Venezuela Turns Women's Affairs Office into a Full-Fledged Ministry (a real good news story)

[magbana]

Venezuela Turns Women’s Affairs Ministry Into Full-Fledged Ministry

March 10th 2009, by James Suggett - Venezuelanalysis.com


La Cantera, a collective of women cultural workers, performed folks songs and poetry along with President Chavez Sunday in honor of women. (ABN)

Mérida, March 9th 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) -- In honor of International Women’s Day Sunday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced that the Women’s Affairs Ministry, which was created last year as an extension of the National Institute of Women (INAMUJER), will now have its own budget and central office, and the name of the ministry will be changed to include “gender equality.”

“The Ministry of Women’s Affairs will become a ministry with a budget,” said Chávez during his weekly talk show Aló Presidente. “What’s more, it occurs to me that it should be called the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality, since these are two distinct and complementary things.”

Last year on March 8th, Chávez designated the president of INAMUJER, María León, to head up a new ministry dedicated to defending and extending women’s rights nation-wide. But until now, the ministry did not have a budget independent of INAMUJER.

Chávez dedicated Sunday’s broadcast of Aló Presidente as well as “Chávez’s lines,” the opinion column the president publishes in more than two dozen newspapers across the country every week, to women’s issues.

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Without the true liberation of women, the liberation of the people would be impossible, and I am convinced that an authentic socialist should also be an authentic feminist,” Chávez wrote in his column.

During the show, a collective of female cultural workers performed several folk songs dedicated to women. Then, with their acoustic guitars strumming in the background, Chávez recited a poem about a battle against the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez in the early twentieth century, drawing a parallel between motherhood and the struggle for national liberation.

Women’s Affairs Minister María León, Indigenous Affairs Minister Nicia Maldonado, Telecommunications Minister Socorro Hernández, Communes Minister Erika Farías, PSUV leader Ana Elisa Osorio, National Assembly Deputies Iroshima Bravo and Nohelí Pocaterra, and other female political leaders accompanied President Chávez on his talk show Sunday.

In honor of International Women’s Day, this group of women ceremoniously placed a bouquet of flowers at Venezuela’s national pantheon where independence hero Simón Bolívar’s remains are buried.

Minister León highlighted the achievements in favor of women’s rights since Chávez took office in 1999. These include an extensive Law on the Right of Women to a Life Free of Violence, legal recognition of the economic value of household work, the creation of a women’s bank and other programs to finance women-led businesses, and an electoral law that increased the representation of women to nearly 40% in state and legislative assemblies.

León also pointed out several important tasks in the coming years in order to further strengthen women’s rights in Venezuela. These include the pending passage of the Law on Gender Equality and the Law on Pensions for Homemakers in the National Assembly, and the expansion of popular education programs to provide sex education to youth and deepen gender consciousness in the general populace.

“As long as the subordination of women exists in our collective conscience, men will continue thinking they can violate the rights of women. The collective conscience must be shaped to bring about equality between men and women,” León declared.

One of the Women’s Affairs Ministry’s top agenda items this year will be the promotion of women’s committees in the tens of thousands of local community councils across the nation, to allow communities themselves to shape solutions to problems such as domestic violence, and to facilitate the denunciation of domestic abuse to local authorities, according to León.

Also Sunday, León said the central office of the Women’s Affairs Ministry was inaugurated in Caracas, and a sister office called the Institute of Formation in Socialism and Gender Equality was inaugurated in Aragua state.

In an interview on the state television station VTV, Indigenous Affairs Minister Nicia Maldonado spoke of the unique ways that indigenous women in Venezuela have benefitted from the government’s support for indigenous communities, including a recent housing project in the Yukpa communities of the Sierra de Perijá.

“Long live indigenous women! We salute all women worldwide and in our country because here we continue in the vanguard, struggling so that gender equality exists, so that we can construct a better world of equality, where sexism is broken along with capitalism,” said Maldonado.

