International Women's Day

Today is International Women’s Day. Palestinian refugee Fatima Helou celebrates the women resisting occupation today. This article was first published on International Women's Day 2005.

Amnesty International has just published a disturbing report on the plight of women in Iraq. The report reveals how sanctions, war and occupation have wiped out years of advances made by Iraqi women. Two years of war and occupation have driven women into the home, seen their jobs disappear and their rights eroded.

It is an indictment of the world today that this report should be published on the eve of International Women’s Day, a day that should see women celebrating everywhere.

Even though there seems little to cheer about, International Women’s Day touches women all over the world. This year we should dedicate this day to the women of Iraq and Palestine.

Since we lost our homeland in 1948 Palestinian women have taken part in the struggle as sisters, wives and mothers. We have fought occupation and oppression hand-in-hand with men.

Women sold their jewellery to buy weapons, faced imprisonment for their dissent, defied humiliation and took up arms for their liberation. Many have embraced death for our freedom.

I would like to dedicate this day to the memory of a young woman, barely in her twenties, who took up arms in 1978 to fight for the liberation of Palestine.

Dalal al-Mugrabi was killed on the orders of Ehud Barak, later a prime minister of Israel. She had just led a commando raid in Israel. The punishment for her resistance continued after her death, as the Israeli troops refused to bury her body. She has become a symbol for all Palestinian women.

On this day I remember the women of Shatilla refugee camp in Lebanon where I was born, and where I lived under siege as a teenager in the mid 1980s.

I had survived the Sabra and Chatilla massacre during the Israeli invasion of 1982. But four years later, we found ourselves once again fighting for our very survival.

We were in the midst of a siege by a Lebanese militia force. Our food was running out and water was becoming scarce. Nevertheless, the young women in the camp gathered to mark International Women’s Day.

It was the first time I had heard about such a celebration. We were given a carton of juice—a luxury during the siege—and the women made speeches calling for equality and freedom.

Women, we were told, had to be at the centre of the struggle for our own liberation, and on this day millions of women around the world were also fighting for their survival—whether under occupation, against war, poverty or for their basic rights.

I, and many of my sisters, felt for the first time that we were part of a global struggle. That night in 1986 brought us hope because we no longer felt isolated and abandoned.

I would like to dedicate this day to the women living under occupation today—the thousands of women in Palestine and Iraq who find themselves at the head of families. Women who have to step into the shoes of men to carry on the struggle for survival. Women who, through war, find themselves becoming both mother and father. Women who have to find food to feed their families as their husbands, sons and brothers rot in prison, or are killed or maimed.

On this day we should remember how small acts of defiance are important, such as the defiance shown by two schoolgirls from Hebron who resisted attempts by Israeli soldiers to humiliate them. They suffered beatings and imprisonment at a military checkpoint after they refused an order to undress in front of the soldiers.

I would also like to dedicate this day to the thousands of women across the world who show their solidarity, and through their campaigns and small deeds have broken the isolation many of us feel.

Most of all I would like to dedicate International Women’s Day to the millions of women around the world whose daily battle against all odds keeps our hope for a better future alive.

Fatima Helou is a Palestinian refugee living in Scotland. She was seriously wounded in an Israeli airstrike during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. She survived the Sabra and Shatilla massacre that year and the War of the Camps in 1986. Fatima fled Lebanon after an attempt on her life for her campaign to indict Ariel Sharon and Lebanese warlords for their role in the massacre. She is currently facing deportation back to Lebanon under New Labour’s asylum laws.

Saturday 15 March will see a demonstration in London to mark the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq - coaches will be going from Cardiff. Email - cardiff_troopsout@hotmail.com for more information.

End Postcode Lottery for Female Victims of Violence

Each year, 3 million women across the UK experience rape, domestic violence, forced marriage, trafficking or another form of gender-based violence and there are many, many more who have suffered violence in the past. They deserve specialised support services, such as refuges and Rape Crisis Centres, yet Map of Gaps, published by the End Violence Against Women Campaign and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, graphically shows the postcode lottery in these essential services:

- A third of local authorites across the UK have no specialised services at all
- Only one in ten local authorities have services for ethnic minority women
- Most women in the UK don’t have access to a Rape Crisis Centre

Ask Gordon Brown to take urgent action to end the postcode lottery by taking a minute to sign our Downing Street e-petition here:

http://petitions. pm.gov.uk/ violenceservices/

Please pass this on to your networks and link the petition to your websites and blogs. To download Map of Gaps visit here

Women - Free to Work Harder

The following article by Lindsey German was printed in today's Guardian.

Lindsey is National Convenor of the UK Stop the War Coalition, RESPECT candidate for London Mayor & Author of "Material Girls: Women, Men & Work"

The women's economic miracle has passed largely unremarked, but increasing numbers of women over the past two decades have contributed more to global economic growth than either new technology or the rapidly industrialising giants of China and India. In the 1970s many of us thought working outside the home would be liberating for women, freeing them from financial dependence on men and allowing them roles beyond those of wife and mother.

