Thank you so much for sharing this.
I've been re-listening to her speech and think it made such inspiring important points:
(extract)
"But it is also important to put this achievement and discussion in its proper perspective:
the murder of women, that is mostly the murder of wives and prostitutes, by men continues even as we speak
the violence done to women and even more often to impoverished or racialized women continues to be without social consequences to those men
as continues the harassment by men up to and including murder of women especially Aboriginal women who are forced to live in the public realm by poverty and lack of social supports like public transit and local public schools
as does continue unabated men’s harassment of women who try to use their legal rights and privileges to take their position in public institutions and political life… what Hannah Arendt speaks of as the very nature of public life;
the recent campaigns led by women victims of male violence and their feminist advocates to hold men like Ghomeshi accountable are still at their very earliest stages and so far have been stunted rather than assisted by legal procedures, by the police and courts as well as by the commercial media and by the social media.
The fight for equal pay is not achieved much less the fight for equal distribution of wealth and resources.
The right to welfare and social services,health services and education services has been so undermined as to barely exist for the poor women, for the immigrant women and for the Aboriginal women. To be among such women is to be criminalized for trying to get by.
Women do not have proper access to legal aid much less to adequate protections of the law and to security of our persons.
Childcare, the care of the sick and the old are still loaded on women even if more and more it is the loading on to immigrant women at low rates of pay and with insecure citizenship.
Women’s sexuality is under constant assault so that young women have even less sense of the entitlement to autonomy to sexual pleasure and to body integrity than my generation had won. Instead, from childhood on they are fed a constant diet of pornography in every media form.
The international talk of women’s rights is just that: talk. Unless women measure, protest and demand, nothing happens to ensure women’s rights as written on paper.
No political party and no public institutions have distinguished themselves as fighters for the liberation of women. Nor have they defended those who do fight for that liberation. I am old enough to remember the Montreal Massacre and what the governments did at that point and in this year of Me Too and various campaigns they have done the same… nothing of pro-woman effect
International studies now confirm that it is only in the presence of an autonomous women’s movement that policies and practices of the state start to reform toward the advancement of women.
“Women only” is a key practice of the independent women’s movement. In the 60’s we had to admit that if men where present in our groups they could sabotage the conversations by their very presence. This has not changed
In fact, for me this discussion of “inclusion” is really the conduct of the backlash against feminism." (continues)
- Our purpose as a movement and as an organization within that movement is not to give every woman the choice of which sex she would like to be or to promote notions that each woman should challenge herself to find or create freedom for herself on her own.
- These silly ideas have come with neoliberalism;
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our primary work is to focus on and take down the structures that prevent women from escaping gendered roles and gendered poverty and gendered racism,
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those structures that enforce gender with laws, norms and institutions including with male violence against women.
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Meghan sometimes says she is fighting for free speech. I am not. I don’t plan to put up with the hate speech of pornography or hate speech of racism and I’m not to willing to tolerate the hate speech against the poor.
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I am fighting for freedom for women and most of all for that freedom that de Beauvoir describes as the freedom that enriches the freedom of others." (continues)
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Consciousness raising and why it is important What is it?
Truthful talk between those suffering the same conditions that allows for naming and strategizing against that oppression by identifying its structures and institutions
A vital tool of the women’s movement for women’s liberty How we use it?
- Why we cannot “include”those wo claim to be transitioning from male to females in this process
Based on the body
Female relationships
- (local) (feminist progressives) (second wave)
To those who imagine you can bully us into submission you are clearly unfamiliar with the Canadian and BC women who defined feminism in this last fifty years of action.
current thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3470743-The-ReSisters-movement-is-growing