Meanwhile, in Caracas and in several other major cities, a diverse array of rural and urban social movement organizations marched through the streets. In a dispatch titled “Men and women weaving socialist conscience for our mother Earth,” the marchers drew the connection between women’s issues and the deepening of Venezuela’s revolutionary process on all fronts.

The marchers also said they were demonstrating in honor of women who had died struggling for their rights in the past, including the 140 Italian and Jewish immigrant laborers in a textile factory in New York who burned to death in the infamous “Triangle Fire” in March 1911.

International Women’s Day began in the early 1900s, and was observed nationally in Venezuela for the first time on March 8th 1944.

Tags: Women
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4281

[Judi Lynn]

1. Here's the Wikipedia on the "Triangle Fire" mentioned in the article.

I had to look it up because why? Because, although something this big, this goddawful happened here, we were never told about it in school, just like all the other grotesque labor problems, like the mining companies hiring assassins to kill union workers across the company, and the auto industry, and food producers, etc., etc., etc., and, of course the genocide of Native Americans, and the unbelievable cruelty with which they were treated from the very first, until they were almost all gone.

Here's that Wikipedia:

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was the largest industrial disaster in the history of the city of New York, causing the death of 146 garment workers who either died from the fire or jumped to their deaths. It was the worst workplace disaster in New York City until September 11, 2001. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for safer and better working conditions for sweatshop workers in that industry. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Building, originally known as the Asch Building and currently as the Brown Building, survives and has been designated as a National Historic Landmark.

The company

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, occupied the top three floors of the ten-story Asch Building in New York City at the intersection of Greene Street and Washington Place, just east of Washington Square. The company manufactured women's blouses, which at this period of time were called "shirtwaists" or simply "waists".

The company employed approximately 600 workers, mostly young immigrant women from Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe. Some of the women were as young as twelve or thirteen and worked fourteen-hour shifts during a 60-hour to 72-hour workweek. According to Pauline Newman, a worker at the factory, the average wage was six to seven dollars a week,<3> at a time when the average yearly income was $791.<4> At most, Triangle Factory employees earned $338 a year.

By 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Company had already become well known outside the garment industry: the massive strike by women's shirtwaist makers in 1909, known as the Uprising of 20,000, began with a spontaneous walkout at the Triangle Company. During the strike, owners Blanck and Harris, two anti-union leaders, paid hoodlums to attack the protesting workers and hired prostitutes as replacement workers to show contempt for the strikers.<5>

While the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union negotiated a collective bargaining agreement covering most of those workers after a four-month strike, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company refused to sign the agreement.

The conditions of the factory were typical of the time. Flammable textiles were stored throughout the factory, scraps of fabric littered the floors, patterns and designs on sheets of tissue paper hung above the tables, the men who worked as cutters sometimes smoked, illumination was provided by open gas lighting, and there were only a few buckets of water to extinguish fires.

The fire
A horse-drawn fire engine on their way to the factory.
The building's south side, with windows from which fifty women jumped marked X.

On the afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire began on the eighth floor, possibly sparked by a lit match or a cigarette or because of faulty electrical wiring. A New York Times article also theorized that the fire may have been started by the engines running the sewing machines in the building. To this day, no one knows whether it was accidental or intentional. Most of the workers who were alerted on the tenth and eighth floors were able to evacuate. However, the warning about the fire did not reach the ninth floor in time.

The ninth(9th) floor had only two doors leading out. One stairwell was already filling with smoke and flames by the time the seamstresses realized the building was on fire. The other door had been locked.

The single exterior fire escape, a flimsy and poorly anchored iron structure, soon twisted and collapsed under the weight of people trying to escape (the exterior fire escape may have already been broken). The elevator also stopped working, cutting off that means of escape, partly because the panicked workers tried to save themselves by jumping down the shaft onto the roof of the elevator.

