How International Women's Day began
By Sue
Davis
New York
International Women's Day, March 8, was born in struggle.
On that day in 1908 hundreds of working and poor women,
mostly East European immigrants, surged out of needle-trade
sweatshops and tenements on New York's Lower East Side and
marched defiantly to Union Square, where they held a militant
rally.
The women marched under the suffragist banner of "Votes
for Women," but their demands for higher wages and better
working conditions also struck a blow against capitalism.
Their speeches denouncing the bosses, the landlords, the
bankers, and all who oppressed them showed extraordinary
revolutionary working-class consciousness.
That hundreds of working women dared to voice demands for
a better life for themselves and their families made
headlines. When news of it was telegraphed to Europe, German
socialist Clara Zetkin saw it as the sign of the
working-class women's movement she had been waiting for since
she first raised the demand for equal rights for women within
the socialist movement in 1889.
Finally, in 1910, under Zetkin's leadership and with the
support of Rosa Luxemburg and the Russians Alexandra
Kollantai and V.I. Lenin, the Second International Conference
of Socialists in Copenhagen declared March 8 to be
International Women's Day.
IWD's legacy becomes
reality in 1917
IWD symbolized the struggle for a thorough-going
emancipation of women--from capitalist exploitation,
centuries-old patriarchal domination, and all forms of
oppression and inequality.
So widespread was the revolutionary spirit of IWD that on
that day in 1917, in the midst of World War I, thousands of
women in the needle-trades industry in St. Petersburg,
Russia, spontaneously walked out on strike. They marched
through the streets demanding "peace, bread, and land." Their
working-class brothers joined them, and the protest swelled
to 90,000.
That strike--initiated by women workers on International
Women's Day--was the first blow of the Russian Revolution,
which established the first workers' state only eight months
later. For years after that, socialist and other
class-conscious women--from Shanghai to Johannesburg to
Berlin to Mexico City to Milwaukee--commemorated IWD as a day
of militant protest.
1970: Reviving IWD in the U.S.
In the United States in the 1950s, vicious Cold War
repression and an anti-communist witchhunt undermined this
struggle tradition. Though groups like Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom tried to keep the IWD spirit
alive, the day was no longer the torch of freedom for women
it once had been.
But by 1970, following the successes of the civil rights
movement and the groundswell of the anti-war movement, a new
revolutionary era was afoot. Many young veterans of those
struggles had also begun rebelling against their second-class
status as women.
They were furious about being paid half of what men made,
about being segregated in "women's jobs," about the sexual
double standard, about illegal abortion and the oppression of
lesbians, about the silence protecting incest and domestic
violence, and about being measured against Caucasian
beauty-queen standards.
And they were inspired by outspoken African American
activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and by courageous Vietnamese
women fighting on the front lines against U.S.
imperialism.
Though many who initiated the Women's Liberation Movement
labeled men as the enemy, others identified the system of
capitalism--where women are viewed as the private property of
men and treated accordingly--as the source of women's
oppression.
These young socialists were excited when they discovered
the history and tradition of International Women's Day.
In 1970, the young women of Youth Against War and Fascism,
the activist arm of Workers World Party, decided to
reactivate the militant tradition of IWD by holding a rally
in Union Square.
The March 7 rally attracted 1,000 women and some male
supporters to the first organized outpouring of the new
women's liberation movement on IWD.
'Solidarity with our
most oppressed sisters'
At the end of the rally, YAWF national coordinator Maryann
Nagro Weissman appealed to the crowd to march to the Women's
House of Detention, then only blocks away in Greenwich
Village, "in solidarity with our most oppressed sisters." The
crowd roared its approval. Nagro Weissman had just served
time in jail for contempt of court during the New York
Panther 21 trial.
At the House of D the demonstrators took over the street
and saluted the women inside with raised fists. In the months
to come, they would return many times to the House of D when
Angela Davis and other revolutionary women were imprisoned
there.
The militant tradition of IWD that YAWF Women revived soon
spawned a bill declaring March Women's History Month. And
over the 30 years since 1970, many big business politicians,
organizations and even corporations have tried to divert,
dilute, sanitize and co-opt the revolutionary message and
promise of March 8. But they have not succeeded. Nor can
they.
Because the clarion call of IWD--for the complete and
total liberation of all women--rings in revolutionary women
everywhere.
As Workers World founder Dorothy Ballan wrote in "Feminism
and Marxism" in 1971, "There is a virtual revolution going on
in the minds of women. It is a harbinger of the general
socialist revolution and at the same time is an indispensable
ingredient for its success."
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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