From Latin America to Spain, from America to Chile, and from Greece to Turkey, women are rising up as long as gender inequalities, discrimination, and gender-based violence remain in our grim daily life.

In 2016, feminist strikes were introduced for the first time in many countries. Every year they multiply, rallying millions of women and solidarity activists around the world, calling for a “strike at home, strike at work”.

A double form of strike that seeks to bring to the fore work for care: a daily, unpaid, and invisible work that is nevertheless still the engine of the economy.

Mass protests by women put into focus the multiple oppressions, discrimination, and precariousness that women and femininities continue to experience in a patriarchal world that reproduces gendered divisions of roles, identities, rights, representations, and the separation of the private and public spheres.

A separation that allows the inequalities between them to be perpetuated: enclosed and undervalued participation in the public sphere – unilateral and silenced ‘reproductive labor’ and care of others, in private life.

Subordinate jobs, lower pay than our male colleagues for the same position, barriers to career progression, job insecurity and sexual harassment in the workplace, the threat of dismissal for pregnancy, meager pensions – this is the world of work that was made for us.

Not only are women forced to reproduce ‘traditional roles’ at the expense of their personal lives and development, not only do they become the targets of oppressive stereotypical representations and practices that ‘want them incomplete’ if they do not become wives and mothers, but at the same time they become the target of multiple forms of gender-based violence in public and private spaces, violence that often goes as far as femicide!

Greek women, European women, immigrants, refugees, women of all ages and all gender identities, working and unemployed, experiencing the devaluation and toxicity of dominant masculinity and an increasingly visible and pervasive sexism, racism, and homophobia that pervades social and political life:

• We oppose the emerging fascist, racist, and misogynist discourse that turns against and targets the most vulnerable among women, refugee women, through a nationalist rant and an unacceptable display of vulgar “masculinity”
• We defend our right to freely dispose of our bodies, to decide on our sexuality and our relationship with motherhood
• We refuse to be the first and main victims of the climate and ecological crises and fight for real equality, without which there can be no climate and social justice

The Diotima Center invites all women, femininities, LGBTQ+ subjects, but also men as equal allies in the struggle for substantive equality, to meet at the feminist march, on Sunday 8/3/2020, at 12 pm, at Klafthmonos Sq.

Diotima Centre, 6/3/2020