Feminist Initiative

See you soon Feminist Initiative!

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

Countering the boomerang Effect

Votes have been counted in Sweden. Feminist Initiative (F!) did not reach 1% in the Swedish elections to Parliament on Sunday 17th September. They got 37,346 votes, 0.68%. Now it is time to analyze the results. Can we call it 'defeat'? I think it is too much a word for a political party born just a year ago. Taking into account not only all the in-built problems for the so-called 'Other' parties in the Swedish political and electoral system, but the way the media chose to ignore F!, or how tight the polls predicted the result for the right and left blocks...we can do no more than understand the outcome.

I am worried about the consequences for the feminist movement in the Swedish society. It can be considered normal not to reach the parliament the first time a new party sets out to do it. The Green Party in Sweden was created in 1981 and they did not reach Parliament until 1988. But there is an essential difference between ecologism and feminism: the patriarchal nature (or the 'masculine domination'). Yesterday, the Dagens Nyheter (the most important newspaper here) joked in its headline: Inget feministiskt initiativ i regeringen, tack!, meaning: 'Feminist Initiative in government: No, thank you!' And, on top of that, the text in the article had nothing to do with F!, but with the fact that there was a woman talking against parity in government. The right alliance are fighting about it. Now they say government has to be 'natural'. You know what it means. They are now dividing the cake among the four parties in the alliance. They are not comparing people´s resumees to see who is more capable. That is not the patriarchal way. The patriarchal way is one that excludes women as much as they can. But they call it 'selection of the best ones.'

They have needed to fish deep down into the ranks of the youth organization to find an unexperienced woman willing to say that she is against parity and in favour of the natural way...Another woman in the right wing manifested against that opinion. And this is what the newspaper finds interesting. A woman against another woman and a good reason to mock F!

The Green party never had to face things like this. This episode shows the patriarchal reaction at its best.

What is certainly clear in Sweden is that there is a Feminist party.This is a fact. Now a new stage begins, two years and a half for the European elections, four years for the next Swedish elections. A lot of work to do. Four years to discuss, train, organize, influence politics, join up new people. Feminists will have a political party prepared to listen all those voices that traditional parties ignore, no matter how feminist they claim to be. Those parties will be now more careful. Or maybe not, let´s see what happens.

It is clear also that an international movement in favour of total equality is needed. Right now it is only an idea, with no faces, name or form. Many feminists are convinced that we have to jump into it. As Gudrun Schyman says, Feminist Initiative is not only Swedish, it happened that it was born in Sweden, but it has universal claims. The feminist movement has always been, and will always be, international. There are many women, old and new feminist to count on, with all their life experience, with all their knowledge. And many men, too, fed up with being part of such an ex-clusive club...

I will let you know what happens next...

María

Gudrun Schyman_2

Listen and watch Gudrun Schyman's Feminist initiative message...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6MkE85-RU8

GUDRUN SCHYMAN LIVE!

Listen and watch Gudrun Schyman's Feminist initiative message...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa58ktuuJpo

A party desperately looking for its electoral result

I’ve just talked to a friend and he didn’t believe me, so I imagine you are finding it difficult to believe, but I have to tell you the truth: The votes of F! were not counted yesterday. All we have is a survey published the very moment when the voting stations were closing, according to which F! would have obtained 1%. But I insist: this is a survey, not real counting. And nothing will be said officially until Wesnesday. I agree this is not easy to believe, but let me tell you about it.

   
This is what newspapers say today, as it can be seen in the table below: with practically 100% of votes counted, the Alliance of four right wing parties (M, C, Fp and Kd) has 48% of the votes, while 46.2% went to the Coalition of the Social democrats, Green Party and Left Party (S, V and Mp). The box ‘Others’ (Övriga in the table) has got 5.7% (2.8% more than in 2002 election. - these figures are in parenthesis).

 

26.1% 97 (15,2) M

7.9% 29 (6,1) C

7.5% 28 (13,3) Fp

6.6% 24 (9,1) Kd

35.2% 130 (39,8) S

5,8% 22 (8,3) V

5.2% 19 (4,6) Mp

5.7% 0 (2,8) Övriga

No surprising that newspapers don’t care about who they are, those Övriga. But the thing is that the Election Authority didn’t even count them either. Yesterday, when the voting stations closed, people there started counting. They made eight boxes and were ticking on them. One of these boxes was Övriga: Others. These are simply the parties which are not currently in the parliament.  Yes, like that! I showed it with my own eyes, as we say in Spain, and this has just been confirmed to me on the phone by the Central Electoral Office. They have told me that they started counting and separating Others this morning and they will have been finished by Wednesday. There will not be official estimations before that.

