Although you wouldn't guess it from casting a look over the range of government-sponsored events and $40-a-head breakfasts with the local who's who to celebrate this year's International Women's Day, it is a day with very different origins.
The birth of IWD almost 100 years ago was closely intertwined with the swelling movement of working-class struggle for the socialist transformation of society. In fact, the idea for an international day of women's rallies and marches — inspired by the previous year's Woman's Day in the US — was proposed by German socialist Klara Zetkin at the Second International Conference of Working Women in 1910.
Russian Bolshevik and feminist Aleksandra Kollontai recounted in 1920: "The conference decided that every year, in every country, they should celebrate on the same day a 'Women's Day' under the slogan 'the vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism'."
The efforts of socialists to organise working women to struggle for their rights in the early years of the 20th century stood sharply counterposed to the work of feminists from the property-owning classes. The differences between these opposing wings of feminism were best reflected in the campaign for the right to vote.
The vast majority of unskilled workers men and women in England, France and Germany could not vote in the early 1900s. The suffrage movement in western Europe wasn't interested in fighting to give votes to either working-class women or men. They argued that only those with property should have the right to vote, and campaigned for a limited extension of suffrage to include propertied women.
Socialist feminists, on the other hand, campaigned for universal suffrage, seeing it as a means to strengthen the working-class movement as a whole and at the same time improve the position of women.
On February 28, 1909, women socialists in the United States organised huge demonstrations and meetings all over the country demanding political rights for working women. This was the first "Woman's Day". The emerging movement was given an enormous boost of confidence by a determined and courageous four-month strike by New York City's 20,000 shirtwaist (a woman's blouse styled like a man's shirt) workers, three-quarters of whom were women, from November 1909 until February 1910.
The International Ladies Garment Workers Union had a mere 1000 members before the strike began, but in first five days of the strike, 19,000 workers swamped the union's offices with requests to join.
Striking women, many of them in their teens, formed picket lines outside their workplaces, trying to convince the scabs to join them. The strikers were beaten and bruised by police and hired thugs. Public opinion swung strongly in favour of the women strikers.
The daily papers devoted whole columns to news of the workers' struggle, the magazines commented on it, meetings were held in women's colleges and in clubs to hear the story, and money was contributed in aid of the strikers. Thousands of socialist women gave their support to the strike, acting as clerks, organisers, speakers, pickets, watchers and solicitors for relief funds.
The strikers demanded an improvement in their miserable conditions, but also, and perhaps most importantly, recognition of their union. It was this last demand that the women's employers were most reluctant to concede to, but which the strikers eventually won.
The first IWD was held on March 19, 1911, the date chosen because of its historic importance in Germany. On March 19, 1848, a day after the outbreak of revolution in Berlin, the Prussian king had promised, among other things, votes for women — a promise which he failed to keep.
Kollontai noted in 1920 that the first IWD "succeeded all expectation. Germany and Austria on Working Women's Day was one seething, trembling sea of women. Meetings were organised everywhere — in the small towns and even in the villages halls were packed so full that they had to ask male workers to give up their places for the women."
She also noted that it was women workers protesting on IWD 1917 who triggered the revolution in Russia which gave rise to the soviets (councils) of workers' and soldiers' deputies that, under the Bolsheviks' leadership, took power later that year, establishing the first workers' state.
For more information on the 1909 shirtwaist workers strike visit the Women and Social Movements in the United States web site at .
Sarah Stephen
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 10, 2004.
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