International Womens Day
<p>In August 1910, at a conference of socialist women in Copenhagen, a German activist named Clara Zetkin stood up and proposed that there should be a day, every year, dedicated to working women and their demands. She did not suggest a date. The delegates, more than a hundred of them from seventeen countries, agreed unanimously. That casual omission of a fixed date is one of the more curious facts about International Women’s Day: the day we now mark firmly on 8 March was, for its first years, a movable feast, and the reason it eventually settled on that date has more to do with a Russian winter than with any committee decision.</p>
<p>International Women’s Day, marked on 8 March, celebrates the achievements of women and presses the case for equality, but its character is unusually political because its origins were unusually political. It did not begin as a greeting-card occasion. It began on the picket line.</p>
<h2 id="a-day-born-in-the-labour-movement">A day born in the labour movement</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The earliest ancestor of the day was American. On 28 February 1909 the Socialist Party of America held a “Woman’s Day” in New York, deliberately scheduled for a Sunday so that working women could actually attend. It united two causes that had often pulled in different directions, women’s suffrage and the rights of labour, and it was Clara Zetkin who carried that idea across the Atlantic and made it international.</p>
<p>The Copenhagen proposal of 1910 turned a national event into a global one in principle, and 1911 made it real. The first International Women’s Day was observed on 19 March 1911 in Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. The turnout was enormous: over a million people took part, and in Vienna women paraded along the Ringstrasse carrying banners that honoured the martyrs of the Paris Commune. The demands were specific and unromantic: the vote, the right to hold office, an end to discrimination at work.</p>
<h2 id="how-8-march-became-the-date">How 8 March became the date</h2>
<p>For several years the day wandered around the calendar, held on different dates in different countries. What fixed it was the Russian Revolution. On 8 March 1917, by the Western calendar then catching on, women textile workers in Petrograd marched for “bread and peace”, and their protest helped trigger the February Revolution that toppled the Tsar. The date, 8 March in the new reckoning and 23 February in the old Russian one, became charged with meaning.</p>
<p>In 1922 Lenin formally declared 8 March International Women’s Day in the Soviet Union, cementing the connection between the date and the events of 1917. From there the date hardened into the standard one elsewhere too. The final piece of the story is institutional rather than revolutionary: the United Nations began observing International Women’s Day in 1975, which it had designated International Women’s Year, and in 1977 the General Assembly invited member states to proclaim a day for women’s rights, giving 8 March its current official standing.</p>
<h2 id="the-people-behind-it">The people behind it</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Clara Zetkin is rightly remembered as the architect of the day, but she was part of a wider circle of formidable women. Among them was Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary theorist and her close ally, and Alexandra Kollontai, who helped organise the day in Russia and later became one of the world’s first female ambassadors. Käte Duncker, a fellow German socialist, is among those credited alongside Zetkin in the original Copenhagen proposal.</p>
<p>These were not figureheads. They were organisers, writers and agitators who treated the day as a tool rather than a tribute, a recurring occasion on which to make demands that the rest of the year tended to ignore. That practical, campaigning spirit is the part of the day’s inheritance most easily lost when it is reduced to flowers and slogans.</p>
<h2 id="why-it-still-matters">Why it still matters</h2>
<p>The case for keeping the day is not that the original battles were won and can now be celebrated, but that they were only partly won. The vote was secured in most of Europe and North America within a generation of those first marches, yet the questions the marchers raised about pay, representation and basic safety remain stubbornly open. International Women’s Day works best when it holds those two facts together: real progress, and unfinished business.</p>
<p>That dual nature is also what makes it resistant to becoming bland. The day is at once a celebration and a complaint, and serious campaigners have long been wary of letting the first crowd out the second. The annual themes that the United Nations and other bodies attach to the day, focused on matters such as women in science, economic empowerment or violence against women, are a way of keeping a concrete demand attached to the celebration.</p>
<h2 id="a-festival-in-some-places-a-protest-in-others">A festival in some places, a protest in others</h2>
<p>How the day is observed depends sharply on where you are. In Russia and many former Soviet states, and in parts of Italy, 8 March has long had a warm, almost festive quality, with flowers, gifts and the giving of mimosa to women as a token of respect. In other countries the emphasis stays firmly on activism, with marches, strikes and demonstrations demanding equal treatment, and in some places, notably across Latin America in recent years, the day has been the occasion for very large protests.</p>
<p>Between these poles, organisations everywhere hold conferences, panels and award ceremonies recognising women in science, the arts, business and public service, while schools and workplaces arrange talks. The same date, then, can be a public holiday with a bunch of mimosa in one country and a general strike in another, and both are faithful to its origins.</p>
<h2 id="the-tension-between-celebration-and-commerce">The tension between celebration and commerce</h2>
<p>A more recent complication is the day’s entanglement with marketing. As International Women’s Day grew into one of the most recognised dates on the global calendar, companies began to attach themselves to it, with campaigns, special products and carefully worded statements of support. Critics have coined a term, often rendered as “purple-washing”, for the practice of celebrating women on 8 March while doing little about pay gaps or representation on the other 364 days. The annual ritual of organisations posting supportive messages has invited the obvious retort: how do they pay their female staff?</p>
<p>This friction is, in a sense, the modern version of the old tension between celebration and demand. The founders worried that the festive strand might crowd out the political one; the contemporary worry is that the commercial strand might do the same. Campaigners have responded by pressing for accountability over slogans, asking organisations to publish their pay figures and their progress rather than simply changing a logo for a day. The argument, as ever, is that the day should cost the people invoking it something more than a graphic, and that a sincere observance is measured in policy rather than in posts.</p>
<h2 id="colours-flowers-and-symbols">Colours, flowers and symbols</h2>
<p>The day has accumulated a small set of recognisable symbols. Purple is its dominant colour, associated with dignity and justice, and it is often joined by green and white, a palette drawn from the British suffrage movement. The mimosa, with its bright yellow blossom appearing in early spring, became the Italian symbol of the day in the 1940s, chosen partly because it was cheap and plentiful at that time of year and so available to working women as much as to anyone.</p>
<p>This pairing of the day with women’s wider civic standing connects it to other dates in the same tradition. It shares its democratic ambitions with <a href="/specialdate/women-s-equality-day/">Women’s Equality Day</a>, which marks the winning of the vote in the United States, and its insistence on opening closed professions echoes through the <a href="/specialdate/international-day-of-women-and-girls-in-science/">International Day of Women and Girls in Science</a>, where the same argument about representation is made in a single field.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The very first International Women’s Day was held on 19 March, not 8 March; the modern date was only fixed years later because of the 1917 protest in Petrograd.</li>
<li>When Clara Zetkin proposed the day in Copenhagen in 1910, she deliberately left it without a date, leaving each country to decide for itself.</li>
<li>In the Soviet Union 8 March eventually became a public holiday, and in modern Russia it remains one, complete with flower-buying that rivals any other gift-giving day.</li>
<li>The mimosa became the day’s Italian emblem largely for a practical reason: it blooms in early March and was inexpensive enough for everyone to give.</li>
<li>The United Nations did not adopt the day until 1975, more than six decades after women first marched under its banner.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>What is striking about International Women’s Day is how little its founders would recognise of its gentler modern incarnations, and how much they would recognise of its sharper ones. A day that began as a socialist tool for demanding the vote has become, in places, an occasion for chocolates and compliments. Neither version is wrong, exactly, but the tension between them is worth keeping alive. A celebration that forgets it was once a protest has misremembered its own birthday.</p>
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