It is time to say goodbye for now...Time also to integrate this intense and wonderful experience, time to get to conclusions, to decide what to do next...
Yesterday there was a debate around the Swedish Feminist Initiative (F!) to assess the results of the 17/9 elections. There was a lot of talking about the media. How much they rejoiced in the scandals when they started, how little they paid attention to the real F! message when the election time arrived. They talked a lot also about the silence other parties have kept regarding feminist issues and equality, the lack of public support from many feminists who agreed with them in private, the reaction of many people who decided to think this was all about some hysteric sour women screaming against men...All these experts claiming that voting F! was like wasting your vote in favour of the right wing parties. All this patriarchal machinery working at its best to silence feminist voices asking for more justice, more visibility, more power.
Nothing that we had not seen before, but anyway...
Once digested the experience, we are sure that F! will keep going adnd building up as a party, creating a structure that supports everybody's creativity, learning, growing, translating ideas into politics, convincing many women that
after 30 years of too many words, it is time for feminist politics. NO more good intentions from tons of gender consultants, gender bodies, feminists, grass-root women groups. It is time to get real, to know that we need power to put into practise our independent proposals and ideas, no matter what. It is about time for power, not for more research, more good will, more good words.
We trust F! helps create a wide international feminist movement for 
total equality to denounce demagogy in European Institutions, that, year in, year out, publish the same report about inequality between men and women, to forget later on any of this when they set up their political agendas. We need a movement to jointly elaborate a demand for structural reform in all the countries, to move forward for equality, to ask for individualization of social rights, for assistance to women who want to get free from family slavery, protection for all the victims of men-against-women violence (including prostituted women) and zero tolerance for torturers (including prostitution consumers), and many other claims, the same all over Europe.
We need an independent feminist movement to embrace all kind of women, irrespective of their religion, nationality, ethnicity, social class. We need a movement based on ideas not on people or particular elections, where every feminist national party can decide when it is the right moment to take part in political elections, as F! has just done it in Sweden. Although it does not pretend to invalidate the most important issue: that many women, these ones and those ones, can work together for equality in any country.
We go back to Spain after a very enriching experience. We have more friends, we know ourselves better, our ideas have been clarified. We enjoyed, learnt how people live in Sweden, how they feel. Sometimes we could perceive how it is to be from the south when in the north, and then we could come closer to the inmigrant experience of life.
We leave but we keep going. We want all of you to keep going. For you, for us, for all the women in the world!
María and Priya
Swedish women rule!! If you know any Swedish women's websites where I could advertise to help further their cause, please contact me.
You go girls! :)
http://www.WomanSavers.com
"World's Largest Database Rating Men"
- Over 20,000 men rated by women worldwide
Posted by: CEO/Founder WomanSavers.com | June 28, 2007 at 12:03 PM
Hi!
The Feminist Initiative is back! We stand in the European Parliament election 2009! Yesterday we had a release of the new international campaign www.feministsupport.com
(Read press relaese: http://www.newsdesk.se/pressroom/feministiskt_initiativ__fi/pressrelease/view/the-first-feminist-party-in-history-stand-in-the-european-parliament-election-2009-254304)
Visit the site and spread the word all over.
We need all support - again!
Best regards
Veronica Svärd, member of the board
Posted by: Veronica Svärd | November 18, 2008 at 01:46 PM