Seventh congress of the World Federation of Ukrainian Women's Organizations held in Toronto (11/23/97)

Seventh congress of the World Federation of Ukrainian Women's Organizations held in Toronto

by Oksana Zakydalsky
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

TORONTO - A confederation of 22 Ukrainian women's organizations in nine countries, the World Federation of Ukrainian Women's Organization held its Congress in Toronto on October 22-26.

Fifteen of the organizations sent 59 delegates to the congress; there were also 62 registered guests. All of the nine countries - Canada, the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Poland, Argentina and Australia - were represented. Ukraine was not, as women's organizations from Ukraine do not belong to the federation.

The congress program consisted of organizational business as well as numerous panel discussions on topics such as the importance of language, the successes achieved by Ukrainian women at international gatherings, and the future - both of the diaspora and of women's organizations. It was noted by many present that gray was the hair color of the majority of the delegates at the congress.

Oksana Sokolyk was re-elected to head the federation for another five years.

The banquet, held on Saturday evening, drew about 300 guests. The guest speaker was the Valentyna Dovzhenko, Ukraine's newly appointed minister of family and youth. A former mayor of Ordzhonikidze, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ms. Dovzhenko had been plucked from the Union of Ukrainian Women, a mainstream women's organization, to replace Suzanna Stanik, who was named minister of justice.

In her speech, the minister painted a rather grim picture of the social consequences of the economic crisis in Ukraine: the fact that women are the primary victims of unemployment, the stress that the economic situation causes to the family unit, the deterioration of health care for women and children. She described, in general terms, some of the social programs that the government is developing to address these problems.

Although the banquet attracted a large number of guests who were not delegates, the organizers of the congress did not use this opportunity to publicize the work of the federation and a large part of the banquet program was taken up by the presentation of citations and certificates with almost no information was provided on the reasons they were being given.

Minister Dovzhenko was presented with a gift, a painting by the late artist Liudmyla Morozova who was identified only as a Ukrainian artist. Ms. Morozova, who died recently in the United States, was born in Kyiv, studied there at the Academy of Art under Vasyl Krychevsky, played a part in the documentation of the Sobor of St. Michael before it was destroyed by the Soviet government in 1935 (the book "The Lost Architecture of Kiev" acknowledges her contribution of rare photographs of the Sobor) and was buried in Kyiv - all details that would have been interesting information to pass on to the minister.

The results of the 26th Mary Beck Literary Contest were announced at the banquet. The topic had been "Let us pass on to our descendants our treasure: our language," and all the top prizes were won by submissions from Ukraine. This seemed to catch the organizers by surprise and there were one or two attempts to find humor in this situation ("we'll have to run a separate contest for the diaspora"), but this only underlined the fact that Ukrainian organizations' programs have not fully absorbed the fact of Ukraine's independence, in spite of the fact that the slogan of the congress was "In Strengthening the Diaspora, We Shall Strengthen Ukraine."

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