STRIKE March 8, 2017-- A Day Without A Woman

[Heaven Swan]

https://www.womensmarch.com/womensday/

A DAY WITHOUT A WOMAN

On International Women's Day, March 8th, women and our allies will act together for equity, justice and the human rights of women, through a one-day demonstration of economic solidarity.

The Women's March supports the feminists of color and grassroots groups organizing the International Women’s Strike on International Women's Day,


March 8th, 2017. In the same spirit of love and liberation that inspired the Women's March, together we will mark the day by recognizing the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socio-economic system--while receiving lower wages and experiencing greater inequities, vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment, and job insecurity.

Anyone, anywhere, can join by making March 8th A Day Without a Woman, in one or all of the following ways:

1) Women take the day off, from paid and unpaid labor

2) Avoid shopping for one day (with exceptions for small, women- and minority-owned businesses).

3) Wear RED in solidarity with A Day Without A Woman

The Women's March celebrates the labor the International Women's Strike organizers and others in planning global actions. We are also inspired by recent courageous actions like the "Bodega strike" lead by Yemeni immigrant store owners in New York City and the Day Without Immigrants across the U.S. We applaud the efforts of #GrabYourWallet and others to bring public accountability to unethical corporate practices. As we mark A Day Without a Woman, we do so in support and solidarity of these and all efforts for equity, justice and human rights.

When millions of us stood together in January, we saw clearly that our army of love greatly outnumbers that of fear, greed and hatred. Let's raise our voices together again, to say that women’s rights are human rights, regardless of a woman’s race, ethnicity, religion, immigration status, sexual identity, gender expression, economic status, age or disability.



Recognizing the multiple, intersecting identities of women, we support and admire these efforts:
#DivestDAPL
#GrabYourWallet

CLICK LINK for some graphics you can share as you partake in these actions!
https://www.womensmarch.com/womensday/

[Cordelia]

Wondering how many women employed by this company will join in .

[KUAN]

All Power To The Women!

Protest Shortcuts
From sex bans to banished brews – the most effective boycotts ever

https://www.theguardian.com/world/short ... ote-tallow

Looks like the Guardian hasn't heard about 'A Day Without A Woman'

Synchronicity perhaps?

[liminalOyster]

How do others feel about this? I'm sure I pretty much support all of this action's goals and there are some figures I admire alot on the board and the advisory councils. But I have some hesitation over any program that ( in the first instance at least) seems to frame being-woman as a discrete class rather than one metric/aspect among many that shape one's class. Also, I haven't read it yet but am enthused about Jessa Crispin's book Why I Am Not a Feminist (spoiler: she is). From the looks of it, she does some good work to parse these kinds of concerns out, best I can tell so far ...

[Luther Blissett]

I did some childcare for the first local planning meeting of it here…I think ours is a little different and had been brought up before the big national initiative made headlines. It's definitely being driven by the more grassroots groups with women of color or poor people: REAL Justice, black lives matter, new sanctuary, solidarity, etc. Liberal groups who wanted to seek permits couldn't build consensus for it.

[American Dream]

It may be better than you're thinking it is- at least for certain tendencies:

Beyond Lean-In: For a Feminism of the 99% and a Militant International Strike on March 8

Linda Martín Alcoff, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, Nancy Fraser, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Rasmea Yousef Odeh February 3, 2017



The massive women’s marches of January 21st may mark the beginning of a new wave of militant feminist struggle. But what exactly will be its focus? In our view, it is not enough to oppose Trump and his aggressively misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and racist policies; we also need to target the ongoing neoliberal attack on social provision and labor rights. While Trump’s blatant misogyny was the immediate trigger for the massive response on January 21st, the attack on women (and all working people) long predates his administration. Women’s conditions of life, especially those of women of color and of working, unemployed and migrant women, have steadily deteriorated over the last 30 years, thanks to financialization and corporate globalization. Lean-in feminism and other variants of corporate feminism have failed the overwhelming majority of us, who do not have access to individual self-promotion and advancement and whose conditions of life can be improved only through policies that defend social reproduction, secure reproductive justice, and guarantee labor rights. As we see it, the new wave of women’s mobilization must address all these concerns in a frontal way. It must be a feminism for the 99%.

