Feminist intervention in the 4th European Social Forum

This is the presence and contribution of the feminist movement in the 4th European Social Forum in Athens. There is already participation and collaboration for the success of these events, of hundreds of representatives of organizations, trades unions, networks and every kind of women’s collectives from France, Italy, Britain, Belgium, Russia, Ukraine, Rumania, Bulgagia, Former Yougoslav Republic of Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Croatia, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Cyprus, Holland, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Catalunia, The Basque Country, the Spanish State, Denmark, Israel and Palestina, but also from Africa and Latin America.

The Women’s Assembly is also organized in a way as to allow for the intervention and speech of dozens of European networks and to make visible the work prepared in the framework of the European Social Forum. We invite the women and the organizers of seminars and workshops (they are all self-organised) to participate in the Women’s Assembly in order to present the conclusions and the proposals for further action and mobilizations.

At the same time, we invite all those participating in seminars or workshops of other thematic spaces to present their conclusions in the Assembly. If the main target is to adopt a manifesto in the Women’s Assembly which will include these proposals, the more general target is to assist a broader European discussion amongst us, amongst the networks and the feminist movements, but also the other social movements.

The seminars of the Feminist Alternative and those having a gender dimension in other thematic spaces, are down to earth and they deal with a broad spectrum of important everyday problems of our neoliberal times, like:

 democracy and feminism
 the women and the working conditions in the situation of neoliberal capitalism
 what means to be a young woman today
 the struggle of the women against gender and domestic violence
 trafficking for sexual exploitation of alien women (and not only them)
 the equality in sexual orientation
 the rights of women in Eastern and Central Europe
 the announced death of the welfare state
 work and precarious employment
 migrant women pressed between capitalism, racism and patriarchy
 the women resisting nationalism and war,
 without forgetting of course the attack of churches against basic rights, which poses intensely the question of the urgent need to defend the secular state.

We invite the women who will be in the forum, citizens of European countries as well as migrant, to participate in those seminars as well as in the Women’s Assembly in order to get to know each other, to discuss and to decide in common our future actions and mobilizations on a European level. The further target that we have is the building of a combative and radical women’s movement, as it becomes necessary in our times, in the East and the West, in the North and the South of Europe.

The Organising committee fot the Women’s Assembly in the 4th European Social Forum For contact, interviews and information:
soniamitralia@gmail.com, svovou@otenet.gr
>Tel. 6932-295118, 6973-035796