Potsdam,
March 18-19, 2005Potsdam,
March 18-19, 2005
AN
IDEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL ATTACK AGAINST WOMEN'S VESTED RIGHTSIn the last thirty years, there were significant conquests in the promotion of gender equality because of the long struggles waged by the feminist movement. These struggles have led to the issuance of international conventions and European directives.
Throughout the 1990s, many world and local conferences have taken place and the European Union has elaborated Programmes aimed at implementing equality in different countries.
However, the results were poor because of the absence of any political will and also because the funds necessary in order to create the material basis for equality were never allotted. On the contrary, very large amounts of funds have been spent in payments to instructors who were more in number than the women trained.
In the last few years, however, there is a serious attack against the women’s vested rights.
Neo-liberal globalisation does not send women home directly but literally tramples upon them in order to move forward.
Nowadays, there is no mention to “equal pay for equal work”, which has never been implemented anyway; as a result, employers have enjoyed additional profits from the pay inequality between men and women exclusively linked to gender.
The majority of women work in poorly paid, temporary, informal jobs, without any insurance or pension rights, under very bad work conditions almost without any health and safety measures and under conditions of sexual harassment.
Moreover, women migrants have to do EVERYTHING: they have to do the laundry, tidy up and clean up and they are often compelled to offer their sexual services.
Additionally, the shrinking, almost elimination, of the welfare state burdens women with the care and culture of children as well as care for the elderly and disabled persons.
Thus, their professional development is prevented and their participation in the labour market and in public affairs becomes difficult. The quality of their lives is increasingly downgraded. The situation has taken on such dimensions that one could speak about the destruction of the reproductive sector.
Women without any education, without good health, heads of one-parent families and other categories, are driven to poverty and social exclusion.
The attack against the material conditions necessary for women’s emancipation is of course expressed in the ideological-political sphere. The Greek Orthodox Church and the Mass Media wage skilful but organised attacks. The women politicians of the ruling New Democracy party stand for “FATHERLAND, RELIGION, FAMILY”, whilst the women of PASOK claim that they had solved all the problems of women when their party was in government and they rest.
In the Greek Code of Medical Ethics, a physician has the right to refuse to perform an abortion and he can create difficulties in assisted reproduction.
The propaganda in TV serials with top ratings is that “Abortion is Murder” and that there should be no premarital sexual relations. Several TV serials are broadly publicised because they are based on “family values”. Homosexuals, drug-addicts etc. are cast into the fire of hell.
These new more difficult conditions place the feminist movement before new responsibilities:
- We have to resist any efforts directed toward regression and taking away women’s vested rights.
- We have to start an ideological discussion and try to extend it to as many women and men as possible.
- We have to open a front against the Christian fundamentalist conceptions of the extreme conservative circles such as the church etc.
- Women should wage a struggle for the implementation of laws and conventions that are good weapons in the hands of women.
- It is necessary, however, that these institutional guarantees are materialised by means of an economic policy that would secure equality for women in the labour market and by means of a social policy that would secure the prerequisites for women’s participation in work and public life.
- Mobilisations and unity in action by the women’s movement are necessary, especially through the anti-globalisation movement.