If women ever really went on strike and refused our assigned roles, “Everything, everything would have to change!” So wrote my mentor, Barbara Deming (1917-1984), pacifist, lesbian-feminist author-activist.
This week, the focus of my writing has been a chapter about women’s use of strikes — the collective withholding of labor, symbolic strikes (Women’s Strike for Peace), and Lysistrata actions (withholding sex or birthing). It’s an exciting action-packed chapter, fun to research. I love reading about Annie Besant and the Matchgirls’ strike in London in 1888 and the Uprising of the 20,000 shirtwaist workers in 1909 NYC and the garment workers massive actions last year in Bangladesh. All of it — inspiring!
This month, I will share tidbits from this chapter-in-progress. Today — the story of a one-day woman’s strike in Burkina Faso, the little landlocked nation in West Africa. Enjoy!
President Sankara’s “Mad Act”
“You can’t make fundamental changes in society without the occasional mad act.” That’s what President Sankara boldly proclaimed when he came up with the idea for “Market Day for Men.” Indeed, it seemed a mad act.
In Burkina Faso, in 1984, women went daily to the market, rain or shine, having no way to preserve food at home. They left early in the morning, often walking long distances. At the market, they selected produce and haggled with vendors to get the most out of their food money, doled out to them each day by their husbands. Then, they carried the heavy loads back home and prepared the family meal.
Joséphine Ouédraogo — On Board with the Bold Experiment
In the few years before his assassination and the coup, President Sankara appointed several women to high positions, including second in command at the Ministry of Defense. For Minister for Health and Family Welfare, he appointed Joséphine Ouédraogo. She was trained as a sociologist and worked for the revolutionary government from 1984 to 1987.
Inspired by Sankara’s commitment to speak for the “great disinherited people of the world,” Ouédraogo worked to eradicate the custom of female genital mutilation, helped develop new laws governing family life, promoted the distribution of contraceptives, fought against discrimination, and advocated for marginalized groups. After the overthrow of the revolutionary Sankara regime, she was out of a job. In 1997, she was appointed head of the United Nations’ “African Center for Gender and Development” and, in 2007, was named Executive Director of Enda Third World, an international organization based on Senegal.
Market Day for Men — The Revolution Bursts Into the Family!
The mid-1980s was a time of great change in Burkina Faso, a country that traditionally had a strict division of labor along gender lines. In September, 1984, with the blessing of both President Sankara and Minister Ouédraogo, the women in the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution called for a one-day women’s strike and, simultaneously, a “Market Day for Men.” They urged community leaders — priests, imams (Muslim prayer leaders), teachers, and news reporters — to encourage support for the experiment.
The people in the capital city of Ouagadougou were given fair notice of the event in a media campaign, but the date was kept a secret so that women would not do extra shopping the day before to spare their husbands. At eight p.m. on Friday night the word came: the strike was to be the next day, September 22.
Bright and early Saturday morning, the experiment began. Women handed over their shopping lists, and the men were on their way — in a torrential rain.
Where Are the Cashews? How Much for Mangoes?
At each marketplace, the men were greeted by teams of militant women from the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. They stopped women from entering the markets unless they were single or had husbands who were ill that day.
The marketplaces proved alien to the men, most of whom wandered in confusion, as if they were lost on a strange planet. They asked about prices and were alarmed at the figures quoted. Not adept at bargaining, they handed over the money and hurried on to buy the next item on their lists. Finally, they carried their heavy loads home, realizing from their aching backs, tired feet, and pounding heads the frustrations and fatigue the women lived with daily.
Joséphine Ouédraogo later wrote of that day:
The atmosphere was fantastic, as much for those who “played the game” as for those who found it “absolutely ridiculous.” It was well worth it. It provoked unexpected debate in all quarters. The revolution had burst into the family and pointed an accusing finger at the masculine conscience!
To Go Deeper:
“Everyday Heroes — Joséphine Ouédraogo (Burkina Faso)” on the blog: Trust Africa.
