Friday, January 27, 2017

Camilla Mariscal - Week 4



Just a few weeks ago, the world witnessed on of the largest global protests in recorded history; the Women's March. Many critics have stated that this march for women has an overrepresentation of Anglo American women, and not enough representation of minority women struggling to find safety in this new political climate.  In Radicals on the Road, it is discussed how this worry of white women dominating a women's march was also prevalent during the Vietnam War. Southern and Northern Vietnamese women gathered in Canada in 1971 to discuss peace in Vietnam, and were joined by women's groups such as the Women Strike for Peace (WSP). These groups were mostly filled with white, older, middle class women but were considered to be "old friends" for their strong social ties with the Vietnamese women visiting Canada. In future protests, these "old friends" made posters saying things such as "not our son's, not their son's", trying to say that women from both standpoints of the war needed to be united against the needless killing of their families. Later on in their attempts to create a "global sisterhood", other feminist groups joined, labeled the "new friends"."Although the individuals referred to as “new friends” differed and disagreed with one another, they collectively constituted members of the so-called second wave of feminism." (204) Women from different age groups and ethnicities were integrated, though like today there was still a dominance of loud anglo voices. Despite this decades long struggle to find the line between who should speak, it is still vastly encouraging that in multiple countries across the world stood together to fight for women's rights, climate change, and equality for all. 

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