[Peace-discuss] International Women's Day Anti-War Statement

[Brooke Anderson]

PRC Statement Against War on International Women's Day
By Brooke Anderson, PRC Co-Coordinator
Friday, March 7th, 2003
(217) 493-2637 or brooke at shout.net

Tomorrow, on International Women's Day, hundreds of thousands of 
women worldwide will gather to protest the war. Today we stand in 
solidarity with these global protests and add local women's voices to 
the world outcry against Bush's plans to slaughter Iraqi people. 

International Women's Day began in 1910 to commemorate the New York 
garment workers strike of March 8th, 1857 and the March 8th, 1908 
women's needle trades strikes for shorter hours, fair pay, and better 
working conditions. On International Women's Day 1917, Russian women 
struck for "bread and roses" in protest of World War I. The holiday 
came to the United States in full force in 1961 when Women's Strike 
for Peace organized 50,000 women to walk out on their jobs and to 
protest the Vietnam War.

WOMEN'S HISTORICAL ROLE IN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENTS.

So, this year's International Women's Day anti-war protests are no 
anomaly. Whether the male-dominated history books record it this way 
or not, women have historically been at the forefront of anti-war 
mobilizations and other movements for social justice.

Indeed, there is a very rich and inspiring history of local women's 
organizing for peace, including a tradition of International Women's 
Day being used by C-U women to protest U.S. foreign policy. Beginning 
in 1968, the local Women's International League for Peace and Freedom 
protested the U.S. war in Vietnam. They held demonstrations on tax 
day and on International Women's Day to protest the war, and later to 
protest nuclear proliferation. From 1985-1991, women's groups 
celebrated the day with rallies right here on this Quad nearly every 
year addressing sexual violence against women, war and militarism, 
and equal rights. When the U.S. bombed Libya in 1985, these women 
activists erected an encampment surrounding the ROTC Building and 
distributed literature opposing the bombing. On Hiroshima Day in 
1986, Women Rising in Resistance held a Women Take Liberty 
Celebration of Peace condemning military rallies at and corporate 
exploitation of the Statue of Liberty. This International Women's Day 
we join our sisters worldwide in protest of the impending war on Iraq.

WHY A WOMEN'S RALLY?

Today's emphasis on women's voices for peace is not meant to 
reinforce traditional gender roles (though some of us are 
particularly proud of our pink and purple banners and armbands!). By 
celebrating women's resistance to war, we are not suggesting that 
women are innately peaceful or that all men are violent warmongers. 
The despicable and cowardly politics of Condaleeza Rice, Laura Bush, 
and Margaret Thatcher would certainly prove us wrong, as would the 
efforts of millions of men worldwide working to prevent the war.

Nonetheless, it is historically true that the majority of imperialism 
and state violence has been ordered and carried out by men (and not 
just all men, but frequently it is wealthy white men in power that 
send mostly young, poor men into battle to kill and be killed). This 
is because men have always held most of the elected and appointed 
positions of power in the world, and in our violent cultures, power 
is exercised through violence, therefore war has traditionally been 
"men's business."

But these powerful men who benefit from the spoils of war are the 
last and least likely to suffer war's tragedies. Women - who have 
little voice in the politics and decision-making that govern our 
lives - gain little (and poor women and women of color gain even 
less) from the acquired colonies and stolen wealth of war, but we pay 
the price with our bodies, our health, our homes, and our families. 
Struggling for our freedom at every turn, we know first hand what 
happens when decision-making is left up to politicians and 
corporations. Women lose! People of color lose! Poor people lose! So, 
if we lose when men in D.C. busy themselves with war, we women will 
make it our business to wage - and win! - the struggle for peace. 
Today, we embrace our power and responsibility to make social change 
- to be creators, not just survivors, of our fate.

A FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF VIOLENCE

Patriarchy and war are inseparable forces of repression and violence 
in our world and must be resisted together - and that fight 
necessitates women's leadership, your leadership. Along with racism 
and homophobia, sexism and militarism divide the world into the human 
(white, male, Christian, American wealthy lives) and the dehumanized 
(female, immigrant, foreign, diverse, and poor lives), and then uses 
violence to maintain men's power over women, white power over people 
of color and so on. This patriarchal world favors violence, 
punishment, and coercion over creative problem solving and attempts 
at mutual understanding, and it exploits concepts of masculinity that 
make violence a condition of manhood to anesthetize us and make us 
accepting of violence in daily life. As Emma Goldman, great anarchist 
leader, said: "It is organized violence on the top that creates 
individual violence at the bottom." 