Sixty-two of the women who died did so when, realizing there was no other way to avoid the flames, broke windows and jumped to the pavement nine floors below, much to the horror of the large crowd of bystanders gathered on the street.<6>

Socialist Louis Waldman, later a New York state assemblyman, described the grim scene in his memoirs published in 1944:

"One Saturday afternoon in March of that year — March 25, to be precise — I was sitting at one of the reading tables in the old Astor Library... It was a raw, unpleasant day and the comfortable reading room seemed a delightful place to spend the remaining few hours until the library closed. I was deeply engrossed in my book when I became aware of fire engines racing past the building. By this time I was sufficiently Americanized to be fascinated by the sound of fire engines. Along with several others in the library, I ran out to see what was happening, and followed crowds of people to the scene of the fire.

"A few blocks away, the Asch Building at the corner of Washington Place and Greene Street was ablaze. When we arrived at the scene, the police had thrown up a cordon around the area and the firemen were helplessly fighting the blaze. The eighth, ninth, and tenth stories of the building were now an enormous roaring cornice of flames.

"Word had spread through the East Side, by some magic of terror, that the plant of the Triangle Waist Company was on fire and that several hundred workers were trapped. Horrified and helpless, the crowds — I among them — looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street. Life nets held by the firemen were torn by the impact of the falling bodies.

"The emotions of the crowd were indescribable. Women were hysterical, scores fainted; men wept as, in paroxysms of frenzy, they hurled themselves against the police lines."<7>

Others pried open the elevator doors and tumbled down the shaft. Of the jumpers, a single survivor was found close to drowning in water collecting in the elevator shaft. The fallen bodies and falling victims made it difficult for the fire department to reach the building.

The remainder waited until smoke and fire overcame them. The fire department arrived quickly but was unable to stop the flames, as there were no ladders available that could reach beyond the sixth floor. The ultimate death toll was 148, including 141 who died at the scene and seven survivors who later died at hospitals.<8>

Consequences
The building's east side, with 40 bodies on the sidewalk. Two of the victims were found alive an hour after the picture was taken.
Bodies of the victims being placed in coffins on the sidewalk.
People and horses draped in black walk in procession in memory of the victims

The company's owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had fled to the building's roof when the fire began and survived. They were later put on trial, at which Max Steuer, counsel for the defendants, managed to destroy the credibility of one of the survivors, Kate Alterman, by asking her to repeat her testimony a number of times — which she did without altering key phrases that Steuer believed were perfected before trial. Steuer argued to the jury that Alterman and probably other witnesses had memorized their statements and might even have been told what to say by the prosecutors. The defense also stressed that the prosecution had failed to prove that the owners knew the exit doors were locked at the time in question. The jury acquitted the owners. However, they lost a subsequent civil suit in 1913, and plaintiffs won compensation in the amount of $75 per deceased victim. The insurance company paid Blanck and Harris about $60,000 more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty. In 1913, Blanck was once again arrested for locking the door in his factory during working hours. He was fined $20.<5>

Rose Schneiderman, a prominent socialist and union activist, said in a speech at the memorial meeting held in the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2, 1911, to an audience largely made up of the members of the Women's Trade Union League, a group that had provided moral and financial support for the Uprising of 20,000:

I would be a traitor to these poor burned bodies if I came here to talk good fellowship. We have tried you good people of the public and we have found you wanting. The old Inquisition had its rack and its thumbscrews and its instruments of torture with iron teeth. We know what these things are today; the iron teeth are our necessities, the thumbscrews are the high-powered and swift machinery close to which we must work, and the rack is here in the firetrap structures that will destroy us the minute they catch on fire.

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

Others in the community, and in particular in the ILGWU,<9> drew a different lesson from events: working with local Tammany Hall officials, such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, and progressive reformers, such as Frances Perkins, the future Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt administration, who had witnessed the fire from the street below, they pushed for comprehensive safety and workers’ compensation laws. The ILGWU leadership formed bonds with those reformers and politicians that would continue for another forty years, through the New Deal and beyond.

