Peace is a requirement for equality for women

On this International Working Women’s Day, the Young Communist League of Canada extends a militant greeting to women struggling for bread and roses in the face of growing threats to safety and security for women around the world and in Canada.

International Working Women’s Day was brought forward through the struggles for improvement in working and living conditions fought for by women, often at the front of the charge in working class struggles such as the hunger marches of the 1930s and the struggles for the rights of women to vote and to work. Gender-based violence, workplace harassment, and unsafe working conditions continue to be front and centre issues for women entering the workforce, especially in sectors such as health care and education.

In Canada, we salute the militant women who have led the struggles within the labour movement through the needle trades and garment workers who fought for an 8-hour workday. We recognize the struggles waged by Dorise Nielsen who fought for women in the needle trades and salute the women fighting today for much of the same struggles: equal pay and equal representation in the workforce. The struggle for justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women is led by the mothers and sisters calling for justice, searching landfills, rivers, and communities, for the thousands of women and girls who have been left by the Canadian state and law enforcement to suffer without answers.

We remember women such as Celia Sanchez Manduley and Pastorita Nuñez who galvanized the women’s struggle in the July 26th movement that overthrew Batista and brought lasting change for Cuban women. We remember the long fought struggles of the Sudanese Women’s union, who fought for the independence of the Sudanese people from British rule. Today these women are fighting on the front lines against the genocide in Sudan. 

Indeed, peace is a requirement for equality. Women are always a victim of war, their rights are ignored and delayed as their homes and their families and their communities are destroyed. Therefore this International Working Women’s Day we emphasise the importance of the struggle for peace. To fight for peace and disarmament is to fight for equality. 

It is clear to us as Young Communists that the main force sustaining patriarchy and male chauvinism today is capitalism. The drive to produce new generations of working people has always fallen on women, who, in modern capitalist society, are forced to work the “double burden” of both the regular work day and unpaid domestic labour, including cleaning, child-rearing, cooking, and other household duties. The patriarchy and the capitalist system rely deeply on each other and mutually reinforce one another. Communists have always taken up the call for increased gender equality, and have continuously fought for accessible childcare, reproductive healthcare, truly equal pay rates, and higher rates of education for women and gender-oppressed people.

Today and tomorrow, the YCL-LJC remains committed to the fight against all forms of oppression. Oppression strengthens and reinforces the exploitation of one class over another.