This March 8th will not be like any other, we have the impressive milestone that the mobilization and feminist strike of 8M in our country meant last year, an unprecedented women's strike in Europe.
And this year will be no less, no matter how much some doom-mongers try to scare us by threatening to cut acquired rights and return us to the world of darkness.
We don't buy the discourse of fear. What's more, we are not going to conform or resign ourselves to staying as we are because it is not enough, more than three centuries of activism and feminist struggle support us, and although at some point they wanted to make us believe the discourse that everything had already been achieved, that women and men enjoyed the same rights, that we lived in equality, and that therefore feminism had ceased to make sense, reality, which is always stubborn, insists on showing us without condescension how far what is said is from what is done.
We are not going to deny that during the 20th century in Europe -in our country since the late 70s and especially from the 80s onwards- we have experienced a period of important achievements in equality, especially in the legal system, with laws that recognized us with equal rights and that were gradually consolidated and developed throughout the State during the first decade of this century.
In the Canary Islands we are not far behind and here too very powerful and avant-garde laws were approved, the one on gender violence in 2003, and the one on Equality between women and men in 2010.
But at this point in the film we already know that laws alone, without resources or political will, are not enough to change reality or therefore to make the equality they propose effective.
Almost ten years have passed since the publication of our Canary Law on Equality, which at this moment, by the way, is in the process of being modified, and we have been able to see that successive governments have taken it little seriously, starting with the public administrations themselves.
And it is that when a rule is not applied even in the house that proposes it, it is difficult to expect the rest of the citizens to assume it.
How much we still have to advance when we are not even able to agree on concepts as basic as that of parity!
For this reason, feminism is more necessary today than ever, once we have discovered the trap of nominative equality in which they intended to pigeonhole us, we have decided that we do not want more sticky floors or glass ceilings, we cannot and do not want to continue waiting any longer to achieve the effective equality that is owed to half of the population.
We don't want more, but we don't want less either.
Tired of waiting, it is now time to move forward and assume the challenges that we still have pending, starting with parity.
And we want it now and in all areas of power in which women still do not have homogeneous positions with men, in the media, in companies, in universities, in judicial bodies, and in all cultural, artistic, religious or whatever institutions, because we want to be in everything, and we want half of everything.
We are fed up with working the same and earning less, with motherhood penalizing us for not having equal and non-transferable permits, fed up and tired of having the worst jobs with the worst salaries, of living in precariousness and being afraid of being evicted from our homes, of being threatened with having our creatures taken away from us, tired of taking care of our families without remuneration or recognition.
Fed up that after a lifetime of working we have the lowest pensions and that on top of that they humiliate us by saying that they are "non-contributory". Tired of being fed up, of social exclusion, of being the poorest among the poor, and of poverty continuing to have the face of a woman.
We have plenty of reasons, that's why this March 8th they won't stop us, and from Podemos Canarias we support the call for the Feminist Strike and encourage all women, of all ages, ethnicities, social classes and conditions, to exercise their right to strike at least in some of its forms: labor, care, student or consumer.
There is still much to be done in equality, and no matter how much they threaten us, we are not going to settle for anything less than half of everything, nor do we conform nor do we resign ourselves.
And we are not going to take a step back, not even to gain momentum.
María del Río Sánchez
Secretary of Feminisms, Equality and LGTBI of Podemos Canarias
President of the Podemos Canarias Parliamentary Group
