[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the role of women in forging their liberation and the challenges they face in the times ahead. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
Women in times past (a birds overview)
1. History has been full of extraordinary female personalities who have contributed to the progress of humanity and of human rights (HR). It is women who have demanded, not only legislation protecting their labor, but also regulating child labor and constitutional recognition for women’s suffrage. Despite these demands often not being met, they tragically ratified their legitimacy.* Immigrant women, for example, without recourse to protest, have been and are the lowest paid labor force the world over –not to speak of their lack of access to services.
*: I am sure women have seldom been able to tell the story otherwise; I do not think any of them can speak frankly about their pain until they cease enduring it. (Arthur Golden)
2. The self-sacrificing and heroic struggle sustained by North American women workers to obtain legal recognition of their legitimate labor aspirations and protection against discriminatory treatment in a country of immigrants led them to initiate strike days in favor of the enforcement of a law that, already approved, reduced the workday to eight hours a day. Moreover, it was ‘Women’s International’ that denounced the anguish brought about by two imperialist world wars.**
**: When a war breaks out, people say “it is too stupid; it cannot last long”. But though a war may well be too stupid that does not prevent it from lasting given that stupidity has a knack for getting its way…. (Albert Camus, The Plague)
3. This uninterrupted and shared resistance of women against abuses has been going on for a long time and was obtained not without persecution, mockery and all kinds of mistreatment. (Jose Miguel Neira). But this all is history…
Women nowadays (The review that follows is but a sample)
4. Women’s activism is found in many civil society realms, but certainly needs to go beyond working for an NGO. They need to find other ways in which they challenge the social norms that deny them their fundamental rights, their dignity. Social media can and do help them to connect among themselves in a spirit of tolerance towards others. (Malala Yousafzai)
5. Fairly functioning social services do distribute the cost of caring across society. But loss of public support for health care, for childcare, for home care, for disability support and for long-term care shifts the burden of care onto unpaid family care-givers, who are mostly women. Globally, it would cost $11 trillion annually to provide the socially necessary care that women provide for free in the home. …That is more than triple the size of the world tech industry.
6. The prevailing system saves a ton of money, while close of half of all women cannot get waged work, because of care-giving responsibilities. The increasing loss of public programs is increasing the need for home-care and for women to be home to provide it. Restricting or eliminating access to abortion is one way to do this. Women rely on abortion care so they can stay in waged work, support their families, and leave violent partners.*** Loss of access to abortion is driving vulnerable women out of waged work and trapping them in family care. (Susan Rosenthal)
***: An absence of documents can and does perpetuate a lack of effective action against gender-based violence in myriad ways, not only for migrants and stateless people who may be undocumented, but also for citizens whose identities do not fit the narrow parameters set by national bureaucracies –or as Albert Camus said, ‘the red tape merchants’ (e.g., caste, LGBT+). (Global South Women’s Forum)
7. And then, we are told constitutions protect women’s rights. But, in reality, customary discrimination provisions have posed a major obstacle to reform many constitutions, because they contain what are known as ‘clawback clauses’ that exempt personal law from the constitutional guarantees of nondiscrimination. These clauses effectively transform constitutional protections against discrimination into open invitations to discriminate since they place customary or personal laws outside of constitutional review and protection.
8. We are talking about issues of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and other family and personal matters that are decided extra-constitutionally and particularly affect women and girls (take for example, their ownership of land and property and their actual ability to participate in political and social life, including freedom from forced or teenage marriage and gender-based violence). Discriminatory customary law regimes have a profound and far-reaching effect on women’s lives. (Satang Nabaneh et al)
A message of hope (Sahar Fetrat)
–Women have nothing to gain from a return to the status-quo ante.
-Trust is like virginity: it is lost only once. (Louis Casado)
9. Time is not linear for women and girls; years of constant loss, and years of fighting back have used the few resources left them to combat ruthless misogyny. For women, this includes taking their bodies to the streets to resist and using their voices to chant. One narrative that stands out is the defiance of women’s resistance that has become more political than ever before as they take advantage of their freedom in the virtual world. This transformation has now become irreversible.
10. Protesting has been and is far from passive. It has required women to risk their lives just to join-in in their daily struggles. Women younger and from less privileged backgrounds are rising spontaneously giving shape to a new grassroots resistance movement of organized civic resistance.**** Among them are teachers, poets, writers, journalists, lawyers, mothers and former government employees… Their demands are remarkably simple yet crucial. Women are defending what they know the enemies of women’s liberation will attack, i.e., their independence, their agency, their mobility, their freedom and their access to reparative justice.
****: Mushrooms emerge from the soil after the rain, but their growth would not be possible without the vast network of mycelia that connects the ecosystem. (Antonio Gutierrez et al)
11. Women are now asserting their rights to social and financial independence; they are also demanding dignity and are risking their lives for a better future. Courage inspires more courage, bravery multiplies, and tyranny leads to greater demands for the rights denied. The resistance movement is young, and diverse, and although it is scattered, it is brave and optimistic and growing in strength. (S. Fetrat)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera. (Pablo Neruda) [They may cut all the flowers, but they will not be able to stop the spring].
Note:
I repeat a footnote from many Readers ago: Are these Readers sometimes repetitive? Yes and No.
No, in the sense that they look at the many aspects of HR work, some new, some old, but the latter always from different perspectives and angles. Yes, in the sense that they always reinforce key concepts of the HR framework.
This deliberate duality is considered indispensable for the readers to progressively internalize the concepts in such a way that they can then comfortably use them in debates and in teaching HR. In that sense, this is no apology. [Moreover, all the good and wise in these Readers has come from others; that of lesser importance has been mine].