English Speech about International Women's Day

Thursday, April 17^th 2014

English Speech by:

• Adinda Putriasa P. – 2010230023
• Dwi Rachmawati – 2011230001
• Redita Adenisty – 2011230006

Assalammualaikum Wr. Wb.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen..

First, i want to tell all of you about one quaotation that I found today..

“Whatever women do, they must do it twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult.”

So if this speech is only half as good as most of the other speeches you will hear tonight, I apologise in advance.

International Women’s Day matters to me personally. I am very proud to be a woman. I thank God for that. As a college student, much of my life has been spent in developing countries, and I have seen with my own eyes that if there is a magic bullet for successful development it can be summed up in two words: educate women.

I love this great country of Indonesia and I want it to thrive in the 21^st century. I believe that it will do so, but only if it unleashes the talent and full potential of all of its population.

We, as educated people, men or women, have to realize that at this moment, the number of women in this world is greatly increasing. Therefore, we need to be concern to education sector, particularly for women to not to abandoned their education.

We need to giving women some accesses to finance and the skills they need to support themselves. We need to helping women give birth safely and have children by choice. We need to promoting children’s health and nutrition. And we need to working harder to reduce violence against women and children.

Let me conclude with three more quotations which seem to me to be appropriate for this afternoon’s celebration. The first is from American writer Alice Walker, and it’s this: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking that they don’t have any”. All of us in this room have a lot of power, perhaps more than we know. The women of Indonesia and the world have infinitely more. Let us resolve to use our power to the maximum. The second saying is this: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people”. I urge the world to be radical. And my final quotation is another one that I found today: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” I encourage all of you to go out and behave very badly.