Aging Across Borders #4: Vignettes for International Women’s Day

This column from Minnesota traveler Anne Winkler-Morey is sponsored by:

 

Since Fall 2023, my spouse and I have been living on the road. For this International Women’s Day, I am sharing global feminist vignettes I have collected so far in our travels to celebrate the international. 

Purple Solidarity in Turkey

The Purple Solidarity Movement of Turkey began in 2014, after a devastating earthquake, as women in the Hatay region — homeland of the Arab Alevi people — fought displacement and corrupt absconding of international aid. The movement quickly grew into a full-fledged national, feminist, anti-capitalist network.

While we were in Istanbul, Purple Solidarity and other groups tried to hold a rally in Taksim Square on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. They were not allowed, so instead they rallied in Kadikoy, a block from our apartment.

Purple Solidarity reminds me of the feminist consciousness raising groups of the 1970s in the U.S. They have created neighborhood pods, where they provide each other material and emotional support while organizing against domestic abuse, for wage equity, the rights of working women and ethnic minorities.

 

Uncovering the history of coal mining women in Wales

In a two-room museum about the coal industry in Saundersfoot, Wales, I learned that the lovely Welsh green fields were once jagged mountains, which became London’s source of coal, tin, steel, and iron. Welsh bodies were maimed and shortened to change this landscape. Children and women were desired as workers because they were short. Babies, “as soon as they could walk,” spent twelve-hour days, seven days a week, in mines. Teenage girls developed the coal miners’ hump, similar to the degenerative scoliosis of elders. The mineral wealth they mined fueled London’s factories that processed the cotton, sugar, tea, and other primary products that were extracted using slave and exploited wage labor from the Global South.

Like the Global South, Welsh workers received none of the profits of their labor, as individuals or community. All added-value happened in London. You can still see the legacy of this extractive industry in the relative wealth divide between Britain and Wales, and in dozens of former British colonies. In the late 1800s, when workers formed a miners’ federation that fought for living wages, health and safety, age requirements, and shorter hours, women were replaced by men.

 

 

 

The woman behind the Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Prize Museum in Oslo, Norway, has a room devoted to the life of Alfred Nobel. He was the son of a wealthy man and failed at all he endeavored. He also was unsuccessful in love, but the woman he desired became a lifelong friend. Bertha von Suttner was a peace activist with a radical bent, connected globally to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and other transnational feminist and anti-imperialist groups. It was she who convinced Alfred to do something for world peace with his treasure — the woman behind the prize.

 

Dignifying the lives of Belfast Millies

The word Millie is used as a slur on Belfast and Dublin school playgrounds — a word to insult working-class girls. Sara O’Neill, granddaughter of an Irish linen mill worker, wanted to reverse that and to lift up women such as her great-grandmother. Using her skills in design, fashion, and oral history, she created flowing robes with designs that illustrate the dreams of linen mill workers, the lives they led after work, and the labor struggles they won. Her recent presentation at St. Mary’s University College in Belfast was attended by women related to Millies.

I attended the presentation. Six women sitting together behind me, in my age cohort, were daughters of Millies. I heard one say, “I thought we would hear more about labor conditions and struggles.”

I loved O’Neill’s presentation, but I, too, wanted to know more. I said to the women in the room, “I want to hear your stories.”

The six women gathered around me, each adding a sentence:

• We became nurses and teachers because our mothers didn’t want us to have a mill life.
• They pushed education on us.
• My mother told me about the songs they used to make up to sing about bosses they didn’t like.
• Our mothers had the fancy shoes, the lipstick. They dressed up after work. They had dreams. 

 

The Women Sardine Workers of Portugal

The sardine factory exhibit in Portimão was informative, but in my opinion not critical enough of factory bosses. They showed a film, with English subtitles, made by the factory owners in the 1930s, when a fascist dictatorship ruled Portugal. It showed the entire process from fishing to the creation of sardine cans. Workers were segregated by gender. Women were responsible for repetitive tasks, like pulling the heads off each fish.

The town had a statue of women with sardine baskets and babies that reminded me of the statue of Chinese rail workers in a square in San Luis Obispo, California. There is a fine line between celebrating workers and dignifying the work — and papering over labor abuse.

Today a cannery in the city of Porto is worked entirely by women.

 

Indigenous Solutions to Homophobic and Misogynist Colonial Legacy in Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka, the feminist and LGBTQ+ movements are laboring to shake off the vestiges of British Imperialism, which left a legacy of draconian anti-gay-sex law and anti-feminist mores.

Activists like Equal Ground founder Rosanna Flamer Caldera — one of Time magazine’s 100 people of 2024, who was a speaker at the Galle Literary Festival I attended — point to the Sri Lanka’s precolonial past. That is when women had economic and cultural power, and indigenous cultures embraced the natural spectrum of gender identity and sexuality. There is nothing inherently Sri Lankan about homophobia.

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In Brussels, a 2024 Pride parade participant held up a sign that read: Queer as Free Palestine.

With the rise of oligarchy in the United States, and the closing of borders, it is easy to forget the strides the country recently made in building transnational solidarity. The current transphobic, homophobic, racist, xenophobic, misogynist regime in the U.S. is a setback for the world. This year, it is especially important that intersectional feminists of the United States embrace purple solidarity without borders.

Happy International Women’s Day.