Creed - from the Asian Women's Rights Council

In response to the Creed below, written by the Asian Women's Rights Council for the year 2000, Feminenza sent the following letter of support. Follow this link to read the letter.

HELP!

A Woman’s Creed
From The Asian Women’s Rights Council

We are female human beings poised on the edge of a new millennium. We are the majority of our species, yet we have dwelt in the shadows.

We are the poor, the illiterate and the invisible. And we vow no more.

We are the women who hunger for rice, home and freedom.

We are the women who thirst for clean water and laughter, literacy and love.

We have existed in all times, in every society, survived femicide, rebelled and left clues.

We are continuity, weaving the future from the past, logic to lyric. We are the women who stand in our own sense, and shout “YES”.

We are the women whose souls no fundamentalist cage can contain.

We are the women who wear broken bones, tongues, minds, hearts – but we are the women who dare whisper “NO”.

We are the mothers in labour.

We are the women who know that all issues are ours.

We have worked now for decades to name the details of our rage, hope, needs and vision.

We have broken our silence.

We intend to do more than endure and survive. And we will be patient no longer.

They have tried to defy us, deny us, define us, defuse us, denounce us, enslave us – and jail, exile, rape, beat, burn and bury us.

We are the girlchild in Hanoi, the grandmother in Burma, the woman in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, Cambodia and Fiji.

We will no longer wait and we cannot be stopped.

We are poised on the edge of a new millennium, ruin behind us, no models before us, the taste of fear sharp on our tongues. Yet we will leap. There is nothing left to lose or win.

Bread, a clean sky, active peace, the wound healing, the child wanted, the body’s integrity honoured, the labour equal and valued and no hand raised in any gesture but greeting. And everywhere laughter, dancing, care, contentment and celebration. A humble healthy heaven – in the now.

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in the encouragement of every woman's future,
working towards a greater mutuality between the genders