Introduction:
From Barcelona we have initiated a project to require a world-wide scoped political organization, the UN, to make a symbolic act of Recognition, Apoligy and Abolition of the Patriarchy.
This project will be presented to the Director of UNIFEM, Ines Alberdi, during the Opening Conference of the II Congress of Women of Barcelona, on October 16th of this year 2009. We want to ask her to act as a mediator and present this petition to the General Assembly of the United Nations.
The accomplishment of this act could give another dimension to the fulfillment of Human Rights. In this way we try, beyond gender policies, to go to the root of the Patriarchy.
If you agree with the DECLARATION that we expose here, we request you to adhere to the signature, either as an association or individually.
Petition:
UNIVERSAL DECLARATION FOR THE RECOGNITION OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE PATRIARCHAL ORDER AND ITS DEFINITIVE ABOLITION
For more than 200 years the women have been engaged in collective struggle against patriarchy, an institution that represents a permanent outrage to all of us, and also for men, forced to play the disagreeable role of custodians and oppressors of women.
IN VIEW OF
the nonobservance of the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, in Article 7 of which it is stated that “All [human beings] are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination”, and the nonobservance to a greater or lesser extent of the subsequent agreements reached in the General Assembly of the United Nations held in New York in June 2000, in continuance of the last of the four World Conferences (Beijing 1995) on Women, these World Conferences being made possible as a result of the efforts of women all over the world in recent decades,
WE STATE:
that , patriarchy, being a tacit institution within society and never written, such as a religious decalogue or a political constitution would be, has consequently been rendered officially and legally invisible, and that this has prevented it from being corrected, amended, or simply abolished as anachronistic, as had been the case with institutions such as feudalism and slavery. We take “anachronistic” as meaning contrary to human rights, as a result of which we find the following outrages:
1.- Exclusion of women from the social contract and the political rights inherent therein, from ancient Athens to the present day.
2.- Exclusion of women from equal and equitable education, giving rise to the necessary functional ignorance to ensure the servile channelling of girls and women into their assigned tasks and their usefulness to men as the hegemonic sexual group.
3.- Exclusion of women from the world of employment, the necessary and sufficient training to enter and practice all professions, and the right to hold posts of responsibility in them.
4.- The above three forms of exclusion have been made possible and are reinforced by a cultural framework built exclusively by the male group (patriarchy), rendering women invisible, repressed and subordinated, and furthermore subject to the corresponding punishment in the event of their contravening the norm. This androcentric culture has been transmitted basically through religions, philosophy and science.
Hence,
WE APPEAL that this International Forum manage the formal request for an apology to the women of the world for the outrages and offences suffered for millennia, and at the same time that the patriarchal order be abolished, and that this abolition bring about the definitive end of confrontation between men and women as superior/inferior, active/passive, and all other binary concepts referring to both sexes for the exclusion of one of them.
REQUEST FOR AN APOLOGY
This request for an Apology manifests in three directions: Recognition, Apology and Abolition.
RECOGNITION of the patriarchal institution, which is tacit in society but hitherto unwritten, and thus phantasmal. Recognition of its formal, official and political existence as an institution, making it subject to consideration and judgement in the same way as all other institutions that there are and have been in the world, and thus liable to be regarded as void in its development and as such obsolete.
APOLOGY for the grave moral, spiritual, social and political offence inflicted on women throughout the world over the centuries, on being considered inferior to men and unworthy of participating in the human social contract, reserved exclusively to men.
ABOLITION. The above leads to the decision to abolish patriarchy as an institution, insofar as it is out of place and unlawful in this century, in conflict with human rights, an affront for half of humanity and harmful to the other half. Just as slavery and other perverse institutions were abolished in the past, we demand the delegitimation of patriarchy, which will allow a more rapid advancement towards the achievement of a better and fairer social order for all.
This request for an apology thus signifies, both really and symbolically, a break between BEFORE and AFTER patriarchy, and a landmark in the history of humanity.
Associació GEA,
Barcelona 2009
**Please note that the awkwardness in language is due to translation.
feminine mystique referring to the “discrepancy between the reality of women’s lives and their image of a proper woman’s life”): the image of men as motivated by a drive for power more important to them than life itself. to live by a mystique is to live in bad faith, to live a false life. For both sexes, trying to live out an image makes life miserable.
