08/03/2026
International Socialist Women Conference was held in Copenhagen, at Skodsborg Spa Hotel, in 1910. It was the first time that a celebration of Working Women's Day was proposed and esteblished. The following year the first demonstrations of International Women's Day started across Europe.
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Here we are standing a century later, as highly educated women who deliberately chose to be small scale agriculture workers despite all challenges of highly unjust politics of agriculture as well as sexual politics of food.
We are growing healthy food for people. We are cleaning the waste of an extractivist economy that leaves behind ruins, ravaged forests, spoiled soil and subsoil and exhausted bodies. Waste is capitalism's success. And we clean it. We sequester it in the soil while simultaneously healing it.
We are willing to take all business risks. Our fields are the front lines where climate crisis look us in the eye. We keep an eye for all who selectively choose not to see it.
As farmers our vulnerability is also our strength. Because the seed of future rests in the hope that we carry in the strength of our chosen vulnerability.
All this, as sociologist Arlie Hochschild says, creates an "emotional labour". And women are often judged for being too emotional, therefore weak, irrational and not suitable for business. Thus our anger, our modus operandi, which as Audre Lorde describes "is loaded with information and energy" is dismissed. It is considered personal. So patriarchy can continue its power hunger game over women.
We know that personal is political. We know that power is not given, but taken. We know that we are seeds. And we know that suppression of seeds often results with more seeds.
Happy International Worker Women's Day.
