Socialist roots of International Women’s Day
The following edited excerpts come from an article that first appeared at workers.org on March 8, 2017.
International Women’s Day, traditionally held on March 8, began in 1908 as a day of action organized by socialist working women in the U.S. In 1907, German socialist Clara Zetkin organized an International Conference of Socialist Women where participants, including Russian Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, discussed ways to publicly support a struggle for women’s equality and liberation.
Socialist women in New York City acted on this discussion in 1908 by holding a mass meeting on women’s suffrage on March 8. Women workers also held a march of 15,000 women immigrant garment workers, organized by socialists, calling for an end to sweatshops, and child labor and for a shorter workday.
In 1910, Zetkin proposed an International Women’s Day at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen, and European socialists began to celebrate IWD in 1911. (Marian Sawer, “International Women’s Day,” Canberra Times, Feb. 17, 1997)
The focus of these efforts was not to establish a day of speeches and floral bouquets but rather to bring poor and working-class women and women of oppressed nationalities into the class struggle and support the liberation of these women, as well as that of their sons, husbands, brothers, fathers and comrades.
Kollontai described IWD as “a day of international solidarity in the fight for common objectives and a day for reviewing the organized strength of working women under the banner of socialism.” (“International Women’s Day,” Encyclopedia of Marxism, marxists.org)
The fiery power of working women in class struggle erupted on International Women’s Day in Russia in 1917 in an event that culminated in the first of two revolutions that year. In Petrograd, on Feb. 23 in the Gregorian calendar, now March 8, thousands of women needletrade workers walked out of their factories and marched through the streets, chanting their demand for “Peace, bread and land!”
As working-class men joined them, the crowd swelled to 90,000, and the spark of revolution lit that day led first to the overthrow of the czar and then to the class struggle that culminated eight months later, in the communist revolution in Russia.
Reviving IWD as a day of struggle
Spanish women demonstrated against the fascist forces of Gen. Francisco Franco to mark International Women’s Day in 1937. Italian women observed IWD in 1943 with militant protests against fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who sent their sons to die in World War II.
But in the U.S. during the Cold War witch hunts of the McCarthy era, IWD demonstrations in the streets ended. By the 1950s, IWD celebrations were mainly small, indoor commemorative meetings.
Yet by the 1960s, a revolutionary wind was blowing new force into the struggle against women’s oppression. Many women of all nationalities were increasingly inspired by the power of a people’s fight — the Black Civil Rights and anti-war movements, La Raza and the American Indian Movement.
The women’s liberation movement emerged out of the confluence of these great mass movements. And many women began to study Marxism and communist history, inspired in part by Mao Zedong’s statement that, “Women hold up half the sky,” as exemplified by Vietnamese women armed and fighting in a communist-led war for national liberation.
In 1968, socialist Laura X wrote an article calling for a renewal of IWD after watching Pudovkin’s 1929 Soviet film “The End of St. Petersburg,” which highlighted the 1917 women workers’ demonstration on IWD. In 1969 she joined with members of Berkeley Women’s Liberation to organize an IWD street demonstration, which she believed to be the first in the U.S. since 1947.
In 1970, 30 events took place worldwide on International Women’s Day.
The 1970 Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF) revival celebrating IWD as a militant day of struggle in the streets was followed by biweekly meetings of the Women’s Caucus. YAWF women combined theory with practice. They read and discussed Dorothy Ballan’s “Feminism and Marxism” based on Frederick Engels’ “The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.” And they studied works by Zetkin, Kollontai and V.I. Lenin that chronicled the revolutionary communist approach to women’s oppression and struggle for liberation.
Today, the importance of that 1970 rally and the march to the Women’s House of Detention blazes out from the past. With that event, the YAWF Women’s Caucus, a division of Workers World Party, re-ignited the celebration of International Women’s Day in the streets of New York City as part of the militant, communist tradition.
Remembering the fighting spirit of that day, Deirdre Griswold, a founding member of Workers World Party, explained how its lessons are crucial in today’s struggles: “Economic pressures today in the U.S. are forcing more and more women into the army or into prison.
“They need an alternative — a multinational, international movement against women’s oppression that is part of a worldwide struggle against imperialism and war.”