IMPACT ON WOMEN IN IRAQ AND THE MIDDLE EAST

This organized violence will be very devastating for the women of the 
Middle East. Women experience war as death, injury, illness, 
impoverishment, sexual violence, widowhood, displacement, and 
detention.

In the first Gulf War, civilian casualties comprised 90% of all 
casualties, and many of these were women and children. Women as 
noncombatants are very much the victims and survivors of war. If we 
are on the frontlines of the killings fields as much as men, we need 
to be on the front lines of the resistance as much as or more than 
men.

Rape has always and forever been a weapon of war. Women's bodies are 
just as much the battlefields of war as the deserts and the trenches. 
Our bodies are made the prizes for the conquerors and a means of 
humiliating and demoralizing the enemy. Systematic use of rape by 
invading armies is a deliberate policy of inducing terror and 
genocide - for example the detainment camps set up in the former 
Yugoslavia for the purpose of rape and forced pregnancy as part of an 
overall program of ethnic cleansing. Women in wartime are also used 
for forced prostitution and sexual slavery (really just forms of 
repeated and systematic rape) in and around military bases.

The U.S. decade long bombing campaign has utterly devastated the 
Iraqi environment, causing unprecedented health problems for Iraqi 
citizens - and especially Iraqi women - and at a time when medical 
facilities, supplies, and medicines are scarce or non-existent due to 
sanctions. An intensified war against Iraq will only worsen this 
irreparable damage. 

In war, women comprise the majority of refugees, and experience great 
horrors and abuse when forced to flee their homes. Women are 80% of 
the health care and other aid workers at refugee camps who place 
themselves in harms way to aid the sick, injured, and dying.

With the devastation of civilian infrastructure in a new war, Iraqi 
schools will be bombed, teachers maimed, and books unaffordable. It 
could be a decade before Iraqi educational institutions could 
re-build, leaving a generation of women without formal education. 

Like women here, women in the Middle East face great discrimination 
within their own society. But Bush attempted to justify his war on 
Afgahnistan in part by pretending the U.S. marines were on a feminist 
mission to liberate Afghani women from their burqahs, when clearly 
revenge and oil were our priorities and when the U.S. government 
cannot event make it safe for women to walk alone at night on the 
streets of America. And we know that a new war on Iraq will only 
worsen the condition of women in Iraq. So, when women's equality and 
liberation are being touted as justifications for regime change and 
massive destruction in the Middle East, we need to raise our voices 
and say that Iraqi women should be the only ones to define what 
counts as moral authority and just means of liberation. We can help 
by echoing their demand that no bombs be dropped, no tanks be 
deployed, no children mutilated in the name of women's liberation and 
supporting their pleas for an end to the sanctions, an increase in 
real aid, and human rights inspectors in Iraq.

IMPACT ON WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

While the women in Iraq will surely suffer the most from a U.S. 
invasion, women in the United States certainly won't gain either. As 
Virginia Woolf once said: Š if you insist upon fighting to protect 
me, or "our "country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally 
between us, that you are fighting Š to procure benefits which I have 
not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my 
instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. As a woman, my 
country is the whole world.

The violence against U.S. women during this war will not as likely be 
physical violence. It will be structural and economic violence as we 
watch hundreds of billions of dollars that could be spent women and 
children's programs go to tanks and bombs, death and starvation.

Every dollar spent on this war is a dollar not diverted to social 
programs that guarantee basic life necessities for women and 
children. With this militarization of our nation and our world has 
come a lowering of the standard of living for billions of people 
around the world - the largest percentage of which are families 
headed by single women, a phenomena named the feminization of 
poverty. If they're feminizing poverty, I say we feminize the 
national budget and feminize this nation's plan for national 
security. As women, we need a voice in deciding what constitutes 
"national security." For us, national security is not the Patriot Act 
(1 or 2!), it is not the Homeland Security Department, and is 
certainly not the color-coded terrorism alerts! For us, national 
security is child care and maternity leave, job training, housing, 
transportation, education, and health care and care for the elderly 
and disabled. If we do a gender analysis of the budget priorities of 
the federal budget, or any national budget on earth for that matter, 
we see that male gender interests dominate the budget, neglecting 
women's needs.

