Radio evolution - ICS - Universidade do Minho

Radio, Citizenship and Social IdentityThe historic condition of women and their strugglesThe theme women and citizenship has a few basic questions. Where is the feminine citizenship if womenare excluded from the educational, political and social process of society? Where is women’s citizenship in asociety where men and women, in their great majority are excluded from social wealth? How to conciliatecitizenship with the absence of equal or compensatory politics? How to help reconstruct the states so thatcitizenship becomes a meaningful concept? The answer for these questions and many others will allow theenlargement of what is possible, even in a society that excludes and is hierarchical and that also can allow us tounderstand where our citizenship is.Women are number one when it comes to unemployment in the Metropolitan Regions of Brazil. Womencontinue to have to deal with domestic tasks. Women continue working without pay. Women continue to shylyassume management positions, and so on. In the 21 st century a reflection is necessary when it comes to theeducational model which we have so that we can question its effectiveness related to equal rights and gender. Is ittrue that we do not have a conservative model, stereotyped and full of repression towards women? Is it true thatwomen have full conscience of their role in society? Can women know how to exercise citizenship?The struggle of women for equality in everything in society, work, home, school was and still is a solitarystruggle marked by great tragedies. It is not by chance that the 8 th of March is internationally considered to beWomen’s Day. That day was marked negatively by a great tragedy. North American women organized women’sfirst exclusive strike that fought against the workday reduction and by the end of the terrible and inhuman workconditions. One hundred and nine weavers from the Cotton Factory crossed their arms as a form of protest todemand their rights to their employers. It was then, on the 8 th of March of 1857 that one of the biggest crimes ofall working history happened. The police, ordered by the employers closed the exits of the factory and set it onfire. The women were stuck and defenseless and died carbonized and asphyxiated in the middle of the smoke andflames. Fifty three years after that terrible episode, in 1910, during the II Women’s International Conference inDenmark, Clara Zetkin, an activist, proposed that the 8 th of March would be declared as Women’s Day. Today thatday is still marked by demonstrations and protests, being commemorated by the fighters all around the world as asymbol of workforce resistance, mobilizing the ample feminine groups against the capitalist oppression(Guimarães, 1999).The 154 year struggle remains the same. The restructuration process that the big capitalist companieshave gone through and the neoliberal politics in many countries reinforce the condition of exploitation andcondition of oppression of women. In Brazil, everyday has been a struggle against social exclusion,unemployment, withdrawal of social rights, the reduction of salaries, the lack of conditions of a worthy life thataffects mainly women. They earn 50% less than men, working in the same position and unemployment amongwomen is almost 6% higher than among men.Facing this picture of discrimination suffered by women, many times even legitimized by the state normsand as a rule, women have started organizing themselves in small groups or even isolated. They would fight forthe change of that legal picture, in the sense of amplifying feminine citizenship and changing the asymmetriccultural pattern that characterized Brazilian and worldwide juridical culture. They would make an effort to makeway for an alternative right that meant the amplification of women’s citizenship in the political right’s sphere.Only nowadays women receives special society attention when comes to education. The come next tochildren and people that have special needs, like the new educational subjects. After millenniums of social andeducational subordination, exclusion from school and instruction, women is now more and more in the spotlightof the educational scene. The feminine educational problems and women’s instruction have gained attention of allsociety. Social ascension of women has produced a profound shuffle in education. The educational practice hasnow been worked out for a new subject, women, children, people with special needs. The training institutions,ECREA: ‘Radio Evolution: technology, content, audiences – conference 2011 | 481