotes women's difficulty in having their history -- and, therefore, also their rights -- acknowledged."
Notwithstanding innumerable UN conventions and a plethora of progressive resolutions defining women's right to political, economic and social equality as essential human rights, equality remains elusive. The statistics documenting women's perpetually unequal status speak for themselves. Two thirds of the world's illiterates are women, who also endure the most abject form of poverty. Worldwide, 70 per cent of "the poorest of the poor" are women -- one billion of them. Too destitute to afford costly medical care, 600,000 women in the South die yearly in childbirth or as a result of unsafe abortions. As if this were not enough, 100 million African and Asian women have been subjected to female genital mutilation under the guise of religion and "cultural specificity." Displaced by civil wars, women and their children make up 80 per cent of the refugee population worldwide. Marginalised and oppressed by poverty and illiteracy and subjected to both private and public violence, women are victimised by the millions.
A powerful and sweeping testimony to the escalating worldwide violence against women, which compromises their most basic human right to physical and mental integrity, was released on 8 March by the London-based human rights NGO, Amnesty International (AI). Entitled "Broken bodies, shattered minds," the AI report condemns global patriarchy, which continues to deny women equality and thereby breeds and perpetuates the male culture of violence. "Violence against women feeds off this discrimination and serves to reinforce it. When women are abused in custody, when they are raped by armed forces as 'spoils of war', when they are terrorised by violence in the home, unequal power relations between men and women are both manifested and enforced," reads the report. AI traces an unbroken "spectrum of violence," extending from the family to the workplace and to the community at large. Aimed at breaking women's will and self-esteem, the physical abuse of women is the most elementary and potent expression of male domination.
While the global culture of violence against women has been documented in numerous previous studies, the AI report's contribution to the debate lies in its documentation of the state's specific responsibility to punish both public and individual transgressions on the basis of internationally binding conventions. Held accountable under the clause of "due diligence," governments are responsible for protecting individuals from abuses of their rights, AI says, citing the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. According to the court's definition, "due diligence includes taking effective steps to prevent abuses, to investigate them when they occur, to prosecute the alleged perpetrators and bring them to justice in fair proceedings, and to ensure adequate reparation, including compensation and redress."
Given most countries' dismal record, governments have evidently failed to enforce "due diligence" and prevent public and private abuse of women. Instead, concludes the report, "impunity and indifference habitually surround many acts of violence against women."
Related links:
Amnesty International
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