This article was published in the issue of November 2017 of the newsletter DAWN Informs.  

The International Women’s Strike (IWS) 8 March 2017 was a moment of culmination in a long process of struggle for women’s rights. It was preceded by joint actions held on International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on 25 November 2016  and on 21 January 2017 in solidarity with the March of Women in Washington DC. The IWS, as a grassroots movement with international coordination, managed to bring together thousands of women from 57 countries, including Kurdistan and Saharawi women.

Under the motto “solidarity is our weapon”, this call for an international strike was driven by a group of women from different countries in the framework of “a world that has become increasingly fierce” (Sen and Durano, 2015) and found its echoes in the women who took to the streets in different parts of the planet[1]. We agree with Claudia Laudano[2] in understanding it as an unprecedented experience in the world.

To understand how a mobilization of such magnitude is achieved, it is necessary to look back at the genealogy of our feminist struggles. In recent decades we can identify several milestones in these struggles, such as the 45,000 women gathered in Beijing in 1995 who confirmed the existence of an international women’s movement; the 2000 World March of Women against hunger, poverty and violence held in more than 150 countries; the mobilization of Polish women in repetition of the experience of Iceland in 1975, who went on strike on 3 October 2016 against the restrictive measures of the ultra-Catholic government that attempted to criminalize voluntary and involuntary abortion; or the women of South Korea, who at that time also mobilized for similar reasons.

Likewise, in Latin America and the Caribbean, the IWS was not an isolated incident, but was based on long-standing action. We have met for 36 years in the Feminist Encounters of Latin America and the Caribbean (EFLAC), born in Bogotá, Colombia, as “the first experience of that gigantic sense of women being together. It was the first time that expectations were exceeded”[3].

The IWS was created “between assemblies and social networks”[4], generating a unique building process linked to that history of national and regional meetings of more than 30 years. Also significant was the context created by the strikes and demonstrations of Argentine women, linked to the experience of the collective “Ni una menos”, which in October 2016 became a national strike in reaction to the rape and murder of a 16 year old girl and the police repression against the National Encounter of Women of that country.

As feminist activist Celina Rodríguez states, “there are no magic facts in the history of women, the IWS was the product of a struggle where two elements stand out: strike as a tool, used by social and political sectors but not as traditional strike (…) and internationalism “[5].

Beyond its historical roots, another necessary element to understand the IWS is the current global scenario that women face. It is an increasingly fierce world crossed by a multidimensional crises and by militarization in contexts of conflict, war and terrorism, where the powerful war industry generates its impacts amidst climate change and extractive policies. We see the increase of the power of transnationals and other companies in development agendas and in the decision-making of our states and, as a consequence, the exacerbation of inequalities.

Above all, the advance of illiberal democracies and of politically democratic but socially fascist societies evidences the closure of spaces for participation, even in “democratic” contexts. Under this new scenario, xenophobic and racist discourses are re-issued and walls are built that expel and condemn migrants. While the protection of human rights goes backwards, the criminalization of protest and political persecution of activists advances.

In the case of Latin America, after a long decade of progressive governments we can ask ourselves: what happened to the proposals of Buen Vivir (Good Living)? And with the ideas of other modes of production, such as agroecology, rural and agricultural reforms? What real space has there been for the new solidarity economies that would open the way to development centered on people, justice, human rights and the planet? What have more than 10 years of supposed transitions towards alternative development for a better world left us with? How do we guarantee that the flaws and debts of progressive governments do not become the defeat of the movements that contributed to processes of enlargement of rights? What role has the feminist movement in this process?

In short, the current global and regional crises and the offensive action of conservative, fundamentalist and antidemocratic forces, call us to continue resisting.

In this context and in the framework of the IWS, we find that it is vitally important to return to the most powerful proposals that feminism put forward, drawing links between social injustices, gender injustices and economic and environmental injustices.

Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, leftist feminisms highlighted the tension between the world of production and that of (social and sexual) reproduction, and the provision of unpaid domestic work of women as a vital point for the sustainability of the economic system. Notions such as invisible work and sexual division of labor became tools that allowed us to analyze the economic value of the tasks performed by women every day in their homes. To build a bridge between these issues, the IWS had amid its main slogans the centrality of paid and unpaid work that women do.

It was these feminisms that asked the more structural questions about the foundations of patriarchy. It is true that 40 years of efforts to address gender issues have enabled us to achieve equality agendas in different areas, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and equality plans at the level of many countries. However, structural analysis shows that we never reached a position of real equality. It is for this reason that, in the current global scenario, we must return to those basic ideas of feminism. As Sofia Valdivielso puts it, “we need to get back to the roots” in order to unravel the structural causes of violence.

According to Valdivielso, it is necessary to review this dilemma between “egalitarianism vs. equality”, for behind the illusion of equality there are still deeply entrenched inequalities. For example, while women’s insertion in the labor market continues to be precarious and lacking in labor rights and social protection, unemployment continues to show gender-differentiated figures – such as data on female youth unemployment that accessed the university – we are educated and we are over-qualified, however very few occupy high positions in university or in scientific-technological systems.So we wonder if perhaps this trap of equality led us to leave behind the more structural questions about the bases that support the systemic functioning of capitalism and patriarchy, a discussion that was present in feminisms of the 1970s but was later diluted in the feminist agenda. Today, in the heat of the IWS, we have the opportunity to take back that discussion, recovering the debates and historical agendas of feminisms, and combating the co-optation of key feminists concepts of their meaning, such as gender and equality.

In the same vein, one of the key issues of confrontation and debate within the movement since the 1980s, still unresolved, has been the participation of feminists in the State. While some believe that one must participate in political parties and in the mechanisms of government, others believe that the space of feminists is in movements. What neither can deny is the effect of the State on the transformation of society, through laws and affirmative actions.

Regarding the role of states, Monica Novillo[6] argues that they must be affirmed as guarantors of rights in the face of the persistence of religious, economic and political fundamentalisms, which threaten the enjoyment of human rights and express themselves in the emergence of neoconservative positions. In other words, we need states that balance the rules of the game, that govern for the majorities. However, Novillo also identifies the challenges for states to assume accountability, develop mechanisms for transparency and advance in greater autonomy with respect to the interests of transnational economic elites which impose their developmental visions.

Thinking about struggles within institutional spaces in different contexts, one of the challenges to answer is: How do we learn from experiences where institutional advances have been lost with the neoliberal setback? How to prevent public policies from becoming instruments of legitimation for capital accumulation? [7]

When we speak of resistance we refer to the history of mobilizations, and in this current context, as Gita Sen[8] says, we have no choice but to RESIST.

The historical overview presented in this article is an attempt to reconstruct the feminist genealogies, bridging the struggles. To speak of genealogy is to recognize that in the struggles of the women of the South and of the North, protest formats are reissued, the claims go viral and real spaces of learning for all are opened. We return to the words of activist Angela Davis during the Women’s March last January in Washington, when she warned: “History cannot be erased like web pages.”

We are feminists, we are on the streets and we are thinking. We walk abreast and learn from the history of struggles against inequalities of gender, class and race. We believe that the compass that guides our path has to recover the strength of the feminist political project on the material conditions of life.