Since I am delivering the statement I want to start with a personal story, or rather, the story of a personal journey. It started when, as the then "Field Commander" of the WPA whose task was – as the name suggests – to dispose of her troops around the field, I strongly opposed the first proposals from other women in the WPA that we should abolish the women’s arm of the party and work for women’s autonomous or independent organising across differences of race and party. To do what, I asked?

There is no time in such a brief statement to recount all the steps of my journey from where I was then to where I am now, but I want to tell you what I began to discover after I was forced to begin that journey: the things I discovered or uncovered that transformed the journey into one that I was making of my own will, as the other women of the WPA were making theirs of their own will.

What would be my answer now to anyone who still argues that women do not need to organise autonomously? I would answer that women have to organise autonomously until we win the freedom to choose. You know, even those of us who, like me, have never believed that a woman’s place was our only place, often accept it as the place of other women. Those of us who had grown up around women who always banged the pots hard against the edges of the sink and hit the broom – clang! – against the floor, never even wondered why they seemed so angry.

While most WPA women (though not all) were born on the coast, several of us have lived and worked in various capacities at various times in the hinterland. None of us would pretend that there are not important differences among women, based on race and ethnicity, age and generation, class, disability, whether one if from town, country or hinterland. That there are not significant differences among women here in Guyana, and women of other nations. Of course there are. But across all these differences, there are also samenesses (we deliberately did not say similarities).

And these samenesses persist in spite of changes in the law – Guyana and other CARICOM countries have some of the most progressive laws on gender equality - because they are deeply embedded not only in our culture, as in the culture of all countries we know of – culture in the sense of how we think about and act on human relations; they are also deeply embedded in the very structure of our economies.

For an economy to function you need all kinds of factors of production, but the first of these is labour. For an economy to function, first you need to produce children who must be nurtured and trained; they must go to school and sometimes do other work. Then they become grown people who need energy to work – grown people who, like the children they once were, daily use up energy which daily must be replenished. The first person to work this out was a woman called Selma James, founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign – that this production and daily reproduction of labour power is what people call women’s work: the majority of the hands-on child care and elder care and everyone else’s care which women do for love, and therefore not for money. And so, when women go to work for money, what more "natural" than that we do that same kind of caring service as nurses, teachers, receptionists, social workers, secretaries? What more "natural" than that we should perform for low wages the same tasks we perform at home for no wages? Of course there are a minority of men who do these jobs, but what they are doing is what our society like other societies calls "women’s work" , and what they are doing therefore is rewarded with women’s pay.

Working in the various women’s groups to which we belong, several WPA women spend a lot of time just listening to and talking to women. If you should hear their stories directly from their mouths and not in the cold print of newspapers! The stories about violence which make it impossible to be tolerant when people say, "well, women abuse too, with their mouths". Who would deny that this is true, but how is it possible to equate that abuse, hurtful as it is, with the systematic violence, including sexual violence, that females suffer across their life cycles?

And then there are the stories- the ordinary stories that would never make it to the newspapers – that help explain the poor reproductive and sexual health of women and men of reproductive age in Guyana – big adult women, from the quiet and non-assertive ones to the ones who seem loud and aggressive – but who would each say that they use no protection because "he" doesn’t like it.

Generation after generation, we produce and reproduce such a will for each of us to abuse what little or great power we have over the other. Adults over children. Grown offspring over elderly parents. Men over women.

What we are suggesting is that fundamental weaknesses in our public culture, including what we call our political culture, are products and producers of fundamental weaknesses in the private culture of the family. This is not any anti-family point. We need better families. A Guyanese woman researcher called Basmat Shiw Parsad once spoke about the way that the family, which is supposed to be a sanctuary, too often becomes a prison and we might add, a slaughterhouse.

All over the world, including Guyana, women are beginning to organise, as women – but in ways that people often do not recognise. Just as people who work outside the home are impelled to organise around issues related to that work, so women – as mothers and other primary carers of children and the family – are organising in defence of their children and family. One of the most interesting features of recent years is women’s organising against economic developments like the building of huge dams which destroy the environment of their homes and communities. In Argentina women organised for years until they won an accounting for the murders of their children under a military dictatorship. It is the same imperative that drives Mothers in Black in Guyana, who have protested for one hour weekly since last July against the carnage on the streets of Guyana, and the reckless taking of lives for which so few have been punished adequately, and some not punished at all.

This kind of women’s organising makes more sense than serving as handmaidens in political parties, trade unions and other groups. On International Women’s Day, March 8, 2001, there will be the second ever global women’s strike for a world that values all women’s work and all women’s lives. The demands range from abolition of the Third World Debt to clean water for every home. Mothers in Black has invited other women to join them in that action in Guyana.

We welcome and support this initiative.

In this election, women will make up a larger percentage of candidates than ever before. This is because we fought for, and won, a quota. Some men and some women have argued that calling for a quota means that we do not believe we can compete on our own merits. But it is not merit that decides, anywhere in the world, which races and which classes and which sex and which nations have power. Look at it from the simple angle of time. Which woman can have the time for politics except she has no children, her children are grown, or she can afford to pay another woman to look after her children, thereby contributing to that second woman’s lack of time to participate in politics? How many poor, young women with young children do you see in Parliament? So quotas must go with other changes. With changes in the political culture to make it more human. With changes in the culture of the home to make it more equal.

The coming together of GAP and WPA brings new possibilities and new hope to Guyana’s politics. As others have said and will say – it brings together coast and hinterland, indigenous peoples and peoples of Indian, African, Mixed, Portuguese and Chinese descent on a new basis. An important principle for us in women’s organising is the principle of autonomy, not because we want to be separatist, but precisely because when different groups have different levels of power,

the best thing is for the groups historically excluded from power to organise autonomously so as to develop and reclaim their power. We learned this from our own experience, but also from the experience of women globally. This principle of organising, for us, is the basis of alliances created on a foundation of real equality and partnership.

As we gladly embrace the GAP-WPA union, we have another reason for embracing it as well. Against the tendency in Guyana – for reasons we understand – to see only race/ethnicity, we welcome the GAP-WPA union also because it provides a base for crossing the divides between women of the coast and hinterland, between Amerindian women and women of other races and ethnicities. If we work with each other with mutual respect for our samenesses and our differences, putting the interests of the poorest women always at the forefront, this could be the start of something truly life-changing for all of us.