The International Women’s Day celebrated on the 8th of March undoubtedly originates in the International Working Women’s Day. According to the most popular version of the story, Women’s Day is the 8th of March because on this day year 1857, female garment workers in New York organized a huge protest against poor working conditions; and the rally in 1907 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of this event gave the apropos to institutionalize the event as a holiday.
American Historian Temma Kaplan argues that neither of the aforementioned events seem to have taken place. The significance of these events lies in the fact that many Europeans view them as antecedents of International Women’s Day. Liliane Kandel and Françoise Picq, scholars of the history of feminism go further, suggesting that this myth was deliberately constructed in order to ascribe an actually international history to this Soviet holiday.
Here we arrive at another possible origin of Women’s Day, namely the women’s strike for “Bread and Peace” in Saint Petersburg on the last Sunday in February 1917 (March 8 on the Gregorian calendar). Protesters demanded the end to the First World War and an end to food shortages. Being the first visible mass demonstration of the February Revolution, it's no wonder that Women’s Day became widely associated with Leftist revolutionary movements. There are yet more reasons for this association, since it was the Second International's decision to establish an international women’s day as part of the struggle for female suffrage in 1910. Interestingly, the first actually international woman’s day influenced by this decision was celebrated on the 19th of March in 1911 in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark, by over one million people demanding the right to hold public offices for women and honoring the martyrs of the Paris Commune.
No wonder the 8th of March due to its significance in the 1917 revolution became a very much honored holiday in the Soviet Union. In other countries of Eastern Europe, Women’s Day as a compulsory holiday was imported only after the Second World War as a corollary to the Communist system. As a consequence, since the fall of Communism, there were successful efforts to deprive this day from the political flavor and connotations. Women’s Day for our generation is merely a general celebration of appreciation towards women, repeating the occasion offered by Valentine’s Day to generate nice income to flower shops. Such days are nice, but I believe the reason why Women’s Day does not raise much interest, but rather slight annoyance and boredom from men is precisely that it is deprived from the very essence that made it interesting: a celebration of women’s economic, political and social equality, which are still not outdated issues.
Agnes Kelemen, Hungary, NATI
Nationalism Studies
Image: www.aauw.org
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