I struggled with what to write today. Which subject seemed to have the greatest importance.
In the end I felt there was no subject that had greater importance. They represented different cultures, different concerns, different areas (work, school, motherhood, reproductive rights) different focus (success stories and stories that show how much work is still required) and I realized that I couldn’t anymore choose a topic of greater importance than I could choose a woman of greater importance.
The death of Doris Anderson affected me greatly.
Here was a woman who having fought so hard for her own success could easily have told others to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Yet she never tired of trying to right the wrongs that had made things so hard for her.
We can learn from her example.
So often you hear expressed “well I am not a feminist but…”
“I would call myself a feminist except for the radical types..”
I hear these things and wonder how they apply to women like Doris Anderson, Judy Rebick and to women whose names will never be in history books but who wrote letters, attended rallies, stopped being the bringers of sandwiches and takers of notes and demanded to have their issues addressed.
It was a mere 20 years ago that the commons erupted in laughter over the subject of domestic abuse.
It was only last year that Peter McKay referred to Belinda Stronach as a dog, and that the government of Stephen Harper stated he had not crossed any lines of decency in doing so.
It was mere months ago that this same government drastically cut the budget of SWC and ended all advocacy and research.
Some say do it yourself, get away from the trough.
Well women did do it themselves. They opened shelters, formed support groups, created underground tunnels for others to leave abusive relationships.
Finally the government decided to starting helping to support these initiatives.
The DIY was already done.
That we are being asked to reinvent the wheel is tiresome and shows a complete lack of understanding of historical fact.
Our daughters should not have to fight the same battles we did.
There should be no question of fair wages, there should be no question that rape is not even partially the victims fault, there should be no question that a woman has autonomy over her body, there should be no question that she has the right to marry or not (and regardless of sexual orientation), there should be no question that WOMAN does not mean less than.
And so our voices must never be silenced. We must continue to ensure that not only do the future women of the world have the rights won so far, but that they have every equal opportunity to live, love, work, play and exist in this world.
As Ani DeFranco sings; “Face Up And Sing”
some guy tried to rub up against me
in a crowded subway car
some guy tried to feed me some stupid line
in some stupid bar
I see the same shit everyday
the landscape looks so bleak
I think I’ll take the first one of you’s home
that does something uniquesome chick says
thank you for saying all the things I never do
I say
the thanks I get is to take all the shit for you
it’s nice that you listen
it’d be nicer if you joined in
as long as you play their game girl
you’re never going to wintoday I just want someone to entertain me
I’m tired of being so fierce
I’m tired of being so friendly
you don’t have to be a supermodel
to do the animal thing
you don’t have to be a supergenius
to open your face up and singsomebody do something
anything soon
I know I can’t be the only
whatever I am in the room
so why am I so lonely?
why am I so tired?
I need company
I need backup
I need to be inspired
Yeah, “do it yourself, get away from the trough”. Whatever.
As you say – we (I use the term loosely, not having been from the generation that did it) didn’t use “the trough” to set up shelters, women’s organizations, consciousness-raising groups, etc. Women organized that on their own without asking anyone for anything.
But women also started to say to themselves: aren’t we citizens and taxpayers too? Don’t our issues and our concerns count? Why SHOULDN’T our organizations and our priorities get government funding? If you can fund the military (which, at the time, almost exclusively had men in it), then you can damn well fund women’s shelters! It’s our tax money too, and these are our priorities. We’re half the population. Half of the citizens of this country shouldn’t be disenfranchised by the other half’s priorities. We’re not a special interest. We’re half the country.
Awesome post, Deb.
Great post, Debra! This is a tough thing to write about sometimes.
Thanks for this post. “Well women did do it themselves. They opened shelters, formed support groups, created underground tunnels for others to leave abusive relationships. Finally the government decided to starting helping to support these initiatives.”
The dialectic of state intervention is always dualistic, on the one hand the state wishes to ameliorate over a grievance and thus funds a social safety net, education programs, etc. because it cannot get to the source of the problem.
Secondly in funding these formally autonomous projects, which often politically lobbied for funding, they attach strings and bind the projects in a dependency on the state for funding, thus recuperating them into the state, and minimizing their ability to radicalize.
Word for word, right on, April. Thank you.
Well, darn, I lost my whole comment due to the system recognizing my IP address as a “bad behaviour IP! 😀 I’m bad, you know it. 😉 But Debra seems to have fixed me up, so hopefully this will work.
Anyhow, I was saying that Eugene has a good point, and that is that once women’s organizations (or any organization, for that matter) gets government funding, it restricts its ability to radicalize. If I’m not mistaken, there are some women’s organizations who refuse to apply for government funding for that reason.
And when you have a government that is sympathetic to this sort of thing, it really hammers the point home: “524 women’s shelters across Canada have been funded by the Status of Women, even though such shelters fall within provincial jurisdiction. These women’s centres serve as agents of change for feminists in communities across Canada. Feminists claim they provide protection from male assault, in spite of the fact that a Statistics Canada study, released in July 2003, found that more men were killed, hurt, or threatened by their partners in 2001 than in previous years.”
How can you argue with that kind of idiocy, that women’s shelters shouldn’t be funded, because occasionally men get beaten too? The unfortunate thing is, once your organization starts to depend on government funding (and why shouldn’t we? we’re half the population!), and the government changes into one whose ideology is repugnant and misogynist, you’re vulnerable to collapse. We Ontarians certainly learned that during the 90’s.”