            
It seems almost sure that no party below 'Others' will arrive to the 4% of votes which anyone would need to enter the Parliament, but you will agree anyway that the system is not very nice to small parties: It makes them non-existent in the very day of the elections by not counting their votes, which means also not talking about them that very day where people care about elections. Then the cake of seats is distributed among the big ones without even referring to the (at least theoretical) possibility that one of them could arrive to 4%. Isn’t this arrogant?  It is so weird that one can only look for technical reasons to explain such nonsense. And, as the much less developed Spain counts much more small parties, and it is done in the same night of elections, it is easier for Spanish people to think that poor Maria is crazy. It is easier for Swedish people to think that poor Maria is a foreigner, and that’s why she says crazy things. But no! Dear Spanish and Swedish friends, dear friends in the entire world, it is as I tell you: Logic is one thing and the logic of the system is another thing. Systems are not logic sometimes. By the way, all the electoral systems I know penalize the small parties, only that they do it in different ways (In Spain, for instance, with the D’Hont method of distributing seats), but maybe this is less obvious.

            
The after-election party at F! was a bit plain. We had the survey that gives us 1%, but that survey hadn’t been that accurate with the big parties, as we were seeing. At one point in the evening, we arrived to that figure of 5.7% for 'Others'. This could give F! the 1% needed to be considered a ‘real’ political party for next elections (and then the system, instead of F! militants, would be responsible for providing the voting bulletins and have them available in all voting stations, but still F! would be in the box Others when counting). Maybe that 5.7% of 'Others' gives F! the 2.5% necessary to have back some of the money spent in the campaign. This is possible but less probable, as looking to the counting at this time in the afternoon it seems to me that some of the Other votes are going to the extreme right wing party. This party is Others. We are Others. I don’t like to be in the same boat than these people, but it seems that the system has put us together. We are obliged to stand in this weird company until Wednesday. Then we’ll have F! individual result and maybe some newspapers will refer to it in one line, or maybe nobody will talk about; after all, elections are already over today. This is a smart way to protect the Ones against the Others. Gosh, I say! It is quite a way!

       
Feminist Initiative will continue to build itself anyway. There are many people here that have taken the decision to go forward, whatever the obstacles we find in our way.

María

People in F!

We have been reconstructing Swedish Feminist Initiative, F!, herstory. Asking everybody about it, we learnt that in F! there is nobody making any money out of it. But then the question that came up is: who are all these people who made the decision to jump into this project, with no connection to their professional lives and, sometimes, putting them at stake?

We have met a number of newcomers, women with no political experience. Like Eva Maria, a 50-year-old midwife, professor at Gothenburg University--very experienced in breast-feeding and natural birth methods--, who tells us about the first time she learnt about F! and, how, with a lot of excitement, she contacted them. She has been married to a man who died four years ago, after twelve years sick, and has raised four kids. She is aware of her limited political experience and how much she has to learn. That is why she did not enter the parliamentary list this time. But she is a convinced and convicing militant on feminist issues and feels happy with her new commitment. She is working in a worthwhile project!

Sara, Kristin and Anna are three fresh young students in the University of Gothenburg. I have shared Sara's flat for a night. When I have arrived there, I have found it as untidy as my own place when I was her age. She tidies it up in a minute (wondering perhaps how this lady might feel about it). Afterwards, she relaxes and looks cool again. Sara contacted F! from the very beginning and took there all her friends, even her younger brother! Her parents are shepherds at a Swedish church, very special ones, as she tells. When she was born, her father decided to share the parental leave with her mother at 50%, and, because of that, he was punished by the church. She is now 20 years old and has already been in both religious and anarchist associations with some organizational problems between these two drives. Now she is number 7 candidate in the F! Gothemburg local list.

Another chapter is formed by the old feminist women, without which F! would not have existed. They have brought about the necessary reflection and experience. They have also contributed to the initial exploding mixture of personalities and visions that found it difficult to come along together in a political program. Some of these women left the project in a very unfortunate way, openly airing their differences in front of the media, who manipulated it to the max helping create the impression that “these old and ugly feminists will never reach anywhere with all these arguments.”

Stina Sundberg is one of this old feminist that remains in F! ranks. She is number 5 in the parliament list. She explains how they tried years ago to organize a feminist political movement, threatening the existing parties if they did not promote women in the political lists. And it worked making it happen in a way that all parties now mix women and men in their candidate lists with no need of a legal regulation forcing them to do so. Stina can also remember how they approached Gudrun Schyman when she started to turn into feminism, and how they all understood that a new platform was needed, a new gathering of people working together in a very comprehensive way, leaving old fundamentalisms behind.

Kristina Hultman is another long term feminist, who goes as number 8 in the F! parliament list. She was talking extensively to us and she has become a friend. Kristina is currently working as a free-lance journalist and she explains how difficult and stigmatizing it is to publicly position yourself as a feminist, and the high price you have to pay in professional terms. This is also a factor that prevents many women to take a step forward to pronounce actively their political sympathy to feminism, joining a party like F!.

