Notes on the 2005 Global Women's Strike: End Poverty and War -- Invest in Caring Not Killing!

author : Patty Imani

by Patty Imani

On March 8 we participated in the 6 Annual Global Women's Strike here in Olympia. Friends gathered at Sylvester Park and shared music, food, and thoughts concerning the state of women's continuing fight to live while challenging oppression nationally and globally.

Sixteen women shared music and stories of their work in the community challenging poverty and war, and the devaluing, objectification, and appropriation of women's lives and labor. The affects of these assaults take so many forms, as does the work we do. What is common in our work is our endurance in continuously resisting those alien forces that appropriate and assault the creative / sustainable systems that we strive to participate in and protect. We work for change by giving to, and challenging one another, as well as those structures that benefit from the taking and commodifying of life (against sustainable ends).

The Global Women's Strike was born on International Women's Day in 1999, when women in Ireland held a national general strike. The strike expanded and became global in the year 2000. Today, women in over 60 countries participate in the strike.

Because of The U.S.'s role in the world, as the primary pursuers of war, as the primary oppressors of peoples and lands, as leaders in resource extraction and consumption, our participation in the strike nationally is essential.

The strike calls for an end to poverty and an end to war.

On poverty: Central to the strike is gaining legal recognition and wages for all the unwaged work women do, as well as pay equity for the underwaged work women do.

According to the UN, women do two-thirds of the world's work: from breastfeeding and raising children to caring for those who are sick, older or disabled, to growing, preparing and cooking the food that feeds families and communities -- this in addition to labor in the formal marketplace. It is shown that women take only 5% of measured world assets in return. for 75% of the work.

To legitimize work that functions to sustain life is an essential threat to the prevalent ideology that functions to objectify and exploit life for use and profit. Our bodies, our environments, whatever is created from the relationships that exist between - are valued only to the extent they support or threaten that function.

Where pay equity is stressed, primary to the demands of the strike is a living wage for ALL women's work. As Audre Lorde talks about in her essay "Uses of the Erotic" women's inclusion in a market system that "defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need (reducing work) to a travesty of necessities," might mean our survival but certainly not our liberation (given we define our liberation holistically - our health in relation to others' and the world we live within).

On war: The support of Women, as givers of life, as protectors of life, demands an end to war, an end to those social structures that necessitate war. Systems of hierarchy, systems of economy and production that require control of earth's resources, control of lands that hold those resources, control of peoples who strive to serve as caregivers of those resources.

"The Global Women's Strike reclaims military spending for caring, feeding, healing and learning":

$1 trillion a year is spent on the military worldwide, more than half of that is spent by the US alone. Just 10% of this would provide the essentials of life for all humans living today: water, sanitation, basic health, nutrition, literacy, as well a minimum income. The majority of those killed and wounded by war are Women and Children, . 80% of those left as refugees in the wake of war are Women and Children.

Women on strike are insisting the governments of the world, and the corporations that rule them - must "Invest in Caring Not Killing"

If you have access to the internet, please go to the Global Women's Strike web site at http://www.globalwomenstrike.net/ and take a minute to sign the Invest in Caring Not Killing Petition to all governments. It reads:

We, the people of the world, demand that:

--The 'war with no end', the arms trade, and the genocide it imposes, be brought to an end.

We demand

--The over $900 billion now spent on military budgets worldwide be invested instead in the care and welfare of all the people and our planet.

We demand

--All caring work, now done mainly by women, be valued and paid for, and a pension paid to all those whose decades of work have never been recognized.

We demand

--Caring, and therefore the survival and enrichment of every life and of the planet's, becomes the aim of every society and every economy.

In Olympia, we would like to give thanks to those who nurtured us during the Global Women's Strike. Many thanks to those who fed us in the park that day - the striking Pizza Time Workers, Don and Dave from Endicott Farms, Food Not Bombs, the Blue Heron Bakery, and the Oly Food Co-op. Special thanks to Music 6000 for providing us with a great sound system. All of the musicians and speakers, the many people who came early and stayed late to help - Thank you!