An August 10 conference on “Gender Equality and the Fight for Women’s Rights around the World” was one of the best-attended events of the festival, with some 2,000 delegates taking part. A range of views were expressed in the discussion.

Vajiowa Tabelo of the African National Congress Youth League of South Africa, who chaired this session, opened the program by describing discrimination against women on the political, social, and economic levels. She remarked that few members of the festival’s International Organizing Committee were women, while a much higher proportion of female delegates were asked to do organizational tasks. She also noted that most street vendors selling food in Caracas were women, while those peddling shoes or other goods were largely men. These are the result of stereotypes enforced by society, Tabelo added, without offering an explanation. She said this state of affairs doesn’t make sense because women are capable physically and politically of doing the jobs they are largely excluded from.

Manuela Vereadora of the Communist Party of Brazil was the first panelist. Lamenting the “demise of the feminist movement” of the 1970s, she said the fight against women’s oppression cannot be advanced substantially until socialism is in place.

Narim Manduga, a panelist from Palestine, pointed to former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and to Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who in 1963 was the first woman in space, as role models for young women today. She also said women can play a bigger role in leading national liberation struggles.

Delsi Rodríguez, Venezuela’s deputy foreign minister, presented many United Nations statistics showing that women around the world are second-class citizens. For example, two-thirds of the 920 million people who are illiterate worldwide are women, she said. Rodríguez asserted that Venezuela’s “Bolivarian revolution is offering a way out” of this reality for women in this country. As proof she cited a phrase in the first article of Venezuela’s new constitution saying that “justice and equality” are the right of all.

Annalucia Vermunt of the Young Socialists in New Zealand was also a panelist. She began by pointing to recent strikes by coal miners in New Zealand and the significance for the working class of women being in the mines today. “Women continue to be integrated into the workforce, and barriers to women and men working alongside each other as equals, performing the same jobs, are progressively being breached in both imperialist and semicolonial countries,” Vermunt said, quoting from “Their Transformation and Ours,” the first article in issue 12 of the Marxist magazine New International.

“Biology is not women’s destiny,” Vermunt said, noting that women’s degradation arose with the emergence of social classes and will end when class society is abolished. “The capitalist class profits from women’s oppression and has a material interest in maintaining it, while it’s in the interests of working people to end such discrimination,” said Vermunt. She described why a woman’s right to choose abortion and affirmative action are essential demands in the fight for women’s equality.

Vermunt pointed to the Cuban Revolution as an example of what is possible to achieve in the struggle for women’s liberation when workers and farmers take state power, overthrow capitalism, and begin building a socialist society.

The presentations sparked discussion and debate. Ana López, a delegate from Cuba, expanded on Vermunt’s final point by describing the rapid integration of women into the workforce since the 1959 revolution and other such gains in Cuba.

Delegates from Palestine, Vietnam, and Western Sahara emphasized the growing role of women in national liberation struggles.

One man from Venezuela argued against legalizing a woman’s right to choose—a minority point of view at the conference. Abortion remains illegal in Venezuela.

Similar exchanges took place throughout the festival. Books on the struggle for women’s liberation were popular at a number of booths at the festival’s Friendship Fair. The Young Socialists stand sold out of the Spanish-language edition of the pamphlet Abortion Is a Woman’s Right and related titles.
 
 
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Youth festival: forum to defend Venezuela, Cuba
World youth festival delegates back Utah miners’ fight for union  
 
 
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