We celebrate 8th March International Working Women’s Day in the name of sick female prisoners and all women!
In New York on the 8th March, 1857, 40 thousand female textile workers working in a factory began a strike in protest at the inhumane conditions they were forced to work in and the pitiful compensation they received despite working 16 hours a day. That strike, organised by 40 thousand female labourers, stands to this day as amongst the largest of women’s labour actions. Intending to disrupt the protest, police attacked the workers and with the help of the factory boss locked thousands of the workers inside the factory. In a fire which broke out shortly afterwards, 129 of the women locked inside the factory lost their lives. However, through the immense sacrifices made by the female workers on that day they were able to secure a reduction in daily working hours.
At the Socialist Women’s Conference associated with the Second International held in 1910 in Copenhagen, at the suggestion of Clara Zetkin, 8th March became known as International Working Women’s Day and has been celebrated every year since 1911.
Women have been fighting for hundreds of years to have equal rights with men and to live freely and their struggle continues upon the backs of these achievements. However, despite these gains, the issue of women’s equality and liberation continues with all its burning intensity.
Sexist mindsets, which feed from the patriarchal capitalist-colonialist system, continue to endure. The struggle against the patriarchal-statist oppression of women, the failure to provide an equal wage for equal work, femicide, harassment, rape and all forms of violence against women must also continue globally.
Through 8th March International Working Women’s Day, we want to draw attention to the situation of women prisoners who in the course of struggling for an equal and free life fell prisoner and now bear all forms of repression in prisons.
In prisons in the Turkish state there are thousands of sick female prisoners amongst whom 198 are severely unwell. Gülbahar Anaşın (breast and lung cancer), Fatma Toprak (heart disease), Özlem Taşdemir (schizophrenia), Zeynep Avcı (heart disease), Diclek Öz (lymph cancer), Hatice Duman, Şivakar Ataş and Besra Erol are just a few examples of such prisoners.
The fascist Turkish state by not releasing sick women prisoners and by blocking their access to treatment is condemning them to death. Even those who have received a report attesting that they are unable to survive in prison are not being released. A female revolutionary by the name of Garibe Gezer who pushed to suicide after being subjected to months of torture, harrassment and rape.
We celebrate 8th March Working Women’s Day in the name of all women and women prisoners struggling against patriarchal systems and all forms of injustice from Turkey, Kurdistan and Iran to Palestine and Germany.
Let’s support revolutionary female prisoners resisting the attacks of the fascist state, rights violations and torture and, by sending letters and cards, be guests in their prison cells.
Long live 8th March Working Women’s Day!
Women: to the 8th March strike, to the streets, to freedom!
Freedom for sick women prisoners
Prisoners Voice Platform (TSP)
