Editorial

Women’s Day was born out of a rebellion against the inhumanity of labour conditions and to recapture the dignity of labour. International Women’s Day was first proposed in 1910 by German Socialist Clara Zetkin, and celebrated the following year by an estimated one million men and women who demanded women’s right to vote, to hold public office, and for an end to sex discrimination in employment and training. This was in response to the second-class status the system assigned to women. While this was happening Betty Friedan known as the Philosopher of Modern-Day Feminism was not yet born. Her manifesto “The Feminine Mystique” published in 1963 asserted that a woman needed more than a husband and children for fulfillment. This strengthened the modern feminist movement – “A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty”, “Who am I, and what do I want out of life? She mustn’t feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own, outside of husband and children” Friedan said. On Saturday 4th February, 2006 Friedan died. It was her birthday and it is symbolic that she gave birth to ideas that will live on.

Six years after Friedan’s birth along came Coretta Scott. When she married Martin Luther King in 1953, she also married his struggle in the civil rights movement for emancipation from racism. When her husband was assassinated in 1968, Coretta Scott-King moved fully into the public stage, determined to continue her husband’s work. A year after his death, she founded the Atlanta based Martin Luther King Junior Centre for Non-Violent Social Change. She campaigned against apartheid. In 1985 she was arrested with three of her children for protesting outside the South African embassy in Washington. Coretta Scott-King passed away a short week before Betty Friedan. Both women were pre-deceased by Rosa Parks, that other stalwart of the Civil Rights Movement.

Here in the Caribbean we have our own heroines but CAFRA chooses to pinpoint these women because while they are lauded in the Caribbean media for their fight, the Caribbean women remain under threat of overt and covert physical and institutional violence. In the Caribbean media is a former beauty queen Wendy Fitzwilliam whose pregnancy while unmarried is causing ripples in the religious and secular world of double standards. The gender bias is flaunted unashamedly as other superstars, like Brian Lara and Dwight Yorke, unmarried fathers, proudly appear in the media with their children of unmarried mothers.

The message of women’s inequality and second class status is violently persistent. The violence at this level seeps down into the everyday relations and the rampant domestic violence that is making terrorist zones of what is expected to be “Home Sweet Home”

Throughout the region the horror stories are recorded of human insecurity, bruised women’s lives, murdered, mutilated wives and suicidal husbands/partners. Suddenly there seems to be an absence of rage at these events and acceptance of seeming powerlessness sets in. All we advocate for can be destroyed by a smoking gun.

The landmark Domestic Violence Intervention/Prevention Training Project for Police and Social Workers remains a beacon of hope.

Will women unite to lobby the state and financial institutions for resources to implement this project on an ongoing basis until communities are empowered to be peaceful?

This Women’s Day, CAFRA calls on women to gather courage from our foremothers and unite with a passion against the denial of women’s rights, and for social justice to be realised.

Nelcia Robinson

Coordinator CAFRA