“Women of Vision — Burkina Faso” on the blog: Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.
“The Revolution Cannot Triumph Without the Emancipation of Women: A Reflection on Sankara’s Speech, 25 Years Later” by Amber Murrey, Speech given at Oxford University, June 8, 2012, published in the International Journal of Socialist Renewal
BOOK: Women’s Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara, Pathfinder Press, 2007
Am I in love? Maybe. I’ve never met her, but she’s a 30-something street artist/ social justice activist who goes by the tag Swoon, although her birth name is also pretty fabulous — Caledonia “Callie” Curry. For years, her powerful portraits could be found illegally wheat-pasted on the sides of neglected buildings in gritty Brooklyn’s back alleys.
“Submerged Motherlands”
From the clutter representing our fragile, dislocated lives with their alarming cycles of growth and decay, rose a magnificent fabric tree (akin to the sacred but endangered Mapou in Haiti). It drew our gaze, repeatedly, to the rotunda skylight, as if we might find relief from our environmental anxieties up there with the delicate cut paper foliage. Swoon believes “we can create little cracks in the façade of impossibility and inevitability.” Standing at the foot of that tree, I, too, believed.
“Earth Ambulance” 
The caravan arrived in New York City in time for the historic June 12th March for Disarmament. The women unloaded the full pillowcases from the ambulance and poured the soil onto old army stretchers from Korea and Vietnam.
Months later, pillowcases from the Earth Ambulance were hung like laundry on clotheslines in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. For two weeks, people stopped to read Earth dreams and nightmares. At night, women camped out there, the dream-laden “sacks” hanging over them, waving in the breeze. Plaza police looked on, mistakenly assuming that official permission had been granted.
SWOON
HELENE AYLON
Something was very wrong, and Wangari Maathai knew it. She saw that women in Kenya had to walk farther each day for water and wood and realized that the cause was a policy of rapid deforestation which had left big swaths of the nation bare and dusty. The authorities didn’t seem to care.
When Wangari Maaathai died of cancer in September, 2011 at age 71, the whole world mourned. The executive director of the United Nations’ environmental program remembered her as a force of nature and compared her to the acacia trees, “strong in character and able to survive sometimes the harshest of conditions.”
As we prepare for the People’s Climate March on September 21 here in NYC, I am thinking about some of the brave women who have fought valiantly for the Earth, like the heroines of the Chipko (“tree-hugging”) movement in India.
Amrita Devi tried to reason with the men, but they had their orders. They entered the forest with axes raised. Amrita Devi boldly walked past the bewildered men and stretched her thin arms around a tree saying, “If a tree is saved, even at the cost of one’s head, it is worth it.”
In modern times, developers descended on the forests of the Himalayas seeking short-term profit. Deforestation led to environmental disasters. In monsoon season, landslides and floods devastated the regions where trees once secured the land.
One day in March, 1974, when the men of Reni were away, laborers with axes and guns showed up with government permits to fell the trees. A little girl saw them and raced to get Gaura Devi (photo) who quickly alerted 27 other women. Together, they marched to the forest and confronted the men.
The rural Chipko movement has been an inspiration to ecology activists around the globe. In 2008, twig sculptures of the tree-hugging women created by Klub Gaja, a Polish environmentalist group, greeted delegates at the entrance to the UN’s climate change conference in Poznan, Poland.
This is not a fairytale. One woman came from a world of talking mice and sleeping beauties, the other from 14 years in the hell of a civil war, with the devil himself on the loose. When Abigail Disney, (Walt’s grandniece) visited Liberia, she was shocked to learn about Leymah Gbowee and the thousands of women who had successfully and nonviolently brought an end a long civil war three years earlier. She hadn’t heard anything about it.
One day, Leymah Gbowee, a social worker who counseled ex-child soldiers, decided enough was enough. Women had to take on both the warlords and the corrupt regime of President Charles Taylor and demand peace. She turned to the women in her church, asked them to dress all in white, bring a friend, and meet her at the fish market to pray. A call was issued over the radio, and the women showed up. They sat where President Taylor could see them from his office window.