The kind of feminism we seek is already emerging internationally, in struggles across the globe: from the women’s strike in Poland against the abortion ban to the women’s strikes and marches in Latin America against male violence; from the massive women’s demonstration of the last November in Italy to the protests and the women’s strike in defense of reproductive rights in South Korea and Ireland. What is striking about these mobilizations is that several of them combined struggles against male violence with opposition to the casualization of labor and wage inequality, while also opposing homophobia, transphobia and xenophobic immigration policies. Together, they herald a new international feminist movement with an expanded agenda–at once anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-heterosexist, and anti-neoliberal.

We want to contribute to the development of this new, more expansive feminist movement.


Linda Martín Alcoff is a professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. She is currently at work on a new book on sexual violence, and another on decolonizing epistemology.

Cinzia Arruzza is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a feminist and socialist activist. She is the author of the author of Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism.

Tithi Bhattacharya teaches history at Purdue University. Her first book, The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (Oxford, 2005), is about the obsession with culture and education in the middle class. Her work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Asian Studies, South Asia Research and New Left Review, and she is currently working on a book project entitled Uncanny Histories: Fear, Superstition and Reason in Colonial Bengal.

Nancy Fraser Nancy Fraser is Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. Her books include Redistribution or Recognition and Fortunes of Feminism.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an assistant professor in Princeton University's Center for African American Studies and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

Rasmea Yousef Odeh is the associate director of the Arab American Action Network, leader of that group's Arab Women's Committee, and a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

How Was the March 8 International Women’s Strike Woven Together?

Ni Una Menos Collective February 16, 2017

The Women’s March in the United States on January 21 is part of a cycle that demonstrates a new form of feminism: the overlapping movements of women, trans people, and migrants refuse to remain subjected to the empire of new forms of capitalist exploitation.

[American Dream]

“We’re Many and Growing At a Global Level” – an Interview with the Strike4Repeal Campaign



As International Women’s day approaches calls for a global women’s strike echo through headlines and social media. Rights that we fought hard to win and considered unassailable seem to be up for discussion. Actions will be taking place in over thirty countries so far; women across the globe are mobilising to take direct action and to go on the offensive against the stark gendered disparities that remain intrinsic in every aspect of existence. Whilst all taking place on the same day, national focus of these actions vary, with strikes targeting – among other things – high rates of sexual violence, outdated abortion laws, and the misogyny of the President of the United States. We have seen worldwide assaults on reproductive justice- including bans, penalties, fines, and even, almost unbelievably, a new law in Arkansas which would give rapists license to sue their victims should they seek an abortion. In the last few months campaigns fighting for women’s rights, and in many places reproductive justice, have been growing in both number and popularity. Over 40 million people participated in the recent Global Women’s marches, Argentinians made headlines worldwide with their cries of ‘Not One Less’ and in Poland over a hundred thousand people took to the streets in a strike that stopped the government in its tracks in its attempts to ban abortions.

On March 8th the Irish campaign group Strike 4 Repeal have called for a national strike in defiance of the government’s draconian anti-abortion laws. They are demanding a referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits abortion except in the case of a woman’s life being endangered. This is in stark contrast with Ireland’s stance on other forms of reproductive, sexual, and gender based justice; same sex marriage is legal and it is one of the only western countries where it is not complicated to change your gender identity; yet every day women are forced to travel overseas in order to access safe abortions. The majority come to the UK, supported by organisations like the Abortion Support Network, but even this far from ideal option is under attack as Britain’s largest abortion provider, Marie Stopes, announced at the start of this month that they would be turning away Irish women after struggling to meet high demands for their services.

Access to abortion is both necessary and urgent, unsafe alternatives abound and women have died after being refused termination. It is inconceivable that, in terms of abortion law, Ireland remains so far behind England, Scotland and Wales, where abortion has been legal for almost forty years. In defiance and in solidarity, Strike 4 Repeal are urging the people of Ireland to strike, to march, to stage events, to withdraw domestic labour and to wear black. This form of non-traditional strike resonates with Plan C’s organising around the social strike so Kat from Plan C Manchester interviewed them to find out more…

http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/were-man ... -campaign/

[American Dream]

DAYNA TORTORICI

While the Iron Is Hot

The case for the Women’s Strike.


Still from The Salt of the Earth.


STRIKES ARE BY NATURE about value. To withdraw your participation in work, even for a day, is to ask others to consider the value of that work. How long can they go without it? When they lose a day of your labor, what do they lose?

For millennia, women’s contributions to society have been taken for granted, a fact that has made them difficult to see. Ever since women first entered the American workforce, not in the ’70s or the ’40s but in the 1600s, as indentured servants and slaves, their would-be waged or “productive” labor has been worth less than that of their male peers. Women’s work was and is considered “unskilled” or insignificant, less dangerous or difficult than the work men do. It has therefore been awarded less pay. But of course the real reason we devalue women’s work is because women are the ones who do it.

According to a 2009 study on labor from the journal Social Forces, whenever a considerable number of women enter a field that was once male-dominated—janitorial work, say, or design, or biology—wages in that field drop. (“It’s not that women are always picking lesser things in terms of skill and importance,” one of the researchers told the New York Times. “It’s just that the employers are deciding to pay it less.”) Meanwhile, when men enter sectors once dominated by women—computer programming, for example—pay goes up. Why? There is no “family wage” that only men can provide: in the US, the average individual’s wage, regardless of sex or gender, is no longer enough to support a family. Every year more and more women become primary- or equal earners in their households; those households should not be punished for the sex of their providers. Wage inequality is sexist discrimination, compounded for many of us by other forms of discrimination: against race, religion, sexuality, legal status. Why do employers pay women less money than men? Because they can. Why do women tolerate it? Because we’re accustomed to losing. The strike is an opportunity to collectively refuse what some would choose to see as inevitable.

Then there is the work that has no pay: the uncompensated, “reproductive” labor of keeping other people alive. Caring for children and family members, cleaning clothes, preparing meals: most people still don’t consider this “work.” Only recently have pundits, politicians, and GDP statisticians seen the political advantage of doing so. (Savvy Ivanka, having learned from Hillary Rosen’s mistake in 2012—Rosen came under fire for saying that Ann Romney, mother of five, “never worked a day in her life”—includes stay-at-home moms in her celebration of #womenwhowork. The President, meanwhile, doesn’t “do” child care. “Right,” he said sarcastically to Howard Stern in 2005, “I’m gonna be walking down Fifth Avenue with a baby in a carriage.”)

A strike can measure the value of work through its absence. We will know what unwaged labor does for society by how much people miss it when it’s gone. Hence “A Day Without a Woman,” the Women’s March on Washington’s slogan for the strike that echoes un día sin inmigrantes, the February 16 strike that sought to reveal how much the US relies on the immigrants it now seeks to deport in ever greater numbers, among them millions of women. “Why is producing cars more valuable than producing children?” as Silvia Federici asked Judith Shulevitz in the Times last year? It’s an old question, one that gets answered anew by each generation. The Women’s Strike presents another opportunity to pose it to ours.

Being about work, the Women’s Strike is also about money. Implicit in the gesture of striking is a question about economic inequality—inequality between men, women, and gender nonconforming people, but also between women. When we join other women in a general strike, we do not do so on equal terms. Some of us risk more in not working than others, and for some of us the risk is too much. Some see this as an insurmountable obstacle to women’s unity. This point was made recently by Sady Doyle in an op-ed on the Women’s Strike for Elle, under the finger-wagging headline “Go Ahead and Strike, but Know That Many of Your Sisters Can’t.” The implication seemed to be that privileged women should feel guilty for striking, and therefore abstain. Doyle endorses the strike, and calls women’s strikes “exciting for their promise to unify feminist theory and revolutionary practice.” But she also argues that “Without a specific, labor-related point, after all, a ‘strike’ is just a particularly righteous personal day.”

This argument, as Doyle herself concedes (“True, part of the point of a strike is for middle- and upper-class women to stand in solidarity with working-class and poor ones”), is based on false premises. The alternative course of not striking—preserving one’s daily status quo, espousing instead “a kind of guilty, stagnant solidarity of intention,” as Magally Miranda Alcazar and Kate D. Griffiths write in the Nation—helps no one. Instead, it places some women’s fear of hypocrisy over the needs of those they might join—including members of teachers’ unions, SEIU, the Movement for Black Lives, and more who have committed to strike. “Striking is not a privilege,” Alcazar and Griffiths write. “Privilege is not having to strike.” The Women’s Strike asks its participants to consider their role in economic inequality, and to consider their feminism’s role in it, too.

The Women’s Strike isn’t undermined by the fact of difference. The aim is not to present women as already equal in standing or opportunity, despite our right to be. By withdrawing my work, I show my place in the larger economy; when we all do (or don’t), we invite one another to see how our work is interdependent, see the ways we are compelled to exploit one another. And when we see it, we may be able to say with confidence—as the beneficiaries and the exploited speaking together—that this is not the system we want.

In a society organized around the accumulation of private wealth at the expense of collective well-being, the liberation of one class of women comes at the expense of another. Middle-class wives purchase freedom from housework through the availability of domestic labor offered by third world women of color—labor that often comes with abuse, no protections, and no benefits. But this zero-sum equation of women’s freedom is a choice we consent to as a society, and therefore one we can refuse. The obstacles to a more egalitarian, inclusive feminism are ours to clear.

What stands in the way? For starters, as Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild argue in Global Woman (2002), government stinginess in public services. America isn’t Already Great, but it’s certainly already rich. The US could have the greatest parental leave program in the history of the world; it just chooses to spend that money on drones and carriers. National efforts to expand early childhood education have yet to address the child-care needs of children aged 0 to 4—children whose parents have jobs they cannot afford to lose. There will be no gender equality without paid parental leave, paid sick leave, or free and accessible child care for all. There will be no equality between women without these social provisions for all. Demands do not get much clearer than this. This is why we strike.


THE FIRST WOMEN’S STRIKE was devised as a comedy. In Aristophanes’s Lysistrata (411 BC), the women of the Greek city-states refuse not work, but sex (“cock”!), to persuade their husbands to end the Peloponnesian war. Despite hopeful contemporary readings, this is not a feminist play. Everyone returns to their oikos and women still can’t go to Assembly. The premise itself is meant to be comedic (a women’s strike—can you imagine?). It’s not hard to imagine people seeing this Women’s Strike, too, as a joke.

But there are real historical precedents that attest to the strength of the strategy. Countless labor strikes in the US have been led and carried out by women: the Lowell Mill women’s strikes of 1834 and 1836; the Atlanta Washerwoman’s strike of 1881; the “bread and roses” textile workers’ strike of 1912; the Mexican American miner’s strike of 1950–52, during which women picketed on men’s behalf because a court injunction banned them from the line (this later became the basis of The Salt of the Earth, a classic of “Red” Hollywood). The more recent history of women’s general strikes is just as rich. In 1975, 90 percent of Icelandic women went on strike. As Annadis Rudolfsdottir recalls in the Guardian,

Iceland’s men were barely coping. Most employers did not make a fuss of the women disappearing but rather tried to prepare for the influx of overexcited youngsters who would have to accompany their fathers to work. Some went out to buy sweets and gathered pencils and papers in a bid to keep the children occupied. Sausages, the favourite ready meal of the time, sold out in supermarkets and many husbands ended up bribing older children to look after their younger siblings. Schools, shops, nurseries, fish factories and other institutions had to shut down or run at half-capacity.1

After Polish women went on strike last October to protest a proposed abortion ban, the historically far-right Polish government voted down the legislation 352-58, with 18 abstaining. On March 8, Irish women will strike to oppose their own country’s abortion ban.

