November 27th, 2009 in İstanbul

Please note that the shorter and Turkish translated version of this interview has been published in Feminist Politics issues 5 and 6.

Ece: In the recent past, we had the opportunity to follow the discussions around compensations paid to women for housework. Last March KEİG, one of the women’s organizations in Turkey, organized a symposium on policies concerning the reconciliation of family and work. Feminists, most of them from academia, from Spain, the UK, Sweden and France, were invited.

Gülnur: And Mexico.

Ece: They gave us explanations about various sorts of compensations like the right to early retirement, etc. Also we had the chance to follow the International Association of Feminist Economists’ annual forums. And there were many discussions around the issue. Paying women a wage or other compensations has been under discussion. So, there are many countries like Spain, France, Sweden or some northern countries where women have been paid for caring work. Even in Turkey, the government has started discussing payments for women who are doing caring work, who are looking after someone at home. It can be some older person or baby or handicapped people. Those discussions are directly related to housework done by women. First of all, we believe that your work in the International Wages for Housework Campaign and also the Global Women’s Strike have played a very important role in making women’s housework visible.

Published on the newspaper, "Radikal Iki" on November, 2008

As of November 2nd, 2008, feminists have a new place in Istanbul: We, the Socialist Feminist Collective, have inaugurated our new space, which will also serve as our base for future publications. The process which brought us to today began in the middle of 2007. Starting with the festival organised in honour of the 20th anniversary of the Campaign for Solidarity against domestic violence, a series of activities which bear the specific color and stamp of feminists were launched. This festival was followed by a support campaign for sex workers who were candidates to parliament in the general election of July 22, by the Purple Needle campaign, re-activated after nearly two decades, by the "line of political resistance" set up by feminists prior to the adoption of the Social Insurance and General Health Insurance law and other actions. The politics behind these campaigns and actions took its aspiration from a feminist standpoint that considers male dominance as all-pervasive and aims to set up women against this problem as a collective political subject. A radical, subversive feminism started to make its voice to be heard again.