Reading of municipal manifesto marks International Women’s Day

Monday 8th March 2021 | translated by MIKE SMITH

Municipal statement, read in front of the town hall this lunchtime:

Once again, March 8 commemorates International Women’s Day, a date that serves as a tribute and recognition to women’s movements for their rights and is also a day to vindicate and make clear that inequalities continue to exist.

It was, at the suggestion of Clara Zetkin, at the Second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen in 1910, where this date was established as the International Day of Working Women. After 111 years, the women’s rights movement is still more alive than ever.

Also remember that in Spain, universal suffrage is approved on October 1st 1931, so this year we celebrate 90th anniversary of the achievement of the women’s vote. Much progress has been made in terms of rights, but there is still a long way to go to achieve real and effective equality.

With all this, the struggle to vindicate women’s rights is beginning to grow and expand: more and more women and men are justifying this struggle as their own and recognizing feminism as the social movement that advocates equality between women and men.

The economic crisis of the last decade led us to an involution in women’s rights that produced greater inequality, impoverishment, feminization of precariousness, cuts in social rights, and an increase in women’s unemployment.

We are now in another crisis caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and once again women are the most vulnerable to suffer its economic effects. Women face an increase in domestic violence, unpaid care work, unemployment and poverty. Although women constitute the majority of front-line staff, there is a disproportionate and inadequate representation of women in national and global policy spaces related to COVID-19.

For all we have said, today, March 8, we say out loud:

• Today we commemorate International Women’s Day and promote activities aimed at strengthening the principle of equality between men and women, joining the UN motto “Women leaders: For an egalitarian future in the world of COVID-19”.
  
• We are committed to developing cross-cutting equality policies.
  
• Promote policies that promote conciliation, co-responsibility and non-discrimination against women.
  
• However, we commit ourselves and encourage the rest of the institutions to continue working for equality and to advance in the development of policies for equality and against gender-based and gender-based violence. We express the importance of the State Pact against Gender Violence, and the endowment and budgetary continuity to guarantee its application. We express the civic and political importance of the Valencian Pact against gender and sexist violence and the endowment and budgetary continuity to guarantee its application.

As a public administration we reaffirm our commitment to women; we will continue to fight every day until real equality exists.

Because women are essential.

Information Source
Press Release – Ajuntament de Xàbia