Feminisme, Religie en Seculariteit: Een Ambivalente Relatie in de Context van de Nederlandstalige Vrouwenbeweging in België

For International Women's Day on 8 March 2012, the Dutch-speaking Women's Council drafted a manifesto for women's rights that opposes religious conservatism and fundamentalism: “Conservative and religious fundamentalism must be made visible and 'disarmed'. Women's organizations must be given the means to combat this fundamentalism and to fully assume their role as defenders of women's rights. Women's human rights are not subordinate to tradition, ethnic custom or religion. Equality and freedom are the basic principles of all human rights and women's rights are human rights.”2

The authors of the manifesto see the worldwide rise of religiously inspired conservatism and fundamentalism as a great danger to women's rights and equality between men and women. They call on the Belgian government to take a number of actions to counter fundamentalism.