Enough Is Enough

Week 20 – Notes

Women are singing and dancing their protest; they’re organizing, marching or going on strike.

The Chilean protest song about rape culture and femicide has become an anthem for feminists around the world. Rebecca Lolosoli, a Samburu woman from Kenya, together with 15 other women, founded the village Umoja as a sanctuary for homeless women survivors of violence, women subjected to genital mutilation, young girls running away from forced marriages or those being abandoned by their families. Buying the land surrounding the village shifted the weight of the power structure in the patriarchal Samburu community. Women owning land is a key factor – it is the foundation for security, shelter, and livelihood and it paves the way to empowerment and economic opportunity. Daughters inherit land in matrilineal and matriarchal society, the Mousu, a small ethnic group living in China near the Tibetan border being one example, the Khasi people in north-eastern India is another. Land is also an issue for the Brazilian Babassu women, called the Babassu warriors. They say: “Call us re-inventors of history!” and have fought and organized for the right to harvest Babassu nuts, the oil and husk being used for bread, charcoal, or soap. Makhosi Busisiwe Khoza, a South African politician and former Member of Parliament for the ruling ANC sends an emotional message to celebrate Women’s Day 2020, then Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American journalist, author and activist, who was arrested in Tahrir Square in Cairo during the protests she reported on, and who was beaten and sexually assaulted by Egyptian security forces, demands the ending of women’s oppression by patriarchal societies. The day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as president in 2017, organizer and activist Tamika Mallory, Angela Davis, civil rights activist and author and Madonna, iconic singer-songwriter are calling for resistance to Trump and sending a message to the world: Women’s rights are Human Rights. The 267 murders of Mexican women in April 2020, the deadliest month in the previous five years, due to stay–at–home Covid19 measures caused furious women to go on strike for a day. The political and economic impact a women’s strike (1975) had (and still can have), is told by women of Iceland …