WE CAN DO IT!

Taking advantage of the closeness of 8 March, I would like to reflect on feminism: its history and its current situation.

Women have been repressed since human beginning. During human evolution this repression has changed with the history, culture and so on. But, the most important fact is that with this discrimination it goes the women fight to defend their rights and to improve their conditions and situation.

Historically, in pre-modern societies, women have been excluded for many areas. For example, in ancient Greece, although women were free, they hadn't right to vote because they couldn't take part in the economic affairs. This fact was decisive to avoid women to vote because you had to pay tax if you wanted to have right to vote.

Later, with the triumph of the monotheistic religions which built their theories with patriarchy as cornerstone, women got second-class citizens. They were confined to housework, childcare and the worship of the pertinent God. They couldn't receive education, they couldn't vote, they couldn't administrate themselves, they couldn't decide anything... They were considered just an object which served to please men and to make the species survive.

This situation remained until the First World War and the worker's movement.

During the Industrial Revolution, women had to work hardly like men, but they were worse considered than the latests. Women earned less money, they had worse working conditions, they hadn't any rights not even maternity leave. They couldn't participate in political life: they couldn't vote or being voted.

With the worker's movement started the achievements on the level of social rights, but at this time, women gave priority to class struggle and feminism was pushed into the background.

It was in 1931 when feminism made the definitive step in the political sphere, particularly in the Spanish Second Republic. During this period women could be voted and voted too. This fact lit the fuse that would make the rest of Europe started strongly the feminist fight.

In the Second World War women held jobs of the men while they were fighting in the trenches. They suffered the harsh working conditions and many of them joined the militias. It was the case, for example of Rosa Luxemburg.

Since then, feminist struggle hasn't ceased: universal suffrage, divorce, access to education, right to decide, sexual liberation, equal rights, incorporation into the labour world, and so on.

GHOST OF SPAIN

These are some funny sentences that I found reading the book...

1. Tapando vergüenzas → Covering up embarrassments

2. Mucho ruido y pocas nueces → a lot of noise but few walnuts

3. ¡Joder, que no nos toquen los cojones! → Fuck, why don't they leave our balls alone?

4. Me cago en su puta madre... → I shit on his whore-mother...

5. Traje de luces → A suit of lights

6. Secretos a voces → Voiced secrets

7. Ni tonto, ni perezoso → Neither stupid, nor lazy

8. Cosas del pueblo → Village matters

9. Nostálgicos → “The few who still feel nostalgia for the Caudillo”

10. Casposos (fascistas) → “the dandruff-ridden”

11. No tiene pelos en la lengua → Has no hairs on his tongue

12. Con la boca pequeña → With a small mouth

13. Ley de Punto Final → Full Stop Law

14. Prensa rosa → Pink press

15. Tocando palmas → Beating out a complex, staccato, machine-gun rhythm with their hands

16. Si les da la gana → If they feel “the urge”

17. Camarón de la Isla → The Shrimp of the Island

18. Clubes de alterne → The brothels that dot Spain's main highways

19. Pisa fuerte niña, que paga el ayuntamiento → Tread firmly, “niña”, the town council's paying

20. La paya te va a pinchar → The non-gypsy, as the nurse was known, will stick a needle into you

21. Mosto → Sweet grape juice

22. Trasnochar → To cross the night

23. Ser de pueblo → To be from the village

CULTURAL ASSIMILATION

The treatment accorded to immigration, and the management of cultural diversity that it brings, is another side of the construction and reproduction of our Western societies. Since the nineteenth century, assimilation has been the process by which successive waves of immigrants became “French or North-American”. While objectives were common -cultural assimilation and the identification with a national-cultural identity-, the ways to get it varied from one State to another: from the “French republican model” to the North-American “melting pot”.

Management formulas: they should be understood as a ideology, policies and practices whole which not only show and express the kind of social cohesion, political traditions and identity myths, but also the forms of unequal relationship, the balances and adjustments among groups culturally different and hierarchical.

HOMOGENIZATION AND MODERNITY
Assimilation: process by which a person or a group adopts as its own the dominant culture in the society while he leaves his differenced cultural identity. The traditional immigrant-receiving countries, like France and the USA, hoped these people left their heritage and assimilated the cultural customs of the host country progressively.
Assimilation of immigrants was an other aspect of the strong trend towards the homogenization which characterized the process of the nation-state construction.

In order to assimilate these people, governments designed nation-building programs which consisted in a series of measures:
1.Promotion of a common language.
2.Only curricular content in teaching.
3.Participation in the “national” institutions.
4.Identification with some symbolic referents and historical myths, etc.
These measures were linked to some aims: modern economy, literate population and a bigger political and social cohesion.
Thus, immigrants were incorporated into societies which were constituted on the basis of a hegemonic culture and identified as cohesion and homogeneity.

The success of the assimilation process was based on social dynamics and actions of institutions, with their explicit requirements-learning the language-and implicit-adapting to the customs.

Many of these societies were more heterogeneous than its national image proclaimed.


FRENCH REPUBLICAN ASSIMILATION
The model of the III Republic involved the adoption of the French language and culture, the adherence to the “republican values”: freedom, equality and fraternity; and to a common political-national project too by the participation and framing in a series of institutions and social spaces such as school, army and the world of work.
The key idea of the French republican model: socialization through institutions of the Republic and permanent residence assimilates the immigrant, and makes him or his children, French. Thus, the well integrated immigrant expresses himself in French, identifies himself with France and with the behaviours, customs and habits of the major part of the population. As this model doesn't consider to keep the cultures of origin, it's logical its hostility towards groups and communities based on the immigrant culture. Besides it's considered a danger for the success of the acculturation process, the existence of specific groups may weaken the loyalty to the Republic.
Cultural or religious peculiarities are own of the private sphere, they shouldn't have public projection.


FROM ASSIMILATION TO PLURALISM
Both the French republican model as the American “melting pot” offered to immigrants, in exchange for their acculturation and identification with France or the USA, the promise of full social and economic integration. This promise of upward social mobility will be no longer kept. I becomes more difficult and selective in a more unequal and fragmented society, both in its structure as in its social actors, and where the greatest danger is not exploitation but exclusion. The increase in inequality and social problems entail the reduction of the protective action of States. Meanwhile, social ties which provided security, identity and sense weaken.
Not only differences and social dynamics of exclusion increase, but they tend to ethnificate. Immigrants and ethnic groups are “underneath” inserted in the social structure. Upward social mobility is much more difficult and the social ethnificated stratification is consolidated. Lost ideological and social referents, the search for meaning and discontent tend to express in identity keys.
In the 80s and 90s, conflicts with the involvement of groups arisen from immigration in poor districts grow. This situation is reflected in school failure, violent attitudes and “difficult areas”.
However, with globalization it has increased the importance given to the own culture, the assessment of the own identity and the legitimacy of its defense.


THE REPUBLICAN INTEGRATION IN THE 90s
Inclusion of immigrants happens: move towards social integration and appropriate and respectful management of cultural differences is attempted.
But, the French people is only one and there are no recognitions to specific and different identities.
The republican way of the recognition of diversity is very wary. It accepts the preservation of cultural diversity but reaffirms the specific republican accents: the need to emphasize the common things, solidarity and social cohesion as a major concern; individual integration as a citizen and the refusal to institutionalize minorities, particularly by law channel; primacy of individual rights to minority representation.