International Women’s Day has been a part of my life since I was little. With the increasing threat of fascism, my parents emigrated from Germany to the Soviet Union in 1929 where they lived for about two years until, they left under the threat of Stalin’s purges. Eventually, they were able to immigrate to the United States. While other children grew up with the ten plagues or Christmas carols, I grew up with songs of the proletarian revolution. The following history of International Women’s Day is my personal account -- in part from histories I have read, but in part from stories my parents told me about the radical socialist/anarchist movements they participated in at the turn of the 20th century, and, in part, my own experiences as a socialist and feminist.
The roots of International Women’s Day goes back to the later part of the 19th century as women began to enter the industrial workforce in large numbers. All over the industrialized world, women began to fight for their right to work, for decent working and living condition,for the right to vote and the right to control their own reproduction. The entrance of women workers into the struggles in the left took different forms but with some of the same issues.
For example, in Austria in the 1870s, where Clara Zetkin, a radical socialist was very active, there was a struggle over whether the socialist left should support all women’s right to vote (including bourgeois women) while fighting for the right of men who did not hold property to vote. The same discussion was going on in the bourgeois women’s movement in reverse. Should women fight for just their own right to vote or should they include the right of all people including men who did not own property to vote? In the end, the Austrian working class women, decided to work with the socialist workers’ movement in supporting the right of all working class people, including women, to vote instead of working with the bourgeois feminist movement.
In the United States, since men with out property had gained the right to vote forty years earlier, the struggle took a somewhat different turn – should the anti-slavery movement fight just for the economic and political rights of African Americans and other excluded people of color or should they include women as a group. They chose not to specifically support the rights of women in their struggle. The American bourgeois women’s movement also decided to center their fight on the right of women to vote and did not raise the issue of enforcing the social and economic rights of African Americans and other excluded people of color.
Meanwhile, in New York City, the industrial garment center of the world, working women were playing a major role in organizing women and workers. In 1908 the International Ladies Garment Workers organized a march of 15,000 women in New York City, under the leadership of the Women’s Trade Union League (who simultaneously organized large rallies calling for women’s economic and political rights). In 1909, the Socialist Party of America called for the first National Women’s Day at the end of February which was the catalyst for a three week strike of 20,000 women demanding better wages and working conditions.
Throughout the early period of women worker’s struggles in America, the most well-known advocate for both workers and women’s rights was the Russian immigrant, Emma Goldman (“Red” Emma). She was actively engaged in the struggles as early as the financial panic of 1893. In a speech in New York City’s Famous Union Square, she was arrested and imprisoned for a year for telling workers that if they needed bread, they had the right to take it. At a much later rally in Union Square in 1916, she was back at the podium addressing women workers on the importance of birth control (which was not legal at the time).
Back in Europe the Second International Women’s Conference was called in 1910. The conference was a part of the 2nd International and was composed of socialist groups, unions, and working women’s clubs. Inspired by the movement among working class women in America, Clara Zetkin, who was now head of the German Social Democratic Women’s Department, felt a recognized Women's day would be a perfect opportunity to integrate the struggles of women and the socialist movement. She called for every country to hold a Women’s Day on the same day to fight for women’s rights and International Women’s Day was born. The next year, 1911 the first International Women’s Day was celebrated in several European countries including Austria, Switzerland Germany and Denmark.
Two further events have strengthened the importance of International Women’s Day over the years. The first was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on March 25, 1911 on the lower eastside of New York City. When the sweatshop caught fire, 140 mostly women and children were burned alive, because the owners had locked them in the factory. This event became a symbol for the need for working class women’s rights and the icon for International Women’s Day. The second was The Russian Women’s Strike at the end of World War I to protest the loss of 2 million soldiers (their sons). It began on the last Sunday in February in honor of International Women’s Day (using the earlier date established in the U.S.). In spite of opposition from political leaders, the women continued the strike for four days. Thousands of Russian women came out demanding “Bread and Peace.” This was the catalyst for the Russian revolution. The Czar was forced to abdicate four days later and women were given the right to vote.
International Women’s Day has ebbed and wained and changed its character throughout the years. Many countries used the Russian March 8th date to commemorate IWD (March 8th, translated from the Julian date of February 23rd to its equivalent in the Gregorian calendar). Other countries such as Australia used March 25th, the date of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, although eventually most countries settled on March 8th. The tenor and the tone of the holiday also changed over the years in different places. The holiday is traditionally celebrated with large marches by millions of women all over the world from Mexico to China. The celebration in the United States, however, became almost nonexistent during the cold war as it was viewed as a socialist holiday.
During the women’s movement in the United States in the 1970s and 80s, women resurrected the holiday and in 1975 it was given the blessing of the United Nations. When the women’s movement re-instituted the holiday in the United States, it more often focused on specific women’s rights (i.e. reproductive rights) but often at the expense of focusing on issues that would traditionally be the domain of working class women or women of color (i.e., racism, women in sweatshops, etc). They were criticized rightly for being bourgeois.
In most countries, however, it has been celebrated as a holiday in which women came out to support the traditional left, focusing on the peace or the workers' movements and how prominent women participated in those movements. They no longer focused on issues which were more specific to women such as daycare, women’s voting rights, contraception, feeding one’s families, the destruction of civil society during wars. (Though to be fair, they sometimes asked the men to do the childcare on IWD).
Since the beginning there has been a tendency to write women’s issues out of International Women’s Day and focus on neutral socialist issues that would not threaten men. This can be seen as early as the 1920s in Russia. Alexandra Kollantai, a noted woman’s advocate, was replaced on the Russian Women’s Section of the Central Committee by Sofia Smidovich, a woman who was not a strong advocate of women’s rights.
In her book, “Love Among the Worker Bees”, a thinly disguised story of her own experience, Kollantai outlines the fate of “feminist” women. The main character finds that her husband does not support her work on women’s rights. When the New Economic Program begins under Stalin and the revolutionary leadership returns to a more traditional approach to capitalism and women’s role – i.e., free love, abortions and homosexuality are once again outlawed and the traditional patriarchal family is reinstated as the ideal – her husband leaves her for a bourgeois woman and she is cast out. She ends up trying to set up daycare collectives. In real life, when Kollanti fell out of favor, she ended up exiled to a minor government role in Norway.
Many other strong socialist women have suffered similar fates – Agnes Smedley , the only foreign-born revolutionary to have a statue in her name in China, grieves over the treatment of women in her book “Woman Alone.” While her theories are widely read, Rosa Luxemburg, was in an abusive personal relationship.
Why do I end this piece with a criticism instead of a celebration? Am I a spoil sport? A spoiler? I can hear some socialist men and more than a few socialist women ask this question. I prefer to think of myself as a woman and a socialist who is fighting the good fight in the tradition of my foremothers.
Until all working class men are fighting with women instead of against them for workplace rights, until women everywhere under any circumstances don’t have to worry about being raped, until women have adequate resources and support to raise and protect their children, until we end the wars that erode these resources and make all people vulnerable, until women, men and any combination thereof can enjoy the same sexual freedoms, until women do not have to worry about dying in childbirth or getting adequate childcare, until the availability of AIDS medications, birth control and abortions are available to all (have I left anything out?), I will continue to raise my voice to demand the integration of women rights into the socialist project so all workers can have the kind of revolution we want. So to Clara, Alexandra, Agnes, Emma and all the rest of us, Happy International Women’s Day!