8-M: focus, union, strategy

Several women participate in a 'Feminist Bicycle' in Santander (Cantabria). Juan Manuel Serrano Arce / Europa Press

International Women's Day is celebrated this year in a world still mired in a pandemic that has caused a serious setback in equality between men and women, specifically based on job insecurity and social vulnerability.

The vectors of this deterioration are multiple.

From the outset, in general terms, confinement and teleworking have turned homes - traditional spaces for the exploitation of gender - into even more impossible places for conciliation, placing the greater burden of responsibility on women in the work of labor. upbringing and education, in caring for the body of others and in providing emotional support derived from the stresses of the pandemic.

All this has been done again without socially repairing them, especially in so-called single-parent households, and without being rewarded for it.

From the point of view of the labor market, it should be noted that the impact of the coronavirus has a particular impact on traditionally feminized sectors such as retail, residential care or domestic work.

Starting from social services, in addition, the pandemic has revealed in Spain the fragility of the care system for the elderly, children and dependents, sustained thanks to formal and informal work networks that are mainly maintained by women, of course, in precarious conditions.

These enormous damages caused by the covid in the well-being and rights of women make it especially necessary to promote a feminist agenda that assesses both the current impact of the pandemic on their lives and the social emergency that is announced on the horizon;

an agenda that actively focuses on the fight against job insecurity, on reinforcing the quality of our public services (above all, support for dependency situations) and on the essential progress in conciliation and joint responsibility.

Today, these issues are conspicuous by their absence from the institutional agenda.

March 8 is, therefore, a good time to vindicate the social agenda in the face of this striking silence, as well as the need to unify feminism around it again.

It is urgent to relativize other issues that, although important, have caused unfortunate divisions in a movement that, nevertheless, maintains an enormous emancipatory and mobilizing potential.

The celebration of 8-M should serve to refocus on the essential issues of the feminist struggle and to intelligently recalibrate a strategy that, in recent months, in Spain, has seemed unfocused and disunited.

The social agenda should top the priorities;

It should be avoided that the internal debate turns into toxic controversy or partisan pulse;

Rhetorical excesses should be banished and steps should be carefully measured which, taken in the wrong, offer free ammunition to the reactionary forces.

The unanimous blow from the General Council of the Judiciary to the Bill on Sexual Freedom is a good example of this.

This strategic vision goes through coherence in transversal policies with a gender perspective.

For a serene debate in civil society and among government partners;

for an activism that never loses sight of the enormous strategic objective of expanding the scope of support for the cause, of the active inclusion of new segments of society.

Precipitation is never a good advisor, and public policies cannot be settled on social media.

Feminism must return to the social agenda, based on consensus and dialogue, and regain that broad-mindedness that has always known how to capture different sensitivities without losing its vision of solidarity with other causes.

Today is the day to start sharpening focus, strategy, and drive.

In Madrid, by decision of the Government supported by public health reasons, street demonstrations may not be held.

The health concern is understood in view of the high level of infections in the capital and the difficult management of a movement with such popular force - and it seems out of place to cross this out as criminalization, as the Minister of Equality has pointed out.

But a comparative exercise is inevitable that yields conclusions that raise doubts.

In this also, it is necessary to demand total equality of treatment.