As a result of the fire, the American Society of Safety Engineers was founded soon after in New York City, October 11, 1911.

The building

The Asch building survived the fire and was refurbished. Real estate speculator and philanthropist Frederick Brown later bought the building and subsequently donated the structure to New York University in 1929, where it is now known as the Brown Building of Science. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was named a National Historic Landmark in 1991.<2><10><11>

The building also was listed as a New York City Landmark in 2003.

The factory is now a part of New York University and has been reconstructed into the chemistry building. Two plaques in the front of the building commemorate the women who lost their lives in the fire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks for posting your article. It helped us educate ourselves, and fill in something very important which was left out of our own educations.

[Judi Lynn]

3. I have to repeat a passage of this article about American women who attended the memorial meeting

after the hideous fire which killed so many women workers in New York City. I had to come back to read it again:

This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.

We have tried you citizens; we are trying you now, and you have a couple of dollars for the sorrowing mothers, brothers and sisters by way of a charity gift. But every time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.

Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.

I can't talk fellowship to you who are gathered here. Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.

This is so good. I never would have known about it if I hadn't wanted to know more about the material in magbana's article.

Thanks, again.

[Peace Patriot]

2. K&R! People in our country need to learn that Chavez is a FEMINIST! nt

[Judi Lynn]

4. NOW Co-Sponsors International Women's Day Delegation to Venezuela in 2006

NOW Co-Sponsors International Women's Day Delegation to Venezuela
By Olga Vives, Executive Vice President

In March 2006, I had an opportunity to travel to Venezuela with an International Women's Day delegation co-sponsored by NOW, Global Exchange, and the U.S. Women and Cuba Collaboration. The purpose of the delegation was to learn about the struggles and gains of Venezuelan women in their efforts to advance their rights using new political and socio-economic models. It was our goal to develop relationships with women's groups working on issues of poverty, violence against women and economic empowerment.

Venezuela has embarked on a path of rebuilding and restructuring the country after a history of governments that were unable to bring equality and economic justice to the Venezuelan people. After electing President Hugo Chavez in 1998, the people of Venezuela have made significant progress toward a more just distribution of wealth; sustaining the country's natural resources, with particular emphasis in the expansion of local economies; making education and health care accessible and available to all; and implementing reforms aimed at bringing women and men into full participation in Venezuelan society.

During our trip, we met with women leaders who were instrumental in the writing and passage of the "Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela," ratified in 2000. This constitution is considered a Magna Carta of women's rights and individual rights, as it addresses specifically the social and family rights of every individual and the responsibilities of the government. For example, senior citizens are guaranteed pension and retirement benefits through a social security system that "shall be no less than the urban minimum salary."

Regarding motherhood and fatherhood, the Constitution says that the "State guarantees overall assistance and protection for motherhood, in general, from the moment of conception, throughout the pregnancy, delivery and the puerperal period and guarantees full family planning services." And, regarding women's work, Article 88 states that "The State guarantees the equality and equitable treatment of men and women in the exercise of the right to work. The state recognizes work at home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth." Homemakers are entitled to Social Security in accordance with law, and other guarantees include the right to work, the right to housing, education and health care.

On International Women's Day we marched with women and men in celebration of their revolutionary victories. During our stay, we visited with women working in their communities through cooperatives and health centers, creating awareness of their newly acquired civil rights, and working toward a safer environment free of domestic and sexual abuse.

The women of Venezuela are participating in the remaking of their country. As the United States expands its global influence and our government embraces political and economic policies that deeply affect other nations, it is important that we forge ties of solidarity with women abroad who are trying to build a better world for their children and for themselves. We learn from each other’s work on reaching common goals—eradicating poverty, violence against women and children, achieving economic empowerment, and building a more just, peaceful and healthy world.

http://www.now.org/nnt/summer-2006/venezuela.html