Provincial World March of Women 2000
Bread and Roses Celebrations

Gander, Newfoundland  October  8, 2000

I'm presently working on a project called Women Wise which is a process of self awareness that highly values the information and wisdom we hold in our bodies and teaches us how to access and trust it. I've listened to my body a lot these last few days as I prepared to write this piece.  I listened  and waited attentively because I wanted something, not statistics or theories , but a word, an image, anything that would give me a sense, a felt sense, of what poverty and violence is about in the lives of women and children. I wanted to get a sense of where I am with poverty and violence and how I carry it in my body. 

The longer I stayed with the words, the more I felt a dead weight. 

My body  felt  like two huge pieces of concrete had been caught somewhere between my throat and my belly. I was feeling  poverty and violence like a cold, ridged, powerful, uncaring, non compassionate, concrete structure. Lodged, anchored.  I took the risk of staying with this discomfort. 

I do not easily digest structure. I began to have an inside sense that  all the talk about poverty and violence wasn't about poverty at all!  Poverty didn't fit.. it certainly didn't name the oppression I felt in my body. I remembered a conversation I'd had with a woman activist in the community and I realized why it didn't fit. Poverty is not about lack of food, resources or lack of anything. It is about greed, greed, and more greed. 

These are not profound insights.  Poverty is about greed, and violence is about killing. Greed and violence is killing all of us. It's killing women. It's killing children. It's killing men and their hope of ever developing the feminine dimension of their personhood. And  it's killing our beautiful planet. The underlying force that keeps it all spinning in motion is man's insatiable greed for power. It is kept neatly and tightly in tact by our patriarchal system. 

A few visual snapshots standout for me. Picture this: 

The president of NIKE owns forty-five billion US dollars in assets, including an annual salary of one million US dollars. An Indonesian woman working for NIKE earns the equivalent of three hundred sixty US dollars per year (thirty dollars a month!). 
 
As women, we represent half of the world's population and labour two thirds of the world's working hours. However, we earn only one tenth of the world's income. 

Six billion people are presently living on this planet.  Four billion  live below the relative poverty level; one point three billion live below the absolute poverty level,  seventy per cent of whom are women. 
 
We who live in the richer countries have fifty-nine times the income of those who live in the poorer countries. 

What's wrong with this picture?  Why does this happen? How does this happen? 

It happens because our system is an appalling corrupt system, particularly now in our so called global market. Corruption is a system unto itself and the global market legalizes it on an international level. How else can one explain the excessive wealth concentrated in so few hands? 

So while we have witnessed amazing developments in science and technology, increases in industrial and agricultural productivity, and amazing communication technology, billions of people are without work, without basic access to food, safe water, housing, and  without health care. 

It's the crime of  humanity that we refuse to care for each other. Studies have told us over and over again that there is enough food and resources on this planet for every one. 

We have enough food. We don't have enough justice. We have enough resources. We don't have enough compassion. 

Who said hierarchy is the natural order? Who said poverty is a natural or inescapable phenomenon? Who said unequal power relations between rich and poor is a fact of life?  The patriarchy. 

With this kind of  belief system is it any wonder that violence against women is still internationally present in the form of wife battering, sexual assault and abuse, genital mutilation and systematic rape in wartime?  Is it any wonder that this is the fate of millions of women in all societies regardless of income, class and culture? 

Women  across this province know the impact of greed and violence. We know 

It's about the women and children (approximately  one thousand) who came through our shelters last year to escape from the war zones of their own homes. 

It's about walking into the Avalon Mall and being faced with pornographic magazines that tell men we love to be humiliated, assaulted and even killed. 

It's about being stalked by an ex partner day and night when your restraining order, peace bond and constitutional rights mean absolutely nothing...until the violence has happened. 

It's about shock, fear and tremendous grief over the loss of  Samantha and many other women who have died violent deaths in this province. 

It's about racism and refusing to fund police protection for the women in coastal Labrador who are beaten and battered daily....aboriginal women. 

It's about having a seventy- five per cent chance of having an income below the poverty line ourselves when we reach sixty-five. 

It's about being blamed, scrutinized and judged because you don't have a paid job or because you're not in the "right class" system. 

It would be difficult to find one woman  who, at one time or another in her life, has not been afraid merely because she was a woman. 

Who said women are naturally inferior to men? Who said compassion, emotion, empathy and other feminine values are signs of weakness? Who said go forth and dominate the earth? 

A patriarchal system based on male values has said and taught us this for centuries. But women have never accepted this and women will never accept this. 

Violence against women is violence against the feminine.(Marian Woodman). 

I believe a system based on values that exclude the feminine is violence against all humanity and the hurt of it runs deep within us. 

Feminine is strength, I compassion, inclusion and openness. It is body and the greatest body is the great earth body, the essence of all that is feminine. The patriarchal system excludes the feminine in women and the feminine in men. It excludes the earth. The balance between women, men and nature has been gravely upset. 

We see the imbalance and destruction of the feminine around us every day and we hear the results of it from our politicians and multinational corporations. 

It is doing economics without taking into consideration the social conditions of people and actually excluding them. 

It's about unbridled competition and productivity depleting natural resources, raping the environment making vulnerable populations, mostly women suffer poverty as a result. 