They wrote a position statement and marched through the streets of Monrovia to present it to the president and demand a meeting. The women had their first victory on April 23, 2003, when Taylor finally met with a women’s peace contingent, while other women sat outside the office, holding hands and praying. He agreed to attend peace talks in Ghana if the women could find the warlords and get them to come.
It’s been a summer of blood and tears, here, there, and everywhere. The news has been unrelentingly painful — cries of “Don’t shoot!” in our streets, massacres around the globe, Ebola, kidnapped schoolgirls. The suicide of a beloved actor who laughed through his tears set off an avalanche of pent-up feelings on Facebook.
You’d think, in 2014, men would be embarrassed to so blatantly exclude women. Remember Congressman Darrell Issa’s men-only panel on birth control here in the U.S. just a few years ago? At least the all-male photo-op of Bush signing an abortion bill earned them some bad press.
This in-your-face exclusion of women has made me a pissed-off peacemaker and cranky crone. For solace, I devoured Rebecca Solnit’s slim new book in one sitting. Men Explain Things to Me is the best read of the summer. Her seven essays offer an articulate description of subtle and not-so-subtle ways women are silenced and erased and how this hurts us all (something feminists of all genders know). The title essay went viral in 2008 for good reason (it opens with a scathingly funny anecdote), and “The Longest War” should be required reading, although it will make you weep.
The lop-sidedness of this summer’s male-led rampaging and feeble efforts at mending prompted me to seek literary examples of turning-the-tables for counterbalance.
In Lois Waisbrooker’s A Sex Revolution, written in 1893, men agree to change roles with women for fifty years as a social experiment, to see if women can end war.
Articles & essays
Barr, Marlene S., ed. 
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. 
This week, I honored the memory of August 1945, when the U.S. dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by writing about the resistance of the Shibokusa women for my new book on creative nonviolence. It lifted my spirits. I hope it lifts yours, too.
After most farm families gave up and moved to the cities, these tough, steadfastly antiwar grandmothers formed the Shibokusa Mother’s Committee in 1955, determined to fight for their land and disrupt business-as-usual on the military base. They knew that militarism meant death to people and animals and violence to the earth.
ONE: “There’s nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Bashing in baby skulls is a centuries old military tactic. It’s part of war, as is destroying the children’s landscape, families, playmates. In Vietnam, the U.S. did it with bombs, napalm, and Agent Orange. We do it now with drone attacks. And the beat goes on.
There is deep longing for ways to resolve conflict without killing each other. This spring I watched tourists at the John Lennon “Strawberry Fields” memorial in Central Park. I took pictures of people taking pictures. Here’s my favorite. One after the other, they stood on the “Imagine” mosaic. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one …”
FIVE: Philo Farnsworth (1906-1971), the Father of Television, thought his invention would bring peace on earth. Seeing the lives of others up close, we’d realize our shared humanity and no longer want to kill one another. Oh well.
HAROLD
To Go Deeper:
My father was a world history teacher in our small town high school. “History” was a common topic at the dinner table and a focus of summer vacations, with family trips to museums and historic sites. (Here I am at the Alamo, age 8, with my Poor Pitiful Pearl doll, grandmother, and big sister.)
Take Susan B. Anthony, for example. Her stiff image appears on coins and stamps. She famously said, “Failure is impossible!” But she also wrote in a letter to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “I sometimes fear that I too shall faint by the wayside and drop out of the ranks of the faithful few.”
In 1872, she was arrested for attempting to vote in a presidential election, stood trial, and was found guilty. When the judge sentenced her to a $100 fine, she boldly declared, “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.” But SBA also confessed in personal correspondence, “I have very weak moments and long to lay my weary head somewhere and nestle my full soul close to that of another in full sympathy.”
If you’re in the area, also check out the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls: