Women’s march in Montreal: towards a movement of all movements for social change

Saturday, January 19, I went to join the brave human beings gathered in Montreal to demonstrate in defense of women’s rights, show our collective support to those who need it, those who die, those who suffer in the blind eyes of the rest of the world.

Yesterday, by -37 degrees felt, we were enough to feel our energies vibrate, to feel the beating of our heart together, attentive to the collective awakening.

The few of us there outside, hoping to reach those hidden under the blankets, we looked at each other, we saw each other, and we saw these women, these men, these beings of light that we are and we approached, as at every gathering, which binds us to each other: the visceral aspect of the struggle. The people who got up, the activists, the militants, the people who speak, the parents, the colleagues, the friends who listen to you and who support you, feel in them also that pinch that will not go away until others are thus discriminated against.

The organizers of this march are admirable people, whose courage is tantamount to the desire for equality, immense, natural, unapologetic. Yesterday, one after another, in calm, emotion and listening, different issues were addressed: (click on the links for more information)

– The disappearances and murders and the words too many Aboriginal women in Canada

– The invisibilization and the voluntary marginalization of the native communities

– The inevitable links between the ecological disaster, the oil industry and the appropriation of indigenous lands by Canada

– The  fact that the patriarchal system  is identifiable in all aspects of life and develops itselfs through the reproduction of norms and codes of action

– The urgency to take in hand the education of future generations, to provide young girls and boys with tools of understanding the world

– A reminder of the sources of our intersectional discourses and practices

– An intervention of Argentinian and Latin American feminists to highlight #niunamenos, Not one more, the movement of women’s gathering and fight for the right to abortion and against the massive murders of women 

– A collective desire to gather, to listen to each other, to develop empathy in the active discussions but not to lose sight of our objectives.

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After an hour and a half in this cold duck, my tears of emotions had  frozen on my cheeks,  I had danced with my feet together to warm up, we sang feminist to gather, I saw and gave huge smiles of gratitude, And so I left, once more reassured in my feminist crazy life.

To fight for women is to fight for myself, for my dignity and for me, but through this commitment, I pledge allegiance not to a party, an organization or an idea, but to a more positive vision of the world. I  work for a future where women everywhere in the world will be free, freed from the shackles of thought and physical prisons of the family, religion or ideological prohibitions reducing them to their motherhood. To recognize the multiplicity of women, their wealth and their strength, without a priori, is also to allow them to flourish without fear of being too much, of not being enough.

Women, feel free to live, to be yourself. All over the world, we are there, discreetly or less discreetly, to watch over you. We do not have all the tools of the world to save or change it, but we have an unsuspected energy to help our sisters and this should not be underestimated.