The historic turnout at the Women’s March on Washington indicates that the majority of American women reject President Trump’s chauvinist administration, the strength of his white female base notwithstanding. At the root of that rejection is the obviousness of his disregard for women and their rights. The President is a self-described sexual abuser and an accused rapist. Multiple members of his cabinet have been accused of beating their wives. The Vice President has made a concerted effort to halt federal funding to Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides hundreds of thousands of women with essential reproductive health care including abortions.

It’s reasonable to ask whether now is a good time for a women’s strike. This is a revanchist administration that doesn’t appear to respond to demands. And there are arguably more urgent needs to attend to—the safety and support of Muslims, immigrants, and trans people who are under attack.

But millions of Muslims, immigrants, and trans people are women, and we strike as them and for them. It is never a bad time to demand what you need. Our bleak political situation has freed us from the constraints of being “reasonable,” of imagining solutions that play by the enemy’s rulebook. There is a new audience for new arguments—a ready population of people willing to think more deeply about the larger forces structuring their lives.

More at: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/onl ... on-is-hot/

[American Dream]

March 8th International Women’s Strike Reader

http://www.weareplanc.org/blog/march-8t ... ke-reader/

[liminalOyster]

Statue appeared today, according to Reddit front page. I'd dig it more if it didn't seem like it could be titled "cut it out!" after HRC.

[American Dream]

FOR A WORKING CLASS FEMINISM: RESOURCES FOR INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

http://www.blackrosefed.org/working-cla ... omens-day/

[seemslikeadream]

Tuesday, March 07, 2017
Common Dreams
Rejecting White House Ploy, Planned Parenthood Says Women's Right to Choose is "Non-Negotiable"
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/0 ... choose-non

This is not a surgical instrument

[Luther Blissett]

Statue appeared today, according to Reddit front page.

This was installed by a $2.5 trillion asset manager, which is…confusing at best.

[seemslikeadream]

The Statue of Liberty went dark overnight and the timing was just ‘too perfect’
By Samantha Schmidt March 8 at 7:22 AM

New Yorkers were left confused late on Mar. 7 when the lights illuminating the Statue of Liberty turned off for more than an hour.

For more than an hour Tuesday night, a cloak of darkness covered Lady Liberty. Some of the lights that normally illuminate the statue went off before 11 p.m., leaving only her still-lit torch and crown visible to most in New York Harbor.

As one Twitter post opined, the timing was “just too perfect.” Definitely, tweeted another, “an ominous sign of the times.”

The near-blackout of the universal symbol of freedom was invested with great meaning on the Internet, with a consensus settling, more or less, on two interpretations.

Lady Liberty was either protesting President Trump generally and, more specifically, his travel ban just a day after he signed the revised executive order limiting entry to the United States from six Muslim-majority countries.

Or she was signaling her solidarity with #DayWithoutWoman, a strike scheduled for Wednesday that asks women to skip work to show the world what life would be like without them.

“Give me your tired your poor your huddled masses but later. We’re closed,” one tweet said. Her lights were out because “Trump has plunged our country into darkness,” said another.

“I’ve been wondering how long before France asks @realDonaldTrump for the statue of liberty back as he clearly doesn’t respect its symbolism,” tweeted Jason Rumble.

Perhaps when her lights came back on, her forearm would display a “Nevertheless, she persisted,” tattoo, another tweet suggested. Could it be that Lady Liberty — one of the nation’s most recognizable female figures — was participating in the “Day Without a Woman?”

