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March 8th is International Women's Day — but Railroad Workers United wants to call it by its full and proper name: International Working Women's Day.
That name matters. This holiday was not born in a corporate marketing suite, rather, it grew out of the labor and socialist movements of the early twentieth century. On March 8, 1908, 15,000 women marched in New York City for shorter work hours, better pay, voting rights, and an end to child labor. (Some accounts trace the Day's roots even further back, to an 1857 garment workers' strike on the same date, though historians have raised questions about whether that earlier event has been mythologized over time.)
In May 1908, the Socialist Party of America declared that the last Sunday in February would be National Women's Day, the first of which was celebrated on February 28, 1909. In 1910, at the International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen, the German delegate Luise Zietz — seconded by the great socialist Clara Zetkin — proposed making it an international annual observance, approved unanimously by delegates from seventeen countries.
From the very beginning, International Women's Day was a Working Women's Day, with aspirations that ran far beyond suffrage: labor protections, social assistance for mothers and children, and international solidarity. In 1917, it was International Women's Day demonstrations in Petrograd that lit the spark of the Russian Revolution. Today the holiday is largely unrecognizable from that founding vision, its radical roots buried under corporate advertising.
International Working Women's Day is, at its core, a holiday of the shop floor, the picket line, and the union hall! We celebrate that today.
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