women's liberation
April 26, 2019 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Viewpoint Magazine — On October 23, thousands of Glasgow cleaning workers kicked off the union demonstration for equal pay organized by Public Services International, Unison, and GMB with a minute’s silence, in memory of the women workers who died before being able to see the day when their work would be finally granted the same dignity and value as the work of their male colleagues. In this act there was full awareness of a long history of great and small humiliations, of invisible, unacknowledged, or underpaid work, of countless instances of injustice and petty abuses, as well as of the enormity of the challenge faced by the women’s strike. Equal pay: a reasonable, almost trivial goal, and yet so difficult to achieve, to such an extent that the World Economic Forum has calculated that – based on current trends and data – it will take at least 217 years to finally bridge the wage gap between women and men globally. (Granting that the world will still be habitable in 217 years…)
then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.’ — Inessa Armand[1]
That femicide occurred the day after the 31st National Women’s Meeting in Rosario (Argentina), in which 70,000 women participated and, in a closing march, occupied forty street blocks. The meeting only appeared in the press because it was repressed at the end. At the beginning of that same month, women in Poland convoked a national strike rejecting the changes that were being imposed in local legislation to further restrict access to legal abortion.
Following the October 19 Women’s Strike and the formation of alliances of women from different parts of the world, the call emerged for an International Women’s Strike on March 8.