Indeed, Women’s March, organizers of “A Day Without a Woman,” were quick to thank the statue for “standing with the resistance and going dark” for the event.

“Lady Liberty got the memo,” the organizers added in a tweet. “That’s ONE MORE woman America CANNOT do without,” another Twitter user wrote.

On the other hand, someone else suggested, perhaps Russian hackers were to blame
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ... 717484294c

.

perhaps Russian hackers were to blame

[Luther Blissett]

Via Jeff:

The Socialist Origins of International Women’s Day
From the beginning, International Women’s Day has been an occasion to celebrate working women and fight capitalism.
by Cintia Frencia & Daniel Gaido

In 1894, Clara Zetkin took to the pages of the Social Democratic women’s magazine Die Gleichheit (Equality), which she had founded three years earlier, to polemicize against the mainstream of German feminism. “Bourgeois feminism and the movement of proletarian women,” Zetkin wrote, “are two fundamentally different social movements.”

According to Zetkin, bourgeois feminists pressed reforms, through a struggle between the sexes and against the men of their own class, without questioning the very existence of capitalism. By contrast, working women, through a struggle of class against class and in a joint fight with the men of their class, sought to transcend capitalism.

By 1900, women in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) were holding biannual conferences immediately before the party congresses — conferences where all the burning issues of the proletarian women’s movement were discussed. This ideological and organizational strength turned the German Socialist working women’s movement into the backbone of the International Socialist Women Movement.

In 1907, the International Conference of Socialist Women convened in Stuttgart, Germany for its first gathering, proclaiming as its main demand “the right to universal female suffrage without qualifications of property, tax, education or any other kind of barrier which may hinder members of the working class from availing themselves of their political rights.” The struggle for the franchise, the delegates insisted, was to be carried out “not together with the women’s bourgeois movement, but in close co-operation with socialist parties.”

The invitation to the next International Conference of Socialist Women — held three years later in Copenhagen — exhibited the same adherence to the proletarian class struggle: “We urgently call on all the socialist parties and organizations of socialist women as well as on all the working women’s organizations standing on the foundation of the class struggle to send their delegates to this conference.”

They were in good company across the Atlantic. The previous year, socialist working women in the US had designated February 28 “Women’s Day” — “an event,” the Copenhagen conference reported the following year, “that has awakened the attention of our enemies.”

Following the example of their American comrades, the German delegate Luise Zietz proposed the proclamation of an “International Women’s Day,” to be celebrated annually. Zetkin seconded the proposal, along with one hundred female delegates from seventeen countries.

The Women’s Day resolution read:

In agreement with the class-conscious political and trade union organizations of the proletariat of their respective countries, socialist women of all nationalities have to organize a special Women’s Day (Frauentag), which must, above all, promote the propaganda of female suffrage. This demand must be discussed in connection with the whole woman’s question, according to the socialist conception.

For the delegates, supporting the “socialist conception” meant promoting not just female suffrage, but labor legislation for working women, social assistance for mothers and children, equal treatment of single mothers, provision of nurseries and kindergartens, distribution of free meals and free educational facilities in schools, and international solidarity.

Simply put, International Women’s Day was, from the very beginning, a Working Women’s Day. While its immediate objective was to win universal female suffrage, its aspirations were much grander: the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of socialism, abolishing both the wage slavery of workers and the domestic slavery of women through the socialization of education and care work.

The First International Women’s Day

The first International Women’s Day was celebrated not on March 8 but on March 19, 1911. The date was chosen to commemorate the 1848 Revolution in Berlin — the day before, March 18, was dedicated every year to “the fallen heroes of March.”

In Germany, two and a half million copies of a flyer urging participation in Women’s Day were printed and distributed. Die Gleichheit put out its own call: “Comrades! Working Women and Girls! March 19 is your day. It is your right. Behind your demand stands Social Democracy, organized labor. The Socialist women of all countries are in solidarity with you. March 19 should be your day of glory!”

