An Especially Important Meeting
I organized the Contemporary Women’s Issues Workshop in Warsaw, Poland, in close cooperation with a team of women from Central and Eastern Europe. [See previous two articles.]
It was the second Contemporary Women’s Issues Workshop in Poland, and the larger number of women from Central and Eastern Europe made it an especially impressive and important meeting—one that built stronger bridges between Eastern and Western women.
We were seventy-one women from thirteen countries, including eleven young and young adult women, thirteen women targeted by racism (Roma, African heritage, and Asian heritage), and twenty women from Eastern and Central Europe. We noticed that we experienced sexism and male domination differently but also how connected we were as females.
These were a few of the highlights:
- A constant sense of everyone cooperating, taking charge, and working hard and intelligently
- Complicated, demanding interpreting and language liberation work done flexibly and thoughtfully
- Being reminded by Diane Balser, the leader of the workshop, that “female” is above all divisions and not an “identity”—that the oppression is what is difficult (being female is a fact and cannot be a problem)
- Looking at the depth of sexism and how our lives as females are shaped by it in every way
- Learning about the impact of war on women
- Being reminded that women are key to changing the whole system as we work on ending climate change
- Seeing how older and younger women are targeted differently by the sex industries
- A new sense of sisterhood across all of the divisions
We seven women from Denmark will continue to meet in a women’s support group. And those of us on the organizing team (from Romania, Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Russia, and Denmark) will keep meeting regularly on Zoom. It feels like the workshop was a new beginning.
Copenhagen, Denmark
Reprinted from the RC e-mail
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