International Women's Day 2012
Today is International Women’s Day, a day when people around the world take part in events to advocate gender equality and celebrate women’s achievements. The day was marked for the first time in 1911, when over a million men and women took part in rallies campaigning for women’s rights to vote, hold public office, work and have equal pay. The campaign to end to gender discrimination is ongoing, and, despite major advancements, women earn just 10% of the global overall income, two thirds of approximately 774 million adult illiterates are women (UN), and violence against women remains a growing universal concern.
PEN International was founded just ten years later, in 1921, by the poet, playwright and peace activist Catharine Amy Dawson-Scott, and has over the past 90 years worked to unite and support writers, irrespective of their culture or gender. The year 1991 saw the establishment of the Women Writer’s Committee, which addresses the specific challenges faced by women writers worldwide, such as unequal education and prohibition from writing. Over the years, the Committee has been especially successful in strengthening regional communities of women writers worldwide, publishing anthologies of women’s writing and working closely with the Writers in Prison Committee to aid imprisoned or endangered women writers.
PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee monitors and oversees PEN’s global activities for writers at risk, and takes the opportunity of Women’s Day to focus on women writers who have been persecuted, imprisoned or even murdered as a result of their work. PEN members worldwide are sending books and letters of solidarity to the writers Ayse Berktay and Professor Büsra Ersanli, who have been held in prison in Turkey since October 2011 and still await trial.
PEN members are publishing the poem ‘You will remain an example’, by Tal al-Malouhi, a young poet imprisoned in Syria in December 2009, when only 19 years old, for comments and poetry she published online. Memorial notices will also be posted for five women writers murdered in Mexico in 2011: Susana Chávez Castillo, Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, Ana María Marcela Yarce Viveros, Rocio González Trápaga and María Elizabeth Macias Castro. This is of real significance to PEN’s recent and current work campaigning against impunity in Mexico, a country in which at least 45 journalists, writers and bloggers have been murdered or ‘disappeared’ since 2006, with an ever increasing degree of threat to women writers.
Read more about the women’s cases that we are focussing on today in English, French or Spanish.
Throughout today, PEN International will be celebrating the work and achievements of women writers worldwide. We asked PEN members to nominate pieces of writing by women that they deeply admire, and have featured these nominations here. We hope very much that members of the public will take opportunity to engage in a live debate about the nominations and tell us what else they would have liked to see included on the list.
And follow #womenwriters today, when @pen_int will be posting on International Women's Day.