Friday Feminist Fuck Yeah: The feminist protest in Barcelona

Like the rest of the English-speaking world apparently, we’re late on covering the awesome feminist protest that happened in Barcelona last week. Called Vaga De Totes (“Everything Strike”), the protest brought together more than 600 different feminist and community groups. 

The slogan of the “day of struggle” was “Women move the world, together we will stop it,” and one of the goals was to highlight how the labor strikes that Spain has seen in recent years don’t take into account women’s unpaid work outside of the formal waged economy. Protestors read a manifesto denouncing “a devastating market system which undermines both social justice and gender equality,” and signs proclaimed, “Muerte al Patriarcado, Huelga de Cuidados,” which translates to “Death to the patriarchy, caretakers’ strike.”

As the breastfeeding woman in the video above explains, “We live in very productivist and capitalist societies in which what’s really important isn’t valued–which is that all of us have the minimum we need so we can take care if each other. There is labor primarily realized by women that’s invisibilized, not recognized, and without which we could not survive.”

The protest was a trial run for a true general strike planned for the spring of 2015–a strike that won’t just shut down waged work but all work, including the shopping, cooking, cleaning, child rearing, and caring for people that so often falls to women. Sounds like a good excuse for me to finally take that trip to Spain…

Maya Dusenbery is an Executive Director of Feministing.