Liberté, Diversité et Sororité

Synergistically together, we thrive

Published in

Wild Women Writers

4 min readJun 14, 2019

Swiss National Women Strike, Juin 14th 2019 — Logo by Charlotte Passera

This Friday, Juin 14th 2019, happens the Swiss national women strike, all around Switzerland. This movement is to bring attention to the swiss patriarchal society, giving voice to various needs like asking for an equal paycheck for the same job, respect, stop misogyny, and more. This is a movement that welcomes women, men, trans, cis, nonbinary people from all colors and background to march together.

To promote the march, women all around Switzerland have been sharing why they are going to march this Friday. And when I thought why I am going march I remembered a text that I started to write during the Wild Women Writing Challange and it feels perfect to this moment. And here it is:

If you know me a bit, you already know that revolution is not a word that represents my actions in doing what I do. I know, I haven’t found a word yet to describe my motor or the inspiration for my actions, but it is a process, and I am observing it, experimenting with what I find on my way.

During this quest, the words of the French Revolution came to my mind: Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité (Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity). And I was thinking about the power of the words that we use and the patterns that we keep reproducing consciously or unconsciously through these words that are repeated over generations. And how these words might support patriarchal dynamics still today.

Long story short, I started to think about a question that I heard many times: What do women want? I can’t answer for all women, otherwise, I would make invisible stories and needs different than mime. So I started to think about what do I want as a woman in the society that I live, and in a blink of an eye, it came to my mind: Liberté, Divesité et Sororité. And here is what I mean with that:

Liberté: To feel safe to be free

In Switzerland, domestique violence, sexual harassment, and rape are still underestimated, and 1 woman every two weeks is a victim of feminicide accordingly amnesty international. Besides of many women that come to this country as a victim of human traffic.

I want to feel safe (physically, emotionally, sexually) to be who I am. I want to feel safe to speak from my heart, knowing that I am free to be express my authenticity, wherever I go.
I wish my freedom to speak from the heart allows and supports biodiversity (biologically and culturally speaking) for other people to speak from their hearts, creating more authentic communication.
In my freedom, I recognize that I don’t speak for all women. And I wish that every and each woman feel safe to speak for themselves. I wish women from all background, from all colors, with various needs, feel safe and empowered to speak up, and also feel heard and acknowledged by their peers, family, and community.
I wish all women feel safe and free to make decisions and take care of our own bodies as we wish.
I wish the right to a safe abortion becomes legal everywhere, so women can choose whatever the woman wants to do with her body and her life.
I wish all women feel safe (physically, emotionally, sexually, politically) and respected everywhere we go.
I wish all women feel supported and valued to study whatever we want, work with whatever we like, to chose whatever we want to choose to do with our lives.
I wish all women feel safe to be free to love who we love and express it freely.

Diversité: Equity to allow and support diversity to flourish

In 2018 in Switzerland, the payment difference between women and men doing the same work was 12% on the average, where 40% of these cases were not justified by differences in time of experience, quality of education, kind of job or position in the hierarchy.

Only when our rights are equally guaranteed and respected that our diversity can flourish, and we didn’t achieve this step yet.
I wish every space become a place to welcome diversity, supporting synergy to allow cultural emergence to happen.
I wish all women feel worthy for who we are and that we get recognized and valued in all spaces (family, community, work, academia, government).

Sororité: Environment where people of all gender identity, all sexual orientation, all colors, all ethnicities feel safe, celebrated, respected, heard and seen for whom they are.

As mentioned, domestic and sexual violence are underestimated in Switzerland, where women of color and from the LGTBQI+ community are still more vulnerable.

I wish all women have a safe and supported environment to open up, to be vulnerable, to feel protected, to be who we are, respecting our own pace, to flourish and thrive.
I wish all women feel supported in creating healthy boundaries, healthy relationships, towards a healthier community and society.
I wish all women feel supported in reclaiming our voices, ou stories, and our passions.

And this is why this movement is so important to me.

For more information about the Swiss National Women Strike:

In English:

Site: https://www.14juingeneve.ch/pourquoi-participer?lang=en

In French:

Liberté, Diversité et Sororité

Synergistically together, we thrive

Liberté: To feel safe to be free

Diversité: Equity to allow and support diversity to flourish

Sororité: Environment where people of all gender identity, all sexual orientation, all colors, all ethnicities feel safe, celebrated, respected, heard and seen for whom they are.

Written by Luiza Oliveira