- The Guardian
- Issue #2135
IWD in Perth 2024. Photo: Vinnie Molina
Every IWD, we rightly celebrate women who have had a huge impact on society. There are also many lesser-known individuals who have still managed to quietly do amazing things through sheer determination and bloody mindedness.
Women who immediately come to mind are the UK Suffragettes and Sylvia Pankhurst, and in Australia, Vida Goldstein, Marie Kirk and Annette Bear-Crawford. There’s also Australian suffragette Muriel Matters, who distributed campaign leaflets from a dirigible air balloon over King Edward VII’s procession on his way to open Parliament in 1909. It’s hard to imagine today the courage required to take to the skies in such a rickety contraption.
Then there was a Glaswegian, Mary MacArthur also active in the women’s suffrage movement, who campaigned for a minimum wage. She became famous for the role she played in the Chain Makers’ strike of 1910, to improve the wages of women working long hours for piece work rates. Another strong-minded woman was the secretary to Eleanor Marx, Edith Lanchester, whose family in 1895 had her admitted to an asylum when she stridently opposed the institution of marriage and the patriarchy.
Of course women were also active during the period of the Russian Revolution – Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Alexandra Kollontai, and many, many others. The women of those times were feisty, but so was an Australian woman from the 19th century – Rose Scott (born in 1847), a feminist and social reformer, devoting much of her life to campaigns that resulted in increased independence for Australian women.
Scott saw the Federation in 1901 as a new “pyramidal scheme which would make working for common justice in everyday life, even harder than it was already.” She reckoned that with federation, male politicians backed up by special interests – militarism and big money – would take control, and democracy would be pushed aside. She said that Australians were being dazzled by “false and elusive ideas of national glory,” and was active in opposing compulsory military training and service in 1914. Scott warned that federation would compromise democracy, and she was certainly right on that.
Closer to our time is a Pacific Islander woman, many in the West have not heard about – Gabriela – instrumental in giving the world its first nuclear-free Constitution. She was the leader of Otil A Beluad – the ‘Anchor of the Land’ – a women’s organisation in Palau for 50 years and an inspirational leader for social justice, for all anti-nuclear activists across the Pacific and globally. Ngirmang survived the Second World War and was well aware of the devastation inflicted upon the Marshal Islands by US nuclear test experiments. When the Palauans moved to reclaim their nation’s independence from the US in 1979, she instigated a nuclear-free clause in Palau’s Constitution, whereby 75 per cent agreement by voters had to be obtained before nuclear weapons could be brought into Palau.
That was the first time such a clause banning and/or restricting nuclear activities had been included in any nation’s constitution anywhere in the world: not repeated since. Retaining this clause has not been easy. For 15 years (1979-1994), the people of the Republic of Palau were forced to vote 11 times to keep this unique clause intact. Each time a new plebiscite was announced, courageous women travelled between villages and islands to talk with communities so that informed decisions could be made about the Compact of Free Association, which defined the post-sovereignty relationship between Palau and the US. They resisted immense pressure from the US government and increasing internal intimidation and corruption. Gabriela faced threats to her life and suffered violence, along with her family and supporters.
The US spent millions of dollars campaigning for its preferred version of the Compact of Free Association that, if implemented, would have seen it granted military rights to Palauan land and waters. There followed the assassination of the Palauan President, and murder and violence of pro-constitutionalists. The British connived in building an unnecessarily massive power station, bankrupting the nation, to add pressure on the people to acquiesce to US demands. In 1987 Gabriela and 50 other women elders took the government to court for attempting to force a vote on the constitution requiring a simple majority to pass, rather than the 75 per cent protective clause that was in the constitution.
A reign of terror was unleashed to get them to withdraw the lawsuit and it took Gabriela over 6 years of lawsuits battling dodgy lawyers. Today the US retains control over Palau’s military and foreign affairs, even though Palau was declared independent in 1994. It has been a David and Goliath struggle, and in 1988 Otil A Beluad was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and Gabriela was also nominated in 2005 by the Swiss-led global ‘1000 Women for Peace’ campaign to draw attention to women peacemakers worldwide.
Women must take the lead again and vigorously protest the current threat to life on earth and the future of humanity. We can’t leave this mess to our children, we must unite and fight once more.
