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THE RADICAL HISTORY OF INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY  
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Catherine Caruso
March 8, 2024
Bucks County Beacon
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_ As the holiday has become mainstream, University of Pennsylvania
Professor Kristen R. Ghodsee says #IWD has grown further away from its
“socialist roots” and has “lost any association with its radical
past.” _

Poster for Women's Day, March 8, 1914, demanding voting rights for
women., Karl Maria Stadler (1888 – nach 1943), Public domain, via
Wikimedia Commons

 

International Women’s Day is widely recognized today as a global
celebration of women’s rights and achievements, but the origins of
the holiday are actually much more radical and nuanced. In fact, the
concept was born as both a labor movement and a push for women’s
suffrage. The idea of a day celebrating women was first conceived
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New York socialists in 1909 as a way to champion women’s rights and
commemorate the city’s garment workers’ strike. On February 28,
the first National Woman’s Day was observed, with celebrations in
both Brooklyn and Manhattan. At the Brooklyn labor meeting, novelist
Charlotte Perkins Gilman said, “It is true that a woman’s duty is
centered in her home and motherhood, [but] home should mean the whole
country and not be confined to three or four rooms or a city or a
state.” 

READ: Backlash: Women’s History Month in a Post-Roe World
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It wasn’t until the following year, however, that the concept of a
“woman’s day” become prominent across Europe. At the Second
International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen in 1910,
Clara Zetkin, a German socialist and women’s activist, proposed a
holiday recognizing the role of women in the international socialist
movement. Zetkin was a staunch opponent of “bourgeouis feminism
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which she said focused more on gender than class. According to Kristen
R. Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and Eastern European studies at the
University of Pennsylvania, the word feminism “was associated with
bourgeois women in England who were trying to get the right to vote
and own property and didn’t really care about women in the working
class.” 

To kick off #womenhistorymonth
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@cmychalejko [[link removed]]
speaks w/@lfeatherz
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International Women's Day (March 8) & the Feminist Movement's radical
history for The Signal's 3rd episode. Liza is a columnist @jacobin
[[link removed]] @TheNewRepublic
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contributing writer @thenation
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— BucksCountyBeacon (@BucksCoBeacon) March 1, 2023
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During the conference, the resolution to celebrate an annual women’s
day was passed, declaring
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“socialist women of all nationalities have to organize a special
Women’s Day, which must, above all, promote the propaganda of female
suffrage” in accordance with the class-conscious, socialist
conception. The following year, Germany, Austria, Denmark, and
Switzerland celebrated
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Women’s Day, with more than 1 million people attending rallies and
marches in honor of the new holiday. “It was very much associated at
that time with European social democracy and democratic socialist
parties,” Ghodsee told the Bucks County Beacon. 

In the years that followed, the holiday was used to protest various
causes impacting working women and even became an important day
for pacifist and anti-war activism
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World War I. But International Women’s Day wasn’t actually
celebrated on March 8 until 1917, when women threw massive protests
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Russia. “Women, for Women’s Day, went out in the street and
basically started protesting against the czar and against World War I,
and they were specifically asking for better rations for veterans
coming back from the war and higher disability pensions for men who
had been maimed in the war or for widows and orphans of men who had
died,”Ghodsee said. “That event, which is often called the
February Revolution, is what led to the abdication of the czar and
eventually to Russia’s withdrawal from World War I.” 

The 8-day demonstration is known as the February Revolution
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Czarist Russia followed the Julian calendar at the time, which is 13
days behind the more popular Gregorian calendar, making International
Women’s Day February 23 in Russia and March 8 in the West. This date
was finalized
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1921 at the International Communist Women’s Congress, which was
chaired by Zetkin, and has remained the same ever since. More than 50
years later, in 1975, the United Nations officially recognized
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as International Women’s Day and observed the holiday as a
celebration of women’s achievements. 

As the holiday has become mainstream, however, Ghodsee says it has
grown further away from its “socialist roots,” adding that while
it is now celebrated all over the world, International Women’s Day
has “lost any association with its radical past.” 

On this week's episode of The Signal, Editor @cmychalejko
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Radical Independent Media, Feminist Struggles, and International
Women's Day: A View from Latin America, with @OjalaEditorial
[[link removed]]'s Dawn Paley.
#IWD2024
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#WomensDay
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[link removed] pic.twitter.com/y5iLnRJi0V
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— BucksCountyBeacon (@BucksCoBeacon) March 7, 2024
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If the holiday were to be celebrated as it was intended, she notes,
“it would be a day where we actually talked about issues that are
still affecting women,” including the overturning of Roe v. Wade,
Alabama’s IVF ruling, sexual harassment, the gender pay gap, and the
lack of paid parental leave. “There are lots of issues that women
still face in our country and March 8 could be a day where we raise
awareness about those issues,” Ghodsee added.

CATHERINE CARUSO is a Pennsylvania-based freelance writer with a focus
on culture, politics, education, and LGBTQ rights.

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