“Language is the most precious and the most dangerous gift bestowed upon humanity.”
– Friedrich Hölderlin
March 8, 2024. Buenos Aires. The mobilisation was massive. Thousands of women, from various collectives and political parties, some alone, others with friends or colleagues, and curious passersby joining them, marched. It was still hot. A sudden and threatening rain fell in front of the National Congress, gradually transforming the march into a pilgrimage. Our soaked heads and flags could have seen it as a curse, but they were the waters of March, and we had to feel their grace. Nothing stopped the protesters, carried by their songs, strength, and conviction.
Repression, in other forms, always looms. Before Parliament, it has become common again. Something sinister, and uncertain, resurfaces from the past, threatening like the shadow of a raven. This winter, news struck: a group of legislators visited former torturers and military personnel sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity during the last military dictatorship. Among their victims were French nuns. I explored this case in my novel Le sang des papillons (The Blood of Butterflies) (Ed. JC Lattès, 2014).
This backsliding is surprising, especially since the memory of Ni una menos remains vivid. Born in 2015 after the femicide of Chiara Páez, this feminist movement resonated its anger throughout Latin America, bringing the issue of violence against women into the public and political sphere.
Faced with the threat of removing the notion of femicide and repealing the law on voluntary termination of pregnancy, we must affirm that nothing will stop – at least on the symbolic level, which is being attacked – the fighting capacity of women in Argentina.
Erasing Women, Ongoing Crime
A year later, images of this mobilisation still resonate like a halo of light against the historical setback experienced by Argentine society, under the latent threat of a bill aiming to dismantle rights acquired after decades of social struggles and suffering. The government – which in this case is moving backwards – wants to go so far as to remove the notion of femicide from the Penal Code, i.e., the recognition of the murder of a woman because of her gender.
The Argentine government is preparing a bill on « equality before the law », aiming to abolish the aggravation of the sentence when a man murders a woman. But the femicide figures contradict this logic: in Argentina, a femicide is recorded every 29 hours. In 2024, 255 cases were recorded. The law, adopted in 2012, aimed precisely to make this structural violence against women visible.
Meanwhile, the Argentine president, amid a media storm with the « cryptogate » scandal, inflamed the Davos Forum with his attacks on feminism, climate change, and the LGBT community. These outrages provoked a massive demonstration on February 2 – against fascism and racism – gathering about two million people across Argentina.
As I write these lines, the National Salon of Visual Arts has eliminated quotas for women, travesties, trans, and federal representatives. Each day brings a new attempt at symbolic dismantling, a collapse of certain rights as if nothing had happened.
Dismantle, erase, silence. The text (from the Latin textus) means interweaving, fabric, and framework. As Barthes postulates, it is a constant weaving process, an emanation of language and a social space that participates in a « social utopia. » Today, however, this text is attacked from all sides: by the narcissism of social networks, the « efficiency » of artificial intelligence, disinformation, and the glorification of individual success advocated by neoliberalism. But here, the weavers of memory resist. They give meaning, again and again, to the history being written in the name of equity.
A Bit of History
As early as 1857, in North America, a group of textile workers took to the streets of New York to demand better wages, fairer working conditions, and a reduction in their long working days (to which domestic chores and family care were added). The police repression was brutal, costing the lives of 120 of them. I imagine them dressed in aprons and grey bonnets, their hands marked by work, the soles of their shoes patched with cardboard to face the cold and snow. They carried out a heroic act, initiating a movement seeking dignity, respect, and equal rights.
In Argentina, feminist struggles also have a long and significant history. From the beginning of the 20th century, figures such as Cecilia Grierson, the country’s first female doctor, Julieta Lanteri, a pioneer of women’s suffrage, and others like Alicia Moreu de Justo and Eva Peron worked for women’s rights.
From a very young age, I admired the poet Alfonsina Storni. Born in Switzerland in 1892, she was vice-president of the Feminist Committee of Santa Fe and a member of the Commission on Women’s Rights. In 1924, she founded the magazine, Mundo Argentino, offering a space for expression to the writers and artists of her time. A tireless advocate for equality, she engaged with the National Feminist Union and the Feminist Party. In a patriarchal society that criticised her for being a single mother, writer, and actress, she defended women’s economic independence. She fought on all fronts and was among the first to demand women’s suffrage, a right she did not live to see recognised. With irony, she addresses in her poems a subject still taboo: equality between the sexes. From childhood, Alfonsina had to contribute to the household finances, first by sewing clothes to help her mother, then by supporting her father, who owned a café that eventually went under. Early on, she learned the value of work and claimed the sweet fruit of rights and equality. Yet, her writings remained marginalised for a long time, relegated to the shadows. In the literary world dominated by men, she is associated with the generation of the 1880s, even though the most influential figures remained male.
In Argentina, as elsewhere, generations of women have fought to obtain the right to vote and, more broadly, to decide their future. In my poetry collection La lengua de Medusa (Ed. Huesos, 2021), I pay tribute to my grandmother and my paternal great-aunts, mostly Italian, who voted for the first time in Argentina, the country where they had found refuge. In my Medusa, I write:
The relentless cold of winter tore through the galleries and courtyards / with iron rakes to the heart / The orphans will remember with faint enthusiasm that in 1951 / For the first time, they entered a dark room, and that is voting, what men do, seems on the edge of the forbidden. / A border sealed in secret with politics, on the other side of the wall, sovereign power was fertilised by blood, manure, innocence.
