MOTERIS Blogpost
Moteris means “woman” in Lithuanian. The word comes from méhtēr, Proto-Indo-European for “mother.”
The link between “woman” and “mother” is one of humanity’s oldest — and one of its most contested. For centuries, women’s reproductive capacity has been used to justify our subordination. It is not biology that oppresses us, but the structures of male dominance created to control and profit from it. From chastity belts to forced sterilisation, from anti-abortion crusades to the global industries of prostitution, pornography and surrogacy, women’s bodies have been turned into instruments of exploitation and control.
This domination is not confined to the private sphere. The same forces that exploit women’s bodies also work to silence our political voices. While entire industries thrive on the sexualisation and objectification of women, those who resist — who speak, organise and build solidarity — are systematically pushed out of public life. The suppression now takes institutional and digital forms: defunding, online harassment, legal intimidation, and the constant demand to dilute or erase the language that names women as a political class.
This connection between the personal and the political lies at the heart of feminism. What happens in the private lives of women — violence, exclusion, exploitation — mirrors how power operates in society at large. The personal is political, and every struggle for dignity and safety in women’s daily lives is inseparable from the struggle for civic participation and democratic representation. The woman’s body, treated as a contested space, becomes a symbol of how far democracy extends — or fails to.
MOTERIS – Protecting the Civic Space of Women and Girls was born as a collective feminist response to this reality. It recognises that the control of women’s bodies and the restriction of women’s speech stem from the same continuum of power. The mindset that normalises women’s exploitation and objectification also denies us the space to speak, to organise and to shape the societies we live in. Defending women’s right to organise is therefore not a side issue — it is a fundamental act of reclaiming political existence itself, as women and as citizens.
Across Europe, women’s groups are finding it harder to operate freely. The attacks come from every political direction: from the far right invoking “family values,” from economic policies that marketise equality and care, and from pseudo-progressive currents that deny women’s existence as a sex-based political class. Different as these forces are, they share a goal — to weaken women’s collective power.
Women’s civic spaces are not abstractions. They are the shelters where women escaping male violence find safety; the rural collectives supporting isolated women; the migrant-women’s associations providing legal and psychological help; the organisations confronting digital abuse and defending access to reproductive healthcare — among many others. Each of these spaces forms part of the democratic fabric that sustains accountability, transparency, fairness and justice. When they are undermined or silenced, democracy itself is diminished.
MOTERIS is not a technical exercise but an explicitly political one. It is rooted in the conviction that women’s rights are universal, inalienable and indivisible. Our civic rights cannot be separated from our social realities or from the power dynamics shaping our private lives. Defending women’s civic space means affirming women’s full humanity — ensuring that what happens to us in our homes, workplaces and communities is recognised as a matter of democracy, not destiny.
MOTERIS builds on the feminist legacy of collective self-organising — the knowledge that women’s strength lies in solidarity, in creating spaces that allow us to act together and to speak in our own voice. In times when women’s rights are under renewed attack, defending our civic space is not only an act of resistance but a reaffirmation of democracy itself — a democracy that must have a sex, one that recognises women’s material reality, voices and collective power.