Date: Monday, March 16, 2015
Time: 6:30 PM
Place: 228 S. Wabash Ave., Room 230, Chicago
For International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month
News and Letters Committees invites you to a meeting on:
From Turkey to USA, women as force & reason fight inhumanity
In Turkey, a savage sexual assault and murder on Feb. 11 brought forth thousands of demonstrators, mostly women, throughout the country and beyond. Özgecan Aslan was a 19-year-old student taking a bus home at the end of the day. Her murder reminds us of the murder of 23-year-old medical student Jyoti Singh Pandey in late 2012 that galvanized women throughout India. Like Pandey, Aslan fought back when the bus driver tried to rape her. Then he stabbed her and beat her to death with an iron bar. When she was found she was only recognizable by her clothes.
Turkey erupted in demonstrations starting at Özgecan Aslan’s funeral, where over 5,000 came and women refused the orders of the Imam there to step back during the ceremony. Instead they stepped forward to the front lines and then did something unprecedented: women stepped forward to carry her coffin and to bury her, vowing: “No other man’s hands would touch her again.”
Since then the demonstrations have deepened and spread. As in India, the government’s first response was to attack the protesters.
♀ What new thinking is revealed by women’s demonstrations against rape in the U.S., in India and Turkey, in fact women are protesting rape worldwide?
♀ Domestic workers in Lebanon have formed a union even though the government forbid them to do so and attacked them for trying. What does it mean that they are fighting not just their individual employers but also the state that legislates discriminatory laws against them?
♀ Does the dialectic of freedom—self-development through contradiction—that we see in women’s struggle for liberation worldwide, reveal something new and challenging in thought as well as action?
Speaker: Terry Moon, Women’s Liberation activist and writer since 1967, Managing Editor of News & Letters
Phone: 312-431-8242; email: arise@newsandletters.org; web: www.newsandletters.org