| Young Women ...
When I see how my mother balances a teaching
career that takes 60 hours out of her week with raising my sisters and me, I realize how
important women's work and support is to my family. I see how her work helps other
families and society itself as she breaks her back to bring every single one of her 2nd
grade students to high standards. I'm dismayed by the hypocritical ideals forced
upon women. There are politicians who pressure women to raise their own children, but
lambast women when they use welfare money to stay home and care for them. Careers that
typically employ women, such as education and nursing, are essential to society. But
despite the extensive training and long hours necessary, these jobs often pay little. With
the strike, the US society can realize its reliance on women's work and begin to give it
greater value. I believe we must demand quality education for women and counting the
dollar value of unwaged work. Sarah (16)
I’m striking because, as a young adult woman, I’m sick of not being taken
seriously. I’m sick of justifying my existence. I’m sick of being
told I have to give up on my dreams in the name of ‘compromise’, or some twisted
idea of ‘facing reality’ - in otherwords, accepting the oppression.
I’m sick of being told to ‘get a proper job’, that whatever I’m doing,
if it’s not paid, it’s somehow ‘not good enough’. I’m
striking because I want my own decent housing, affordable organic food, free sustainable
transport, free email, web access and training, free education for life ... for all.
I want my voice recorded in history, and I want to hear all the voices of so many silenced
before me. I want to have children, without having to make myself and my children
dependent on the forced waged work of a man we love, so that none of us get to see him
because he has to work so hard to make up for the wages we (so far) are robbed of for the
work of raising our children ourselves. Or likewise, forcibly separated from from my
children myself, only to make money to pay someone else to look after my children. I
want to tell my children and my grandkids what I did for the first ever Global Strike, and
how it changed the world in my life-time. I want a new calendar, with B.S and Y.S.
meaning ‘Before the Strike’ and ‘Year of our Strike’ (in Cuba dates
are given in years ‘since the revolution’). I want to grow old, knowing
that I and my daughters will not, as so many women in this country (and in this decade!)
of my mother’s generation, after lives spent caring for others, look forward to a
‘retirement’ in uninsulated, underheated accommodation which claims the lives of
30,000 older people a year in Britain, most of whom are women. I’m striking for
all of my life, and for all the lives of women, children and men before and after me. Jenny
(25), London
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