For Immediate Release

Barbra Ramos, National Communications Director
[email protected]
323-813-4272

NATIONAL–AF3IRM celebrates International Women’s Day — also known as International Working Women’s Day — the best way we know how: by affirming the absolute necessity of women-led organizing and fighting for liberation!

The strength and courage of women is transformative and powerful. We know the roots of International Women’s Day in the strikes and struggles of women workers. We have witnessed how women-created actions snowballed into vast movements for social justice: Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors started #BlackLivesMatter, while Idle No More came from Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Nina Wilson, and Sheelah McLean. We have seen the power of women’s organizing when we waged the Stand With Grace campaign and won.

As a transnational feminist organization that is purposeful in its work, we remind all of our commitment to these intersectional struggles against gender-based violence, commodification, fetishization, and economic oppression. We organize around our own oppressions and we do so that women may not only survive but thrive. We have a vision of world different from the reality we face in almost every corner of the world – from rape culture to trafficking, from the missing and murdered women from Canada and Mexico to Guatemala to the women imprisoned for miscarriages in El Salvador, to the concerted effort to take away hard-won women’s rights in the United States, to the use of women’s bodies as pawns in war and conflict.

We have a vision of a world that is a negation of the current one run by the combined ferocity of Capital and Patriarchy, maintained by a continuing ferocious assault upon womankind. We organize, we struggle, we study our experience and articulate our worldview — because humanity and the earth will not survive if we continue to follow what is being dictated upon us.

Realizing that hitherto proposed paradigms have failed to correct and address comprehensively all systems of oppression and exploitation, we assert that a woman’s place is at the head of the struggle for liberation. All of written human history — from slavery to capitalism and even the socialist “experiments” of the last century have been enmeshed with patriarchy and dominance. Hence, we affirm our right to our struggle, the women’s right to their own rebellion and liberation. We aim these words not only at the so-called conservative “right” but at the entire political spectrum.

Our liberation may be bound with yours — but our liberation cannot be achieved through subservience to your liberation. Women’s liberation in these times comprise of these: the dismantling of Patriarchy, resistance to Capital and the end to Imperialism. These are indivisible components of the women’s struggle. We cannot achieve our liberation by allowing ourselves to be silenced, our worldview ignored and our movements subjugated under other movements, our history and achievements erased.

The women of AF3IRM live their oppression and struggle every minute of the day, day after day. From that experiential knowledge, we create our theory and guide to action. We work to manifest a just world of equality; we are fiercely resolute in transforming what justice and solidarity looks like. We are becoming the change we seek, and so we are also the future our enemies fear.

This International Women’s Day and during Women’s Month, AF3IRM chapters across the country refuse to have women’s work, lives, and stories vanished. We take over the streets of Los Angeles with our sisters from Ovarian Psyco-Cycles for a historic march with over seventy endorsers on International Women’s Day. This is the first major march led and organized by transnational feminists and women of color. We are at the Empowering Women of Color Conference at UC Berkeley with a workshop led by our Central Coast and SF Bay Area chapters. We are connecting and organizing with more women in areas like New York, where we host our annual Happy Hour Against Patriarchy — a mocking of the masculinist edict suffering is women’s fate. At a vigil in San Diego, we are memorializing the women leaders of the struggle, and the missing, murdered, abused and trafficked women and girls that others have forgotten at a vigil in San Diego.

AF3IRM is and always has been purposeful in its work and we remind our sisters from the streets of Los Angeles to the boroughs of New York, from Canada to Mexico, from India to the Philippines, from Palestine to El Salvador, that even as we acknowledge our differences, we will continue to support each other’s struggles. We will continue to organize, to mobilize, to act and to speak.

Either we fight and struggle side by side, in mutual respect and benefit, or we shall have to wait another 10,000 years for liberation.

Rise, sisters. We can hear the new world breathing. Liberation is calling our name.

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