International Women’s Day
Not quite a holiday: the future of women is always a fight for rights and mobilisation for peace
Many Italian cities will today see processions of indignant & aware women: the reasons to take to the streets this year are perhaps even more numerous than usual. A government in which, despite the first female prime minister, policies remain far from inclusive. The war in the Middle East and Ukraine whose bill is also and above all on women’s bodies.
«The world needs to look to women to find peace, to get out of the spirals of violence and hatred, and to return to human looks and hearts that see».
(Pope Francis)
8 marzo. Più donne, meno guerre:
la campagna di Avvenire
#donneperlapace
We participate in the wave of indignation and anger we still breathe over the killing of Giulia Cecchettin – and of all women who continue to fall victim to gender-based violence – with half a million people who flocked to demonstrate against patriarchal violence on 25 November, including men. Everything is connected!
This day is one of the few intergenerational and intercultural occasions to highlight once again the prejudices that still affect women all over the world: According to the latest Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum, there is not a single country in which all gender discrimination has been overcome. The path of women then is the path of a repaired humanity.
Photo: www.firstcisl.it
In this desire for a future of culture, respect, dignity, equality and inclusiveness, we want to recall the main stages that led to this International Day, its claims and symbols.
We find the first 8 March in St Petersburg in 1917. Here, women demonstrated to demand an end to the war. Later, to commemorate this event, it was decided at the Second International Conference of Communist Women held in Moscow in 1921 that 8 March would become International Workers’ Day.
The testimony of those Russian women
is for us a seed of the future
WE URGENTLY NEED TO MOBILISE NOW AGAINST
THE "THIRD WORLD WAR IN PIECES"
(Pope Francis)
Image: www.pisatoday.it
FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF CIVIL AND POLITICAL ACHIEVEMENTS, WE ARE CALLED UPON TO MAKE USE OF THE INHERITANCE
THAT COMES TO US FROM THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR II:
since 1946, Women's Day has had the fragrance
and colour of the mimosa.
It was three anti-fascist women, three constituent mothers of the Republic: Teresa Noce, Rita Montagnana and Teresa Mattei, who chose it as the symbol of this day. “We certainly owe also to those women, to that vote – expression of a popular sovereignty no longer mutilated in gender – and to the renewed spirit of unity, freedom and participation the formulation of Article 3 of our Constitution that makes the principle of equality one of the cornerstones of our civil coexistence. And even today, current events remind us every day of the importance of reaffirming that each of us has equal social dignity and is equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions.” (Source: repubblica.it)
Women have always had to fight twice. They have always had to carry two burdens, the private and the social. Women are the backbone of societies.
Rita Levi Montalcini
