Address by Stefanos Stefanou, General Secretary of the Central Committee of AKEL, at the AKEL event “The Cypriot women’s movement – a history that hasn’t been written”

 

26 May 2023, AKEL C.C. Press Office, Nicosia

One of our era’s greatest challenges remains the fight against stereotype perceptions. In a socio-economic context that places women in a double oppression and “second-class status”, women’s contribution to the evolutionary course of history has been marginalized in the collective social consciousness.

Recognizing that ignorance and semi-literacy perpetuate and foster the narratives that want women to be stuck [in their position] or to play the roles assigned to them within a system of oppression, exploitation and inequality, we therefore decided that a discussion such as the one we are having today is necessary.

It is evident that it is not enough to acknowledge that gender inequalities remain deeply rooted in our society. On the contrary, we must ‘read’ our history also through a gender perspective, something we will attempt to do today.

I am confident that the scholarly and in-depth contributions that will follow will both enlighten us and set the stage for further discussion and reflection. Since our aim is not only to record the history of women and the women’s movement, but to understand the consequences of not recording it as to perpetuating stereotype perceptions and consequently gender discrimination.

The absence of women as participants in historical development, as well as women’s perspectives on social, economic and other developments in different historical periods, is undeniably due to the multiple expressions of patriarchy. It is due to the inherent social discrimination it generates, which has over time categorised women, as Simone Bouvoir said, as ‘the second sex’, the one in the shadow of men.

It is also due to the male-dominated and male-centric writing of historiography and other related disciplines which have systematically ignored women, women’s actions and the role of women’s movements in the evolution of humanity – thus promoting almost entirely the model of the male leader, the male politician, the male revolutionary, the male scholar, the male scientist.

Do women have a history? Women have had and do have a history. They have engaged and do engage in action. They have been and are involved in social and class struggles. They have had and have contributed to production, to the progress of science, literature, the arts and letters and to the collective evolution of every society.

A glaring example is the participation of pioneering women such as Cleo Christodoulides and Katina Nikolaou in the formation of the Left in Cyprus during times when women’s emancipation, women’s organisation and involvement in political activity and other important aspects of public life seemed to be extreme, principally revolutionary assertions. “I made it a condition of my life to work for the awakening of women, who had been enslaved by men, by the prejudices and biases of society and of themselves,” said Katina Nikolaou, adding that “the first women fighters were considered immoral. Our life was full of adventures and difficulties”.

Yet they managed to form the first communist and trade union organisational cells of working women, fighting for better working conditions alongside their male comrades. They actively opposed the British colonial Palmer regime, participated in the anti-colonial struggle, as well as in the great miners’ strikes of 1948. In the same year they began to form the first “Progressive Women’s Organizations”, to reach 1950 when the first all-Cyprus women’s organization was founded – the Pancyprian Organization of Democratic Women (PODG), which in 1959 gave way to the establishment of POGO.

A women’s movement that has since then left its uninterrupted imprint on Cypriot society and paved the way to the struggles for equality, gender equality at work, combating gender violence and sexist stereotypes, pioneering the re-unification of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot women and supporting in practice every effort for the liberation and reunification of our country and people.

This is one of the many women’s stories that continue to be sadly absent from the official historical narrative. It is part of a universal story that is not addressed to any ‘special’ audience and certainly not just to women. It is part of a history full of struggles, assertions, class struggles and efforts to combat stereotypes. The visibility of women is the bridge between the past and the wider ongoing struggle for social equality and a society free of gender discrimination. An effort in which AKEL will continue to play a leading role.