How can we honor International Women’s Day with the Afghani women? I can say to the Bosnian, Serb, Croat women, ‘Ma sretna ti zena’, as well as to the Eastern European women.

How can we honor International Women’s Day to the Syrian, Iranian, Turkish, Arab and African women that will let them know I have worked hard to honor women, heal trauma and that I feel for them and all of their children? How can we honor International Women’s Day with a one-day Western holiday begrudgingly given to the Asian-Pacific Islanders?

How can we honor International Women’s Day to the mothers taken at the southern border of the USA? To Central America, South America, the Caribbean Islanders?

– Danica Anderson, Founder and Clinical Program Director

Women workers demonstrating in St Petersburg, Russia on International Women’s Day 1917

March 8, International Working Women’s Day, with a 110 year history in commemorating women’s political struggles insisting on her primacy to author her destiny, and promoting the fight for equal rights, and progress.  The founding of International Women’s Day was birthed through women collaborating, inspired by each other’s public political struggles for women’s rights and liberation across the world.

In Chicago, 1908 U.S. socialist women celebrated a Women’s Day giving rise to solidarity from international women collaborating on the horizon. In Germany 1910, Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin were inspired by their foresisters, and proposed at the International Women’s Conference, a proclamation to establish an annual International Women’s Day, endorsed by women from over 17 countries. A day for commemorating working women’s struggles both personal and political, at home and life at large – stressing the need to advance history for all with demands including equal pay in the workplace, and equal rights in law, all of which we still battle to this day.

Clara Zetkin

The meaning of International Women’s Day of recognition took a turn from it’s roots upon the United Nations recognition of International Women’s Day in 1977 when it became a day for cards and flowers and spa days in the U.S. for your sister. Let us never forget the struggles women have fought and we continue to face today, and the fierce fierce women poured into the streets this weekend to keep in tradition of 110 years ago.

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Elinor Ostrom/Indiana University

Elinor Ostrom (b. 1933- d. 2012), the first and only woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, for her myth-busting esteemed research and fieldwork on the commons and social collective action, relied upon a epigenetic and collaborative social collective backbone in alignment with the Kolo Self Trauma Care Protocol.  Ostrom devoted her life to the power in people’s every day small acts to evolve how we manage the commons sustainably by evolving our collective self-governance.  Both The Kolo: WCCC and Elinor Ostrom’s bodies of work instruct us to collaborate in social collectives, heal trauma and confront the greatest crises of our times where violence too often erupts from mismanaged commons leading to repression, ecological degradation, genocide/gynocide, and disease. Alternatively, choose to stand shoulder to shoulder to advance our potentials within nature’s limits.

Elinor Ostrom’s accomplished lifework was possible because of her prioritizing collaboration across disciplines and with her colleagues. They discovered over a thousand separate case studies of people governing the commons sustainably but they sat across disciplines and specialties, in isolation.  Ostrom’s pioneering work, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, is a testament to collaboration, advocating for alternatives to both state control and privatization of resources, archiving case studies of people evolving possibilities to face problems within their own communities. Her life’s work was fueled by refuting biologist, Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”, which has been influencing policymakers since its publishing in 1968, justifying overt state control, claiming there is no way to manage communal property sustainably.

Elinor heard Hardin speak about overpopulation at the University of Indiana advocating state-sanctioned limit of 2 children per family maximum.  Ostrom, stood tall, condemning this state control as totalitarian. He countered her with his published theory “Tragedy of the Commons.” She carried out her life’s work refuting Hardin through ethnographic fieldwork and archival history advocating vesting authority in individuals and communities to self-manage as opposed to concentrating power and control outside.  In one Turkish village they resolve their disputes through discussions in the local coffee house, the location of cultural daily life being lived out.

In the face of today’s state of the world, with one crisis and terror after another, where conflicts and wars break out from totalitarian attempts to control resources we need more doing the work of building social collectives and collaboration.  The Kolo Self Trauma Care Protocol aligns the biological and neurological process toward flourishing to harness cohesion and inclusivity in the social collective, with women and girls as priority actors in the daily processes of living.  Just as the Kolo Self Trauma Care Protocol frames trauma as intensified learning where our daily small acts is what the future generations will live out, Ostrom found the same to be true and proved state control and privatization are not the only potential.

Ostrom’s contributions is increasingly being recognized and grappled with by social scientists, recognizing the significant impact that local practices have on other levels of political and social organization. On International Women’s Day let us be reminded of the history and be inspired by the kolo, Elinor Ostrom, and the women 110 years ago collaborating internationally.

Your tax deductible gift can help women on the frontlines heal from trauma and flourish in collaborative social collectives, halting the intergenerational cycles of trauma.

The Kolo: WCCC calls our attention to the grave situation of women we do not see internationally, and especially to remember today the women and girls in Afghanistan who remain in their fight facing a brutal existence as women and girls, with or without U.S. intervention under the Taliban.

Afghanistan Girls. Photo Credit: Dr. Danica Anderson, 2016 fieldwork in Afghanistan

International

Afghanistan

“The Taliban remain deeply misogynistic. Their 1996 to 2001 regime was notorious for denying women and girls access to education, employment, freedom of movement and health care, and subjecting them to violence including public lashing or execution by stoning. Taliban rhetoric and conduct has moderated somewhat in subsequent years, with some Taliban commanders permitting girls to attend primary schools, typically in response to community pressure. But the Taliban also continue to carry out violent attacks against girls’ schools and block women and girls from exercising many of their basic rights, and remain deeply opposed to gender equality.

In February, a Taliban leader wrote, “[W]e together will find a way to build an Islamic system in which all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam — from the right to education to the right to work — are protected.” Skeptics noted the comma separating women from equal rights, and that from 1996 to 2001 the Taliban also argued that women were enjoying all rights “granted by Islam.” Read More on WBFO/NPR

Kenya

“As the world celebrates International Women’s Day, women in Kenya still face hurdles in owning and using land and property.

“I feel like a prisoner,” a 45-year-old widow told me last year during an interview about the subject in Kakamega. “I’m limited in what I can do with land. ‘You can plant here, not there.’ I fear I will get nothing, based on the signs from my mother-in-law.” Her husband had died six months earlier, and she feared she would not get a share of their home, land and business or any inheritance from her husband’s estate.” Read More on Human Rights Watch

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