WE NEED A NEW, FEMINIST VISION OF A JUST WORLD

We are women's voices, not just women's voices for peace, but voices 
that provide an alternative analysis of the constellation of 
patriarchy, racism, and militarism that create such vast inequality 
in our world. The peace we seek is not merely the absence of war, but 
rather the presence of social, racial, and economic justice and 
freedom for all people.

In wartime, women are always asked to postpone indefinitely our 
struggles for equality while "more important" issues are addressed. 
And, it's true, the prospect of millions of people dying in this 
senseless war is huge and merits the choice of many feminist 
activists who have channeled their energies into the anti-war 
movement. But, by exposing the relationship between sexism and 
militarism, and by making the equal status of women in society a 
condition of a just, peaceable world, we can work for both at the 
same time. Peace is a women's issue. Women's rights must be part and 
parcel the anti-war movement. Ending the oppression of women and 
working toward a just, non-violent society are not mutually exclusive 
objectives - rather, they are inseparable.

When Simone de Beauvoir spoke of women's resistance to war, she said 
that "to refuse to countenance a war that dares not speak its true 
nameŠ you can no longer mumble the old excuse, "We didn't know"; and 
now that you do know, can you continue to feign ignorance, or content 
yourselves with mere token utterance of horrified sympathy"? So, if 
you aren't already involved in the anti-war movement, hopefully today 
you have been inspired to join us. All movements for social justice 
have to guard against male dominance in the movement and take 
pro-active steps to elevate and encourage women's leadership in the 
movement. We hope that today is one strong step in that direction. 
Slavery abolitionist and early feminist Sojourner Truth once said: If 
the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world 
upside down, these women together ought to be able to turn it right 
side up again. And I believe that we will together turn this world 
right side up again. The generations of women to come may never know 
our name or face, but their world and the world of their 
grand-daughters will be a safer place for our efforts.

BUSH'S PRESS CONFERENCE

Last night during the Presidential press conference, little Bush 
reached new height in the arrogance of power. He said that we are in 
the final stages of diplomacy before we go to war for peace, no 
matter what the rest of the world or his own people think, and that 
anyone who doesn't want to be in harm's way should leave Iraq! If 
he's in the final stage of diplomacy before bombing the living shit 
out of another country, then it is no time to stand aside and look 
helpless. It's time to stand up, fight back again this war, and put 
George W in the final stages of his presidency for violating the 
Constitution of the United States and the sanctity of international 
law. Down/out with Bush!

In additional to the mind-blowing inability to answer the most basic 
of questions about the war, I was also struck last night by the 
difference in his responses to men and to women reporters. When 
calling on and answering women reporters, Bush spoke oh so softly and 
sweetly so as not to offend our delicate natures with talk of war. 
Well, if there is one fatal mistake a man can make, it is to 
underestimate the strength of a woman. Never underestimate the 
strength of a woman. And he has underestimated the strength of not 
one woman, but millions of women who know who the real axis of evil 
is and are ready to organize to unseat him!

While he is assembling his arsenal of destruction - his fighter jets, 
bombs, tanks, and missiles, as though they were all toys in his 
infantile world - we will be assembling our own army of millions of 
women to stop him! Out of the schools and the hospitals, out of the 
prisons and the kitchens and into the streets we will go to take this 
nation back from George W, back from the military, back from the oil 
companies, and back from the multi-national corporations that have 
this nation in a death grip.  We can do it and we will!!!

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Brooke Anderson
Champaign County Health Care Consumers
44 E. Main St., Suite 208
Champaign, IL 61820
Phone = (217) 352-6533, x 17
Fax = (217) 352-9745
Email = brooke at shout.net
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-- 
**************************************
Brooke Anderson
Champaign County Health Care Consumers
44 E. Main St., Suite 208
Champaign, IL 61820
Phone = (217) 352-6533, x 17
Fax = (217) 352-9745
Email = brooke at shout.net
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