There are also women who come from other parties and a different political background. They are social movement activists with lots of experience in real life issues. A key person here is Milka Saxlund, coming from Uruguay and who was granted political assylum in Sweden thirty years ago. Milka is the head of the F! list for the Gothemburg municipality. She very well knows the city politics and the immigration experience in a racist and discriminatory environment, in a Sweden that tries to fight hard against it. She is the single mother of six--yes, six--, kids. Milka lives with an inexhaustible fire in her welcoming heart. We could write lots of posts about her life experience.

And there are also men in F!, it is a real discovery. They are truly feminist. I will have to write more to let you know why it is that I say this. They have undertaken the initiative of keeping themselves in a second row, leaving the close up to women, realizing that men usually take all the credit, attention and space, and abdicating of that patriarchal scheme.

Many people all over the world have their eyes on F!. Many feminist here have their hearts and hopes at stake. Thinking of them all, I wish, more than ever before, they could make that 4% they need to enter parliament.

After today a new stage will begin, as interesting and special as this one. But now we are all focused on election day, and results, and we get the champagne ready, just in case!

María

Gender Equality, Love and Politics

Here in Sweden I try to melt into normal life routines, making my stay in Sweden as Swedish as possible, without being always the outsider interested in weird issues. That means that I got a bike to go through the city, I am practicing sport and mixing with people, visiting friends, doing yoga with local groups, connecting with the alternative movement here in Stockholm.

People are friendly and very eager to explain to me what Sweden is and what being Swedish looks like. They come in tune with my interest in politics and feminism, and, out of all these conversations, this post has come up. The amateur sociologist living within me warns me about generalizations, buying into the conventional wisdom or believing, against evidence, that people’s stories can come close to truth. But here we go.

Sweden being the country of equality has different readings for people living in Stockholm. They are mostly proud of the equality levels they gained and grant great value to the informal behaviour they show among ranks, hierarchies or clashing cultural systems. Both men and women think they are living in a very egalitarian environment and they like it. Where they seem to start finding problems is when it comes to their private lives.

On the one hand, they say Swedish gender equality is a bit of a myth, in that it is not true that real equality has been achieved yet. Women still take care of most of the housework and take responsibility of family issues, children’s needs and old people. There are many less women in positions of responsibility in the public system than in public companies. Actually, Sweden is one of the European countries with few women working as managers. Women’s jobs tend to be part-time to allow women to take care of family issues. Parental leave is mostly for women, with few fathers making something close to an equal use of it. As Margareta Winberg, former Minister for Gender Equality Affairs, put it

"...men need to understand that gender equality in a relationship improves the quality of both partners’ lives. For women, equality means not being burdened with a double workload and being able to develop both as parents and out at work. For men, it involves assuming half the responsibility for the home and the children and thereby paving the way for a good relationship both with the children and with their life partner…understanding this is essential if we are to give women and men the chance to combine a stimulating job with a fulfilling family life."

What happens now is that Swedish women adapt their careers to the needs of their children, and, then, they climb slowly upwards in their career or stand still at a career level. They are less attractive for employers also due to that long parental leave that men hardly share, keeping them away from the working place for eleven months, at least.

Women and Men in Sweden is an excellent publication from the Swedish Bureau of Statistics where you can find all the data to show you the extent of all these questions.

When it comes to private realms, some Swedish people say that men and women no longer melt together as much as they used to and that coming closer in the context of greater equality seems to be a problem. Is not here a suspicious argument undermining the importance of conquering greater spaces of independence for women? The number of people living alone has been skyrocketing in the last decade, paving the way for many sexist remarks assuring that this is the price women have to pay for so much gender equality. It seems that, as one woman in Gothemburg put it, we cannot meet in equality, we do not know how.

But to me it is easy to experience that while men never had to pay any price for their taken-for-granted independence, women find it constantly threatened by these suggestions warning us about loneliness, difficulties, less comfort, less attractive, more opposition…

Being a feminist sounds always like hard work. But, I think, it is work that pays off.

A non-Swedish woman told me that she found herself at a loss regarding sexual approach to Swedish men. She finds them passive and tame. Another Swedish colleague confirms that the female strategy of waiting for guys to come closer can take you forever or it can never happen at all. So, it seems that new ways to build up inter gender relationships are needed here. Whereas, at the same time, same gender relationship models seem to flourish in this paradise of equality.

What is the conclusion to make here?