It hasn't worked out that way. Women's labour has been bought on the cheap, their working hours have become longer and their family commitments have barely diminished. Yesterday's G2 special investigation into how employers treat parents highlighted companies offering decent maternity packages, but many firms refused to take part, and the question remained whether a woman's career would survive childbirth.

The reality for most working women is a near impossible feat of working ever harder. There have been new opportunities for some women: professions once closed to them, such as law, have opened up. Women managers are commonplace, though the top boardrooms remain male preserves. Professional and managerial women have done well out of neoliberalism. Their salaries allow them to hire domestic help.

But more women face worsening conditions: the supermarket or call centre workers; the cooks, cleaners and hairdressers; all find themselves in low-wage, low-status jobs with no possibility of paying to have their houses cleaned by someone else. Even those in professions once-regarded as reasonably high-status, such as teaching, nursing or office work, have seen that status pushed down with longer hours, more regulation and lower pay.

Inequality is not just between men and women, but increasingly between "top" women and those at the lower levels of wages and conditions. Class divisions between women appear in starker form than they did a generation ago. Indeed, those at the top often rely on the labour of those at the bottom to sustain their lifestyles.

Role models such as cabinet ministers Yvette Cooper (three children) or Ruth Kelly (four) do not face the problems of most working women. They receive salaries of three or four times the average female wage, have far longer holidays, access to drivers and other benefits. Estimates have put the cost of employing a nanny at £35,000 a year. Even the cost of a full-time nursery place, at £10,000 a year in London, is close to many women's annual wage.

Women's right to work should not mean a family life where partners rarely see each other or their children. Yet a quarter of all families with dependent children have one parent working nights or evenings, many of them because of childcare problems.

The legislative changes of the 1960s and 1970s helped establish women's legal and financial independence, but we have long come up against the limits of the law. A more radical social transformation would mean using the country's wealth - much of it now produced by women - to create a decent family life. A 35-hour week and a national childcare service would be a start.

It is hard to imagine the major employers conceding such demands. Every gain that women have made at work has had to be fought for.

Women's lives have undergone a revolution over the past few decades that has seen married women, and mothers in particular, go from a private family role to a much more social role at work. But they haven't left the family role behind: now they are expected to work even harder to do both.

Women and Politics Today - A Short Report of Respect's Women's Conference

RESPECT CALLS FOR:

* Full enforcement of equal pay legislation. Fine employers who flout this legislation.

* Universal childcare in publicly funded nurseries for the full working day.

* End discrimination against women at work during pregnancy and on returning to work.

* Extend parental leave entitlements to all employees regardless of size of workforce.

* Women must be free from domestic violence. Safe accomodation should be provided where necessary.

* No sexual harrassment in the workplace.

* For a woman's right to choose.

* Mass campaigns uniting men and women to oppose sexism and fight for full equality.

In response to a resolution passed at the Respect National Conference held last year calling for a National Women's Conference to coincide with International Women's Day, Respect brought together over 100 women – and a few men – on 3rd March to discuss the position of women in Britain today, and progress on the women's rights movement on a global scale.

A diverse group of women participated in the event, and speakers ranged from journalists, academics and councillors to trade union leaders, NGO workers and leaders of the anti-war movement. It was also an historical conference because though International Women's Day was founded in 1910, in recent years it has come to be celebrated largely as an apolitical event. The Respect conference was an attempt to put politics and issues of class back into discussions around women's oppression.

The six workshops attempted to capture the most pressing issues facing women in Britain and the west today. Issues discussed ranged from the rise of raunch culture and abortion rights to Muslim women and politics, and whether women in general are able to pursue a career, have children and be actively involved in politics all at the same time. The point was made that while women now produce the majority of the wealth in the world, no woman should have to make the choice between pursuing a career or having children, or sacrificing an active political life.

Journalist Victoria Brittain helped open the session along with Lindsey German from the Stop the War Coalition, Linda Smith from the Fire Brigades Union and Rania Khan, a young Respect councillor in Tower Hamlets. Victoria discussed the idea that men are never going to relinquish power willingly, while Lindsey pointed out that the huge inequalities in society today are "not just about individual relationships to society" but rather structural inequalities. "Women got the vote on the same basis as men in 1928. Laws were passed on equal pay and sex discrimination more than 30 years ago. Yet there is still huge inequality," she said.

Iraqi writer Haifa Zangana and Eli Rostami-Povey of Action Iran introduced a powerful session on how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have set back the position of women in those countries. Haifa noted that while Iraqi women were fighting alongside men in the resistance against the British in 1922, we now have a situation where an Iraqi woman MP considers it unacceptable to speak in public. Not a particularly inspiring role model for young women in Iraq.

The National Women's Conference was welcomed by participants as the first women's conference that Respect has organised, with enthusiasm for similar forums in the future which would allow Respect women members and non-members to discuss action on the issues raised, such as developing a Respect policy on work/life balance and supporting campaigns on abortion rights. The essence of the meeting was that while there have been clear advances, women are still fighting some of the same struggles today as they were from the beginning of the women's movement. The clear message was that politics must be put back into the fight for equality and that changing society and attitudes towards women are fundamental to realising women's rights