International Women’s Day
NO HOLDS BARRED |
Armida Siguion-Reyna |
The first National Women’s Day was held in the United States, in 1909. There had been variations of the observance elsewhere such as in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland in 1911 and in Russia, on 1913, before the United Nations Charter proclaimed gender equality as a fundamental human right in 1945.
Since then, the UN campaign for the advancement of women’s rights has moved toward what has been acclaimed as “four clear directions,” specifically, the “promotion of legal measures; mobilization of public opinion and international action; training and research, including the compilation of gender desegregated statistics; and direct assistance to disadvantaged groups.” It has become a “central organizing principle” of all work done in the UN “that no enduring solution to society’s most threatening social, economic and political problems can be found without the full participation, and the full empowerment, of the world’s women.”
Hereabouts, it was the current president’s mother, President Corazon Aquino, who signed Proclamation No. 224 on 1 March 1988, “Declaring the First Week of March of Every Year as Women’s Week and March 8, 1988 and Every Year Thereafter as Women’s Rights and International Peace Day.” And she didn’t stop there..... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110308com4.html
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