What the lesson could be is that a new way of coming together is needed in this age of gender equality. Love has to be dimensioned out of a patriarchal thinking system, as Gudrun Schyman says in her wonderful letter Let_love_become_politics.pdf,

"I myself had chosen to live my own lifestyle and nobody else controls me. I was neither weak nor victimised." But then I started realising that I no longer need to defend that picture…There was this little secure space within me where I no longer felt threatened by the thoughts of change. Perhaps this was the reason why I unexpectedly met another person and discovered that love has neither age nor gender. For the first time in my life I do not love a man because he is a man; I love a human being because he is the person he is.

And she adds, "please, do not come up and say that politics has nothing to do with love! Those who say so then claim that the politics is not about life at all."

If feminism is about constructing a new world where much of the old proceedings cannot operate, we should pay attention to new ways to share lives together, in a human way, irrespective of our sexuality option, ethnicity, gender or social condition. It sounds to me as if now that the public realm is being transformed towards equality, we have to come back to ourselves and start building bridges from these new people we are now that are no longer comfortable with what we used to be.

Priya

Transferable personal rights?

It is very interesting that transferable parental leave constitutes a single exception in the legal system concerning social security and labour legislation. Normally, people contribute to the social security system on the basis of their personal work situation. They gain rights derived from those contributions, which also work on a personal basis. Employers have to respect employee’s personal rights, not the ones related to their relatives or other grown-ups related to them. The legal relationships generated in the working place between employer and employee are entirely personal.

It means that people have their own holidays, their own right to sick permit, their wages…they cannot transfer to other people. But this rule gets broken when it comes to parental leave. Then men can transfer women the ‘right to stay at home’. What are the predictable consequences of this? Why do employers have to adjust their working relationships according to the employee’s sex? Why do they have to know whether the female employee’s partner is willing to stay at home with children or he prefers to transfer his parental leave right to her? How is it possible that people can transfer their rights so easily?

I can imagine a couple deciding over their holidays:

Hey, boss, I will take this year a month and a half. My wife transfers me half her holidays.

How does it sound?

You can tell me that going on holidays is not as important as taking care of children. Well, holidays are very important, that is why you cannot renounce or transfer them to anybody else. Of course, taking care of children is the most important responsibility. That’s why fathers should not be able to renounce it, so that no employer or no other person can take it away from them. And social services, educational, day care centers, so hardly gained, should remain intact, so that grown-ups can decide in freedom if they want to work. Because, I think, it is very difficult to decide, with any kind of freedom, whether to go to work or not, if you are holding a baby in your arms, isn’t it?

Why do we always have to discuss the same obvious rationale?

The conclusion is as usual as ever: nothing is gained forever. Social conquest should be kept alive every day, every minute. In Sweden it is also difficult to move forward. And here it is also possible to go backwards.

María

Life paths

I have always wondered why life paths can be so different. Why there are some people devoted to politics with no material profit, while others go through life with a calculator in their heads and hearts. A profesor at Stockholm University told me three days ago that she is going to vote for the right wing because they propose a tax benefit to people spending on paid housework, actually having a maid, and she is fed up with cleaning and picking up the whole day.

Although in real terms, as Pierre Bourdieu said, it is not the ‘why’ but the ‘how’ (how it is like this and not otherwise) what we should ask. And that the most we can aspire for is to detect the circumstances incentivating us to take this path and not a different one. So, how is that I am here writing this blog instead of going out for a walk around beautiful Stockholm in this sunny day?

Here in this Swedish Feminist Initiative, F!, they are talking a lot about personal issues.  Gudrun Schyman, the F! leader, was telling us in Gothemburg last week I learned a lot and saw a lot when I was the leader of the Left Party. And that helped me a great deal to understand the situation of women and my own life. Before entering the Parliament, I had been battered, I was a single mother, working as a social worker, a typical woman’s job, I had a part time work to pick up children in time from the child care center. I was part of the pattern. And it took me a lot of time to realize that I was a feminist.

And in a letter called Let_love_become_politics she says for me politics has to do with how I want to live my life with other people.

So, with all these life stories, how can we not talk about personal issues? If I compare Gudrun Schyman with some male colleague at the Swedish Parliament, I can imagine a good guy in any political party, heterosexual white middle-aged man, married to a part-time working woman who does the housework and takes care of children's well-being.

He also plays with children late in the evening if they are still up. He is a kind husband ‘helping’ with dish washing. He studied Law at University and walked up the professional ladder without experiencing how it feels when you are looked at your breasts while you try in vain to explain your ideas. Without being called names for trying to get a sexual encounter or feeling you are a poor mother for working more than 10 hours a day. He is not frightened to go through a dark street, either. And if his party loses power, he will get a position somewhere, as president of something, with a good salary, anyway.

He does not need to think about the personal side of life. Women are just so complicated!

Can you remember that line...‘THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL??

María

campaign materials

Some of F! graphic design materials:

Is it worth voting?

Remember you are a part of something bigger than yourself