It is important to claim that it has been the mobilizations and movements of women and feminists who ran the fence in each period to consecrate progress and to install the horizon of equality that we must achieve as a society and as a country.
Claudia Pascual Grau. Santiago. 8/3/2023
. On International Women’s Day, we commemorate all our struggles, our achievements, and we vindicate the demands and rights that we need to consecrate.
The advancement of gender awareness, the feminist struggle and the living conditions of women is undeniable. No one might say “nothing has been done” or that we are still the same as 100, 70, 40 or 20 years ago.
Women have achieved the right to education, to work paid outside the home, to elect and be elected, to be in all spheres of society.
However, these rights and participations have not occurred with the speed needed to have more equitable and equal participations and representations, we still have gender gaps that are shameful. Co-responsibility in tasks and care work, domestic work, representatives in Parliament, company directories, council of rectors, the labor participation rate with a 25% difference to the detriment of women, are just some of the existing gaps . The conditions of inequality and legal discrimination still persist as they are expressed in the conjugal partnership regime.
If we add to the above the gender violence that girls, adolescents, women and diverse sex-generic people continue to experience, it is undeniable and undeniable that we must continue fighting until we conquer all our rights and end all discrimination and inequalities.
That is why advances so claimed for women in our country are the creation of laws that generate awareness and classify gender violence, those that recognize domestic and care work, the institutional framework of the Ministry for Women and Gender Equity, the the right to decide on abortion in 3 grounds, the recognition of economic violence that is the non-payment of alimony, among others.
It is important to claim that it has been the mobilizations and movements of women and feminists who ran the fence in each period to consecrate these advances and to install the horizon of equality that we must achieve as a society and as a country. We must also vindicate the importance of political forces and governments assuming these demands for their concretion and translation into public policies and legislation. Thus, what has been done by the Government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda in education, by Frei Montalva in health and promotion of popular organization, by Salvador Allende with agrarian reform, housing policy, kindergartens, popular casinos, pre and postnatal, by Michelle Bachelet with solidarity pillar of pensions, shelters once morest gender violence, financing of high-cost diseases, licenses to care for sons and daughters with long-term or terminal illnesses, pregnancy interruption for 3 reasons, vaccination once morest human papillomavirus, criteria of gender parity in parliamentary elections, or in this government of President Boric that promulgates the law for the effective payment of alimony pensions, which creates a national registry of caregivers, added to the bills that are in process such as the of 40 hours of weekly working time or pension reform, realize that the commitment of governments can accelerate the establishment protection of rights and reduction of inequality gaps.
That is why it is no less important that governments openly manifest themselves in favor of gender equality or even feminists, because it is not a brand to shine but a stake on the horizon to reach, a committed direction of their actions.
It will generate contradictions, by the way, the State is not feminist, nor are the parties or politics (no matter how much progress there is in that direction), but this cannot inhibit embracing the causes of gender equality and equity, the causes of feminism . Nor can it claim to replace women’s and feminist movements.
This 8M also commemorates 50 years of the Coup d’état, and women and feminists not only condemn the breakdown and the deep wound that was caused to democracy, but we continue to condemn the violations of human rights and continue to demand truth, justice , repair and guarantees of non-repetition.
We remember the women victims of repression, the women who were the first to organize in search of their relatives, those who organized for economic survival, those who rose up despite fear and mobilized every March 8 beginning the days of protests once morest the dictatorship every year, those who demanded democracy in the country and at home, those who tirelessly continue to demand justice and not impunity in democracy and have seen once more the horror of massive and systematic rapes in the Piñera government once morest the social outbreak.
For all this diversity women, for all the struggles and rights, we continue to fight and march every March 8 on International Women’s Day.
Claudia Pascual Grau is a social anthropologist, is currently a senator, was the first minister of Women and Gender Equity, former councilor in the Municipality of Santiago, leader of the Communist Party of Chile.
