International Women's Day

An article by Marian Sawer*

Planning is well under way for the celebration of International Women's Day around Australia - now in fact a week of activities centred on 8 March. IWD has taken on an increasingly 'official' character over the last twenty years, despite its subversive origins.

In 1975 Gough Whitlam was the first Australian Prime Minister to launch an IWD - the year it was also first officially celebrated by the United Nations. Government agencies put out calendars of events and government leaders are anxious to appear at them (John Howard may be an exception - his IWD commitments have yet to be revealed).

So what are these subversive origins? A widespread myth, now turning up on IWD home pages on the internet, is that:

It was on this day in 1857 that women employed in New York's textile and garment industry marched to protest about low wages and poor working conditions. Fifty-one years later, on 8 March 1908, these workers again called a strike - thousands marched to condemn child labour and to agitate for women's right to vote and for safe working conditions.

The only problem is that, as US academic Temma Kaplan has detailed in Feminist Studies (Spring 1985), no evidence can be found for either of these events. The story about the 1857 strike can be tracked back only to the 1950s, when it surfaced among French Communist circles in Paris. It is believed the story was invented to detach IWD from Soviet history.

The real historical strike was a general strike of shirtwaist workers in New York which lasted from November 1909 to mid-February 1910 and led to an upsurge in female unionism. More than 20 000 were involved and women maintained pickets outside factories in Lower Manhattan throughout these freezing winter months. More than 700 were arrested and others were clubbed or verbally abused. It had nothing to do with the origins of IWD.

It was German socialist Clara Zetkin who was the real mother of IWD. In 1907 she had organised an International Conference of Socialist Women and called for all socialist parties to fight energetically for women's suffrage. Zetkin was bitterly opposed to bourgeois feminism and wanted to ensure that working class women were not lured away from their class movement by default. Socialist parties had been too ready to accept manhood suffrage in place of universal suffrage. The conference participants, including Alexandra Kollontai, discussed demonstrating to publicise their support for women's equality.

In 1908 Branch Number 3 of the New York City Social Democratic Women's Society took up the call by organising a mass meeting on women's suffrage on 8 March. The following year the American Socialist Party declared the last Sunday in February to be National Woman's Day. In 1910, at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen, Zetkin proposed that there be an International Woman's Day and this was celebrated by European socialists for the first time on 19 March 1911.

Russian socialist women followed suit from 1913, celebrating IWD like the American socialists on the last Sunday in February. In Petrograd on 23 February 1917 an IWD demonstration by women textile workers turned into bread riots and then into the February revolution. The fact that 23 February on the old Russian calendar corresponded to 8 March on the Western calendar adopted after the revolution set the date for the Soviet celebrations of IWD from 1918.

From 1922 Clara Zetkin headed the International Women's Secretariat of the Communist International in Moscow and IWD became an official Communist holiday. It became International Women's Day (plural) after the Second World War.

The first Australian IWD rally took place on 25 March 1928 in the Sydney Domain, organised by the Militant Women's Movement of the Communist Party of Australia. Those attending included Edna Ryan, who died last week. The rally featured the demand for equal pay which was to become the focus of her life-long feminist activism. From 1931 IWD marches were held in Sydney and Melbourne. Although they were led by women, the majority of participants were male communists.

In 1936, reflecting the new 'popular front' strategy of the Comintern, non-Communist women's groups were invited to participate in the Sydney IWD Committee for the first time. Other States followed suit and by 1938 the groups involved in the Perth IWD Committee ranged from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom to the Young Women's Christian Association, the Association of University Women and the National Council of Women. After the Second World War this kind of co-operation was disrupted by cold-war tensions and IWD once again became largely a Communist event, marked by small meetings, luncheons and concerts.

The Union of Australian Women, initiated by the Communist party in 1950, attempted to revive IWD and became its custodian in the 1950s and 1960s - a story well told by Barbara Curthoys in the recently published history of the UAW, More Than a Hat and Glove Brigade. Street rallies were hard to organise due to the attitude of State and local authorities, but UAW members sometimes engaged in peace walks with slogans printed on aprons or shopping bags. Closely watched by ASIO, UAW organised IWD functions featuring international themes and involving other women's groups.

In the 1970s the big street marches of women's liberation arrived and new open-ended collectives took over IWD, displacing the hat and glove brigade. Eva Bacon, a UAW stalwart, has told a poignant story of the 1976 Brisbane IWD. Washed out by a torrential downpour, women's liberation activists rescheduled the rally, forgetting to tell the UAW: 'Many of us regretted that we were not told... it was nevertheless good that IWD was honoured publicly'.

Today IWD is characterised by a mixture of celebration and stocktaking. There is an increasing emphasis on breakfasts - reflecting the tight schedules of many of those participating, particularly those with money to donate to aid projects for women. It has certainly come a long way from its origins - which is no reason to mystify them.

* Marian Sawer is Associate Professor in Politics at the University of Canberra
This article was published in the Canberra Times on 17 February 1997

Page created 25 February 1997; last updated 13 February 2002

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