It's about making our water, to which access is a universal privilege, into a commodity of a powerful few. 

It's about not allowing men to experience their femininity without being labelled effeminate, sissy and a wimp. 

It's about  keeping  us invisible by marketing and commercializing our bodies. 

It about promoting a two tier health system because some governments no longer believe in the right of all to receive equal health care. 

It's about having genetic engineering transform our economy, our health care and even our food without any legislation governing it,  regardless of the devastation it could cause to all of us, not to speak of the earth. One of the greatest arguments for this genetic engineering  is so we can feed our planet. Did you ever hear of such hypocrisy? 

This violence against the feminine has pushed our culture into a state of shock causing many to retreat into religious fundamentalism where the end result is racism, sexism, homophobia and general intolerance to differences. (March 2000) 

Take heart...Poverty and violence is a phenomenon that is created. It's man made. Therefore, women can change it. I choose to find the hope. I believe that events like the World March and other women's gatherings by their very existence challenge the structural causes of this phenomenon. 

"Some of us lost the dream, some had it wrenched from us, some of us had it stolen, some of us do not remember where.... 

What we do remember,  some of us at least, is we promised if  ever the time came when the Earth needed us, the children of her daughter, First Woman..., would come together again and learn to live..., in love and in balance. I think that's what feminism is" she said. " The coming together of sisters and cousins". (Ann Cameron) 

There is a deep yearning in us to recover the dream.  We are challenged on all levels as women to be open to the new questions and to find new answers. I believe answers are in our deeply feminine bodies. I believe it even more as I experience being bombarded by the information explosion that leaves so little time for integration. Something in us waits for attention and I believe it  feminine dimension, the wholeness that comes from knowing in our bodies that we are female and male, dark and light, earth and sky. It is a wholeness that we as women yearn to embrace so that we can call it forth in an unbalanced and unjust world.  Even as women we must rediscover the feminine within ourselves because we have taken on the scars of an aggressive and uncaring world. 

"The first thing I learned, in a long list of strategies to survive my childhood, was not to trust anybody. The second thing I learned  was not to trust myself."(Elie Danica) 

"I know, the way I know the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, patriarchy flourishes on fear and dissent. I know as surely as I know my name that patriarchy condones abuse of children to ensure we all grow up frightened and afraid to trust others." (Ann Cameron) 

And I would add ...afraid to trust ourselves and our own bodies. 

I began this piece by referring to how I had to be attentive to how I carry all this poverty, violence, greed and structure in my own body. If I don't listen there will be no room in me to create a space for something new and receive the dream to which Ann Cameron referred. If the space is filled with despair I will collapse within myself or I will take on the aggressive patriarchal values of my culture and become hardened. In other words, I lose touch with the feminine and all the wisdom it teaches me. 

Rediscovering the feminine side of who we are brings some balance into our lives and into our society. We have never  accepted a world vision that our brothers have shaped in their own image and likeness. We have always refused to acknowledge the patriarchal structure which condones and endorses all kinds of violence and oppression in the name of order.. 

This is the energy that gave birth to the World March 2000. Those days of celebration were born out of the protest and political activism of women in Quebec...not unlike the political action that gave birth to I. W. D in the US and Europe at the turn of the century. 

Women's advocacy groups, cooperatives, community kitchens, women's centres and shelters  have resisted these uncaring structures for centuries. Women have been the initiators and leaders. 

So we will do well to root ourselves in the passion, energy and power of the great and wonderful women who have motivated us to action. 

Those who have gone before us: 

  Our mothers and grandmothers 
  Our spiritual leaders:(Machtilde, MaCally, Nagle, Hildegard) 
  Our political leaders ( ... Fanny MacNeil, Armaine Gosling, Jessie Murray Almon
and The Famous Five. 

Our present leaders: the women in this province and women all over the world who celebrated the Women's World March. Our women friends. The women we work with every day. We  allow ourselves to joyfully celebrate each others gifts and diversity while keeping our eye on the larger goal - to create a kinder world for women and men. 

The unknown and unsung, unpaid heros and activists that work along the Labrador coast and rural communities throughout this province. 

"We are all walking scar tissue trying as bravely as we can to define love in a world sadly devoid of it... but we know beyond any hint of doubt that love is alive and well and doing very nicely in the hearts of many women." (Ann Cameron) 

Yes! We want bread and we want roses! We've always made our own bread. Lets gather our own roses.! They come freely from the great Earth Mother and our primal connections with her. 
 
Let's go back to our centre, the centre of our being,  our feminine spirit, our goodness, our integrity, our heart of hearts. Let us own and acknowledge the wisdom in our own body  we know to be true. And let's take it on the road. Take  our vision for a better community, a better world, to our lobbying, to our social action  and celebrate who we are! Let's celebrate the fire in our  feet and the songs in our heart and dance the truth in the streets. Let's take back the feminine for women all over the world. Let's take back the dream for a just world. 

Let the joyous marching begin for women everywhere! 

Helen Murphy is the coordinator of the Provincial Association Against Family Violence. "Power and Violence" is taken from her keynote address to the Newfoundland and Labrador World March of Women in Gander on October 8, 2000