Firstborn Girl #6

FIRST BORN GIRL
feminist culture and
action festival
3-6 May

“6 hours work, 6 hours culture, 6 hours
activism, 6 hours rest” is the advocating
postulate of the sixth edition of the feminist
culture and action festival - FIRST BORN
GIRL. Improving labour rights for women,
proper valuation of our fellow citizens’ unpaid
housework, finding paths of giving conscious
resistance to the current and past forms of
exploitation and devaluation of labor and
dignity are issues that are in the focus of this
year’s festival. We advocate for a new 6 hour
work day, recalling the 19th century workers’
hard-won struggle of the 8 hour one. In those
times the struggle for a free daily leisure
time was the main political issue of the
labour movement. Today, the leading political
endeavor is finding a way to decent working
conditions, workplace protection and care
for workers, especially within the industrial
branches, while resisting the neoliberal
exploitative practice. One quarter of the day
belongs to the activism since we consider
everyday proactive initiatives of syndicate
strengthening are a key factor in resistance
building. The Macedonian life for many
citizens implies living conditions below a
decent living standard, inadequate education,
public health services that no one deserves,
corruption as a most common everyday
practice and, among other, omnipresent will
of leaving this precarious state in search for
better life outside of the country.
Several fierce women are part of
Macedonia’s past, fighting bravely as women
activists. We feel obliged to remember those
days of struggle. The archives are limited
and incomplete, but knowing this fact, we
mustn`t bring to oblivion the iconic female
figures that were active in the struggle of
the labour movement, women such as Rosa
Plaveva, who, together with her comrades,
organized the first celebration of May Day
in 1909 in Skopje. She continues to organize
syndicate strikes in the period after the First
World War. In the years that follow many
other women actively organize strikes while
working in the textile industry. Some of these
women are Nevena Georgieva-Dunja, Ljubica
Georgieva, Ilona Trajkova, Denka Dimova and
many others.
From 3rd to 6th of May, FIRST BORN
GIRL will host guests who think about these
essential and important issues. With them
we will try to address the following questions:
Do textile industry workers, who hardly
receive their minimum wages, deserve
such treatment after hopeless striking?
Or should they just keep piling up their
precarious monthly contracts? Will unpaid
housework ever be recognized and valued?
Will housework ever be valued as full time job
or it will continue to be common, implicitly
given luxury by those who decided to care
for the home we also live in and eagerly
wait for the prepared dinner at the table?
Can girls and women in Macedonia, those
living in cities and rural areas, have access
to proper reproductive health care and take
care of their general well being? Until when
will the young women in Macedonia be asked
on their job interviews if they plan to give
birth? Until when a kindergarten teacher
will look after 30 children by herself? Will
the new maternity leave initiative, stimulate
the passive role of women in Macedonia,
their home imprisonment and cutting them
from the public life, or should the initiative
motivate inclusion, proactiveness and role
of an influencing and decisive subject in the
societal life of one country? Will the poor
6 percent elected women mayors in 2017
elections in Macedonia, ever become a two
figure number? The gender gap in salaries
keeps to incite gender inequality in socioeconomic
and cultural life. The urge to
resist those norms is more than needed. Yet,
the way to achieve equality involves much
stronger emancipating input and serious
institutional challenge and political will.
We welcome you to spend with us these
festival days in exchanging experiences
and knowledge, rethinking these and many
other questions, supporting active women
of the local scene, since FIRST BORN GIRL
continues to exist as space for presentation,
learning and sharing of new initiatives in
culture and art, which are powerful catalyst
of the message we wish to spread.

In solidarity,
Jana Kocevska


If you hire a housekeeper the national
income would grow up, employment would
grow up, and economic growth would grow
up. The unemployment rate would go down.
If you married her, and she continued to do
exactly the same work, national income
would go down, employment would go down,
economic growth rate would go down and the
unemployment rate would go up.
You can’t get more stupid than that, and
sexist, right? And yet still our textbooks, our
politicians our statistics only measure labor,
not all the work many of us do.
Guy Standing

Thursday 03 05

12:00 discussion
YCC plateau
21:05 exhibition
cinema Frosina foyer, 1th flr
21:30 discussion
YCC plateau

Friday 04 05

21:00 theater performance
Frosina hall, 1st floor foyer
22:30 DJ set
YCC plateau

Saturday 05 05

20:00 movie program
Frosina hall, 1st floor foyer

Volonteers

  • Надица Банишка
  • Теодора Милеска
  • Ивана Цилевска
  • Драган Тануровски
  • Верче Петрушевска
  • Енџи Николоска
  • Изабела Јакимова
  • Нина Елзесер
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