Indigenous Peoples, women and campesinos march in protest of the corporate-controlled World Water Forum in Mexico City. (2006) Photo: Langelle/GJEP
March 8th, 2012 is International Women’s Day. International Women’s Day has been observed since in the early 1900s, a time of great expansion and turbulence in the industrialized world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radical ideologies.
In 1908, Great unrest and critical debate was occurring amongst women. Women’s oppression and inequality was spurring women to become more vocal and active in campaigning for change. Then in 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights.
The next year, the first National Woman’s Day (NWD) was observed across the US on 28 February. Women continued to celebrate NWD on the last Sunday of February until 1913.
In 1910 an International Conference of Working Women was held in Copenhagen, Denmark. A woman named a Clara Zetkin proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day – a Women’s Day – to press for their demands. The conference, which included over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties, working women’s clubs, and the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, greeted Zetkin’s suggestion with unanimous approval and thus International Women’s Day was the result.
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The Sixth World Water Forum will take place in Marseilles, France from 12-17 March. There will be a peoples’ Alternative Water Forum taking place at the same time. The alternative forum is being organized by associations and movements, trade unions, NGOs, citizens and elected representatives from all over the world.
It will be a meeting place for all people who are fighting for water:
– against the appropriation of land and water,
– against the development of shale gas, which pollutes underground aquifers and rivers;
– against the privatization of water by multinationals around the world…
For more on the alternative water forum, click here
In 2010, GJEP Communications Director Jeff Conant won a Project Censored Award for his reporting from the World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey. You can read his article below:
Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
