Breathe
By Thelma Elena Pérez Álvarez
While Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned by Italian fascism between 1929 and 1935, he wrote a series of essays entitled Prison Notebooks, in which he expressed a phrase that I take up in its most popular version: "The old world is dying. The new one takes time to appear. And in that chiaroscuro monsters emerge".
This phrase fits the rollback of women's rights that we have witnessed in the wake of global crises and global shocks since at least the 2008 housing crisis, the AIDS-19 pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the genocide against the Palestinian people, global warming disasters and migration crises.
On the occasion of International Women's Day, the United Nations (UN) published the report Women's rights under review, 30 years after the Beijing declarationThe report announced that, despite the progress achieved, 157 governments of the 168 member states reported in 2024 that the setback in women's rights is manifested through the increase in discrimination, the weakening of legal protection and the resources that governments should allocate to programs and institutions for the support and protection of women.
The report evidences this through data: every 10 minutes a woman or girl is murdered by a partner or family member, only 87 countries have been led by a woman and, while digital technology and artificial intelligence reproduce stereotypes, the digital gender gap limits women's opportunities.
It also points out pending actions to guarantee women and girls better living conditions, such as: education and digital rights, integrated social protection, universal health coverage, care services, preventing and eradicating gender-based violence, maintaining gender quotas, developing national plans for peace and security, gender-sensitive humanitarian assistance and climate justice.
The culmination of the above occurred at the opening of the 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women on March 10, when the UN Secretary General warned of an attempt to dismantle the rights and fundamental freedoms of women. Also, that patriarchy has returned with more force, misogyny is generalized and this can be observed in the leaders happy to throw equality to the wolves.
So, while the chiaroscuro remains, it will be necessary to continue resisting the monsters who decide to increase spending on armaments and reduce budgets for education, health and pensions. To those who privilege profits over the lives of working women, to those who do not want to recognize the crises of feminicide and disappearances. Those who do not want to recognize their dependence on the illegal economy, on the politics of death, nor that their profits lie in the exploitation of the stigmatized, the poorest and most excluded.
Subscribe to read the full column ...
