Today is International Women’s Day…a day that is celebrated throughout the world including here in Nicaragua.
I first learned about Women’s Day in 1985 when I was a part of an all women’s delegation to Nicaragua during the Contra War. We walked parts of the road from Estelí to San Juan de Limay so that mothers of children killed by the contra could plant crosses where their children had been taken off buses, tortured, and assassinated. Due to the violence and terror, the road was usually closed, and families could not pass to visit one another. That day, the road was busy with 60 of us “protecting” them with our U.S. citizenship…families coming and going as fast as they could and then the mothers joining us, telling their stories, and planting their crosses.
We went into the town of Limay and there they had planned for us a celebration of women for International Women’s Day…I learned, participated, and was humbled by these empowered, impoverished women. I learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on 25th of March, 1911 where 146 young women working there were locked in and burned as the factory burned…except for the many girls that jumped 9 stories out of windows. I learned that their deaths made for safer labor laws in the US. I learned all this in the little town of San Juan de Limay, Nicaragua.
Today is International Women’s Day. It is celebrated throughout the world. It is celebrated here.
Women are the backbone of society. Poor mothers keep the family going and fed…often detriment to their own health. Often women are the sole heads of households. Women work long hours and then return home to cook, clean, feed, wash, and care for the home and family. It is women who carry the growing population due to lack of birth control and global machismo (estimated 28% of pregnancies are unintended). It is women who give birth to the human race…in pain, blood, sweat, tears and often in death (1,000 women/day).
Yet women are paid less than men globally for their hard work and long hours. Women are raped in places of work…be it sweatshops or as domestics. Three out of four modern day slaves are women. Women are still beaten in their own homes and it is culturally acceptable in many, many regions of the world. Almost ½ of the women from 15-49 years of age in developing countries think that wife beating can be justified. And then there are the countries that are U.S. allies that stone women, forbid them to drive, discourage education, refuse them the right to vote, and require them to become invisible in their mountains of cloth with only their eyes looking out at the world that is not to be theirs.
Today is International women’s Day. It is celebrated throughout the world. It is celebrated here…
Now let’s make it obsolete…let’s make a world where women are equal. -Kathleen
