The history of International

By Abigail Blonigen

International Women’s Day is celebrated across the world on March 8. But how did this day come to be? And why has it seen a recent resurgence in popularity?

According to the International Women’s Day website, the impetus for IWD was in 1908 when thousands of women took to the streets in New York City advocating for better working conditions and voting rights.

The next year, the Socialist Party of America declared the last Sunday in February as National Woman’s Day, and it was celebrated across the U.S. until roughly 1913.

Women were also uniting across the pond, and in 1910 German socialist Clara Zetkin proposed an annual global day of celebration and protest at the International Conference of Working Women. Over 100 women from 17 countries attending the event agreed to the holiday unanimously.

A staunch Marxist, Zetkin believed that ending the oppression of women and workers could only happen through a class revolution and the deconstruction of capitalism. According to the Encyclopedia of World Biography, much of her career was centered around working mothers and women’s suffrage.

On March 19, 1911, the first official International Women’s Day drew over a million people to events, celebrations and protests worldwide, particularly in Europe, according to HISTORY (better known as the History Channel).

That year also saw the beginning of the “bread and roses” campaign, popularized by Helen Todd, a factory inspector and suffragette. She wrote in an essay “Getting Out the Vote: An Account Of a Week’s Automobile Campaign by Women Suffragists” in a 1911 publication of The American Magazine:

“Not at once; but woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life’s Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.”

The “bread and roses” slogan became popular in the Labor Movement, most famously the 1912 Lawrence textile strike. Following a Massachusetts law reducing the workweek for women and children from 56 to 54 hours, the Everett Textile Mill cut weekly pay, igniting strikes across the city and a ripple effect throughout the region, according to HISTORY.

The International Women’s Day movement was entwined with labor rights as much as it was entwined with the fight for peace.

In 1917, Russian women began a strike for “bread and peace,” according to the IWD website, calling for an end to World War I. The war had killed millions of Russian soldiers, caused substantial food shortages, and exacerbated issues faced by women and workers.

According to Suyin Haynes of TIME, these protests led Czar Nicholas to renounce his throne, and a few months later women were granted the right to vote in Russia. Britain followed suit a year later, and the United States in 1920.