Struggle goes on for rights

As International Women’s Day approaches, where is the movement?

Long before 1975, when International Women’s Day was officially sanctioned by the United Nations as March 8, its origins were in the streets.

On March 8, 1857, New York City garment workers marched and picketed to protest factory conditions. They railed against the long hours and low wages and demanded the right to vote. More than 50 years later, on March 8, 1908, garment workers marched again, to honor their sisters of 1857. Again, they wanted to end sweatshop conditions and child labor, and they wanted the right to vote. Both times, the cops were called in.

International Women’s Day is a more staid affair these days. But as Oscar-winning actress Reese Witherspoon, personal finance expert Suze Orman and other speakers at yesterday’s second annual Global Summit for a Better Tomorrow at the United Nations reminded us, there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, especially around two intertwined issues: financial resources and safety.

The statistics they presented are alarming: At least one in three women is likely to be beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime. 

“All women deserve physical safety,” said Witherspoon.

“[Violence] is hidden in the homes, schools and other places where women should feel safe, but all too often it is someone in their own family who is violent,”  Joanne Sandler, executive director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women said. “When we started this work, many of our colleagues warned us, this was a private issue, not one for the halls of the U.N.”

Sandler talked about how countries like Cambodia didn’t even have a word for domestic violence, not because it didn’t exist, but because it wasn’t spoken about.

Witherspoon showed off a new product from Avon to help the cause: the “empowerment bracelet.” (The event was cosponsored by the Avon cosmetics company and UNIFEM.) 

The $3 blue bracelet’s clasp is shaped like an infinity symbol “to represent the infinite power of women,” Witherspoon explained. She urged people to buy them for their friends and daughters, and to “talk about it wherever you go.”

Most of the money will go to UNIFEM’s 11-year-old Trust Fund to End Violence Against women. Sandler described how funding is used for such global projects as going door-to-door to collect signatures from families to not let their daughters be subject to honor killings, or going to soccer fields in Latin America to tap young men to be spokesmen against domestic violence.

The reason for domestic violence “is the lack of financial freedom,” she said.

“I’m here in the hopes that you will save yourself,” Orman said, “because when one woman saves herself, she has the power to save the world.”