2014: SELMA JAMES & THE GLOBAL WOMEN’S STRIKE
How to Change the World: The Anti-Racist Feminism of Selma James & The Global Women’s Strike. A public speaking event organized by WPIRG at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, ON on March 6, 2014. Co-sponsored by the UW Women’s Centre.
Selma James is an anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist campaigner and author including of the acclaimed 2012 publication Sex, Race and Class – The Perspective of Winning A Selection of Writings 1952-2011. Raised in a movement household, she joined CLR James’s Johnson-Forest Tendency at age 15, and from 1958 to 1962 she worked with him in the movement for Caribbean federation and independence. In 1972, she founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, and in 2000 she helped launch the Global Women's Strike which she coordinates. She coined the word "unwaged" to describe most of the caring work women do, and it has since entered the English language to describe all the work without wages of women, children and men, in the home, on the land, in the community. In 1975 she became the first spokeswoman of the English Collective of Prostitutes. She is a founding member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (2008). She has addressed the power relations within the working class movement, and organizing across sectors despite divisions of sex, race, age, etc., South and North. globalwomenstrike.net
Selma James and Angela Davis, September 2013
Nichola Marcus is an exciting organizer and public speaker for Red Thread, a multiracial, grassroots women’s organization in Guyana that demands payment for caring work and struggles for social, economic and political justice. Red Thread is a critical Caribbean point of reference for overcoming the divisions between Afro-, Indo- and Indigenous women. Nichola with others in Red Thread did a time use survey of women of all three races, demonstrating the length of grassroots women’s working day and by quantifying that work, quantifying the power relations among them. She was part of the launch of a Self-help Information and Support Service for domestic workers and other low-waged women, that welcomed Guyana’s ratification of ILO Convention #189 recognizing domestic workers as workers. Red Thread co-ordinates the Global Women’s Strike in Guyana. globalwomenstrike.net/guyana
