It is International Women’s Day today. Originally called International Working Women’s Day, it was an explicitly working class day of honour when first celebrated 100 years ago. And IWD remains of particular importance for the Left, one of those days to remember past struggles, to pay due homage to those women – strugglers and diehards – who continue to resist and continue to hope big. But something more, too – a day to simply recognize the unpaid and so often invisible labour performed by women around the world to sustain their communities.
Today, personally, a moment to remember some of the outstanding women I have known. By no means all of them, nor even those I have known the best. But a few who cross my mind this morning as I take a moment to reflect.
– Lucia: communist in the most organic of ways, sustainer of family and community and always in her quiet way the measure of what was right, who opened her home in a little village in Zimbabwe’s communal lands to a white kid who knew a whole lot less than he liked to think;
– Denise: feminist activist, Marxist analyst, popular educator, radical theologian, who told me to read Robert Bly on gender and masculinity and helped me find what was right in his work as much as what was wrong with it;
– Marta: trade unionist, lawyer, exile, voice of the Guatemalan armed resistance, mentor, who remains for me a profound symbol of strength in gentleness, of conscience in armed struggle;
– Judi: eco-warrior and wobbly sister, the first person ever to show me that it was not only possible but fundamentally necessary to draw together ecological activism and radical, pro-worker anti-capitalism;
– Georgie: teacher and trickster who brought me so much literature and music and introduced a healthy dose of irreverence and laughter to the dour radicalism of my younger years;
– Karen: a vague memory of a young internationalist and human rights activist who would hold a three-year-old me across her lap for hours of political meetings in our living room, and who still today symbolizes what it means to be safe and loved and warm;
Just a few of so many to think of today. Just a few of so many to honour.
Bread, yes, but roses too.
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