Trumpeting the battle cry “Forward to female suffrage,” more than a million women — mostly, but not exclusively, women organized in the SPD and the unions — took to the streets in Germany demanding social and political equality. They organized “popular public political assemblies” — forty-two in Berlin alone — where they discussed the issues affecting their lives.

Around the world, working women set aside a day for themselves. In 1911, women workers in United States, Switzerland, Denmark, and Austria chose March 8 as Women’s Day. Counterparts in France, Holland, Sweden, Bohemia, and (crucially) Russia soon added themselves to the list of celebrants.

Celebrating International Women’s Day on March 8 took hold as a worldwide practice in 1914. A famous sign emblazoned with the words “Women’s Day / March 8, 1914 – Forward with Female Suffrage,” in which a woman dressed in black waves the red flag, marked the occasion. In Germany — overcome with hysteria in the lead-up to World War I — police prohibited the poster from being hung or distributed publicly. The fourth International Women’s Day turned into a mass action against the imperialist war that would erupt three months later.

Three years later, March 8 would acquire a new significance when the February Revolution convulsed Russia (February 23 in the Julian calendar is March 8 in the Gregorian calendar). Russian working women played a leading role in the upheaval. Despite the opposition of every party, including the Bolsheviks, they turned the International Women’s Day demonstration into a mass strike that carried away the whole working class of Petrograd and gave birth to the Russian Revolution.

What War Wrought

War broke out in August 1914, inaugurating a new era in the development of the International Socialist Women’s Movement.

The entire Second International — and therefore the International Socialist Women’s Movement as well — split along national lines, succumbing to chauvinism. In Germany, the SPD (and its affiliate, the General Commission of Trade Unions) adopted a “social peace” policy, making critical demonstrations verboten. Those who flouted the proscription and publicly celebrated International Women’s Day suffered repression at the hands of the government and the police.

In early November 1914, Clara Zetkin issued an appeal “To the Socialist Women of All Countries,” where she spoke out strongly against the war and in favor of mass actions for peace. As part of this opposition to imperialism, Zetkin convoked the third and final Socialist Women’s Conference in April 1915. (Lenin accompanied the Bolshevik delegation, which included his wife Krupskaya and Lilina Zinoviev.)

As imperialist war waged around them, the conference issued the internationalist battle cry “War on war.” But principled opposition to militarism was in short supply. Upon returning to Germany, Zetkin was arrested for distributing the manifesto as an illegal leaflet.

An Annual Reminder

After the collapse of the second German Empire and the formation of councils (Räte) of workers and soldiers all over Germany in November 1918, the bourgeoisie effected a kind of democratic counter-revolution: they granted women the right to vote, but counterpoised parliament and the constituent assembly assembled in Weimar to the soviets of workers’ delegates.

Doing the bourgeoisie’s bidding was Social Democratic leader Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic (and “the Stalin of Social Democracy,” in the words of historian Carl Schorske). In his hands — and those of the union bureaucracy — the demand for universal female suffrage, adopted by the revolutionary labor movement as a transitional demand, was turned into a barrier to socialist revolution.

Since International Women’s Day had originated in the left wing of the proletarian women’s movement, the SPD leadership also stopped celebrating March 8. They argued that, following the extension of female suffrage, the holiday’s objectives had been achieved.

To their credit, the Communist Party continued to celebrate International Women’s Day under the slogan “All Power to the Councils! All Power to Socialism!” And in June 1921, Clara Zetkin helped make it official. The Second International Conference of Communist Women, chaired by Zetkin and held in Moscow, proclaimed that in the future, International Women’s Day would be celebrated around the world on March 8.

Ever since, International Women’s Day celebrations have been held on March 8 in countries across the globe — serving as an annual reminder of the revolutionary potential of working women.