The law on women’s suffrage was adopted in 1947, and in 1951, they finally voted. As Alfonsina Storni wrote: “Cada día más dueña de mí misma” (Each day more mistress of myself). They must have felt this same determination as they entered the voting booth, their civic booklet in hand. This conquest marked the birth of women as political actors.
My Godmothers, My Guides
2008. Persepolis and Buenos Aires in a theatre in Paris. I love Studio 28, this cinema is full of history. The red velvet that adorns the walls and the jewel lamps designed by Jean Cocteau, the godfather of the place, give the space a timeless, hushed aura.
That’s where my boyfriend at the time invited me to see Persepolis, an animated film by a then-little-known Iranian: Marjane Satrapi. Sinking into the velvet seat, I was captivated by her story, by the story of the little girl she was in Iran in the 1970s. Tears still well up in my eyes thinking about it.
Her story of exile and heartbreak strangely resonated with the sadness I felt for my own country. The black and white, like an old photographic roll, carried the trace of omnipresent censorship, adolescence lived without colour, without escape, under the constant surveillance of patrols, between ID checks and muffled cries in the night of countless murders.
My adolescence also had this dark hue. But Marjane, like so many exiles, knew how to weave a bridge between pain and culture, between confinement and freedom. In Europe, she found colour.
2009. I had the honour of celebrating the 30th anniversary of Marguerite Yourcenar’s entry into the French Academy at Mont-Noir, alongside celebrities from the literary scene. Gisèle Halimi, a lawyer and activist for women’s rights, was also there: dressed in white like a contemporary Athena, she had an unforgettable presence. Among the other people I met during this unforgettable day were Annie Ernaux, not yet adorned with her Nobel Prize, who already carried in L’Événement and Les armoires vides an essential voice on the silence of women.
How can we not also mention Simone Veil? Her portrait accompanies me everywhere. In 1994, it was she who signed my naturalisation decree. A survivor of Auschwitz, an advocate for the rights of Algerians, Minister of Health, the first president of the European Parliament… On November 26, 1974, stoic in the face of insults, she defended the right to abortion in the National Assembly:
« We cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the 300,000 abortions that mutilate the women of this country every year, that violate our laws and humiliate those who undergo them. »
My godmothers have always been my guides. When I falter, I look at their photo and feel a deep conviction that I must continue.
End of 2020. I spent the whole night watching the debate in the Upper House of Congress to finally hear on December 30 that Law 27.610 had decreed that Voluntary Termination of Pregnancy would be legal and free. Beyond the respectable philosophical debate on life, it was the lives of millions of women who died or became sterile following clandestine abortions that were at stake. Without going into the details of the aberrant cases where a girl of only thirteen had to continue a pregnancy after being raped. I cannot help but consider this law a yes to life.
Christmas 2023. It was snowing in Paris when I arrived at the home of the great writer Nancy Huston, who, a few months earlier, had accompanied us on a march in Buenos Aires for women’s rights. On Christmas Eve, with a complicit gesture, she handed me a book she had bought for me: Femme Vie Liberté (Woman, Life, Freedom), by Marjane Satrapi. I jumped for joy! This book pays tribute to Mahsa Amini and testifies to the gravity of the situation in Iran. Available for free in Persian, it allows Iranians to access it freely.
The boyfriend from Studio 28 was right; there was a great affinity with Marjane, which today translates into admiration. But the self that I am, that we are, is only a drop of water in the vast ocean, a stitch in the fabric of history. We are one more person in a movement, one more person among those who demand not to lose the rights we have so painstakingly built since time immemorial.
The death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 sparked an unprecedented uprising. Arrested by the morality police for a poorly worn veil, this 22-year-old Kurdish woman succumbed to her injuries three days later. Her name became a symbol.
This struggle, passed down from generation to generation, has been recognised on the international stage. In 2003, activist Shirin Ebadi received the Nobel Peace Prize for her fight for human rights. Twenty years later, in 2023, it was Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned in Tehran, who was awarded the same prize.
In this continuity, in 2024, Marjane Satrapi won the Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. A figure in the defence of human rights, she perpetuates the memory of Mahsa Amini and amplifies the voice of Iranian women seeking justice.
“Women, Life, Freedom,” More Than Ever
It is necessary to break the silence. So that the future of women may be inscribed in life, and in equality.
End of August 2024. The Taliban imposed a law of silence on Afghan women, a true veto on their voice. The restrictions affecting 21 million women are horrifying. What they seek is to condemn women to erasure.
In La Cité des Dames (The City of Ladies), in the year 1400, did Christine de Pizan not already formulate a feminist utopia? Six centuries separate us from the first French writer to live by her pen. A century separates us from Alfonsina and her tireless struggle to break the prison, the cage that is the image of the silence imposed on Afghan women and so many others.
Breaking the silence means having the courage to continue expressing oneself, continue sowing the 21st century with knowledge, and transmitting knowledge like a torn veil that flies high, so that the light of equality may live. The historical process of Mazan testifies to this, and the figure of Gisèle Pelicot remains an unparalleled example of courage, bravery, and integrity.
Yes, Marjane, Alfonsina, Simone, Gisèle, Nancy, Annie… And all those who want to hear, let them hear: Women, Life, Freedom – Women, Life, Freedom.
March 2025. And we continue to weave.
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