Awami Workers Party on Friday held an open dialogue for working class women on the occasion of International Women’s Day.
AWP, the largest Left wing party of the country held the event at Saraye Dhobian in Model Town. According to a statement, AWP will be hosting a series of events across the country to celebrate the struggles of women in Pakistan.
“The event was organised to encourage dialogue and discourse regarding daily issues faced by the working-class woman in the country,” said AWP Punjab Women Secretary Abida Chaudary.
The event included a street theater performance by Huma Safdar and folk poetry. An open mic session was designed to discuss the day-to-day travails of working class women.
Organisers explained that it was hoped that the dialogues would pave the way for ordinary women to build networks of solidarity amongst themselves and take back the political from the clutches of the “public” and the “masculine.”
Chaudary said that the AWP recognised that women’s struggles were multi-fold. Most of the world’s poor were women and they also constituted the majority of the world’s labor force. She said their work in the public sphere was exploitative and their work in the domestic sphere was invisible and not considered productive work.
“Their bodies are sites of consumption; used, regulated and disciplined by bigoted religious states as well corporate norms,” she added.
AWP Lahore Women’s Secretary Sonia Qadir explained that the false dichotomy of masculine versus feminine relegated everything traditionally associated with the latter to be of lesser value than the former. She said this also perpetuated violence against women, both physical and psychological and legitimised rape culture.
“Our aim is to wrest space for the voices of ordinary women in Pakistan, voices which are mostly marginalised and often completely invisible,” she said.
“Women’s liberation cannot become a reality until working class women can begin to retake the political sphere,” she added.
AWP federal committee member Shazia Khan said the purpose of the event had been to promote a real democratic culture in which women werre treated equally and fairly. She said that AWP was committed to the political, economic, social and cultural struggles of women for liberation, democracy and social justice.
