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International Women’s Day Statement
Connecting Girls; Inspiring Futures Of the occasions we as the human race love to commemorate - most can fall under the theme: freedom triumphing over oppressionand injustice. The world over we recognize the need to discard prejudice, to maintain respect and love for one another, and to promote equity and equality. These are the themes common to all thosesocial and political movements we generally recognize as being great, and beneficial to the human race. The world over for as long as we can recall the human race has struggled to overcome evildistortions that consider one life as superior to another by virtue of race, or gender or ethnicity or any other number of things. A litany of failures is strewn across our history, and has left scars on ourconscience. From slavery to genocides we have seen the capacity of humanity to injure to repress and to oppress. The voices of those who have dared to challenge these injustices and the systems thatuphold them, still echo in the corridors of history, we remember those who, an ocean away, proudly declared that they had a dream, we remember the famous speeches of the Harriet Tubman’s; the eloquentwarfare of people like my own father and all the bravery of those who, within these borders, fought for the right to selfgovernance, and for the liberties we now enjoy. In the midst of these greatmovements for equality, equity and social justice the women’s movement, since the early 1980s when it begun to get politicized, has raised its hand to be counted as one amongst these great movements. Thestruggle to overcome the distortion that pits

men and women against each other, that claims men are more entitled and more deserving than women or that women are far feebler and less able or lesscapable than men, has been a long one. These tyrannical stereotypes have long oppressed the human mind and kept our nation from realizing it’s full potential. Yet the women (and men) who have...