International Women’s Day takes place on March 8th. The roots of this day go deep into the early 20th century – and include the USA, Europe and Russia.
In 1975, the UN decided to make March 8 International Women’s Day. However, the first Women’s Day took place in 1911. It is still celebrated today – like here in Nuremberg in 2021.
It was the women of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) who came up with the idea of a national women’s day in 1908. Action followed a year later: female socialists and bourgeois suffragettes flooded the streets of America together and demanded an equal say with their husbands. This manifestation was so convincing that the Europeans jumped on the steaming train. So it came about that in 1911 an international women’s day took place for the first time.
Thousands of women workers took to the streets in Denmark, Germany, Austria-Hungary and also in Switzerland for women’s suffrage, for equal rights and soon also for peace. The fact that the women’s day of struggle, which is celebrated to this day, falls on March 8th, has nothing to do with the American women – all the more to do with the women of Russia.
bread and revolution
It is February 23, 1917. A war is raging in the world that we will later call the First World War in the history books. Russia is at war. But at the same time, a completely different fight is brewing here. It escalates in St. Petersburg, which is now called Petrograd and is still the capital of the Russian Empire. And it leads to upheavals, the consequences of which reach into the present.
Numerous arms factories have settled around Petrograd since the beginning of the war. The workforce is growing. And she’s hungry. Because the war prevented an adequate supply of food. The workers regularly take to the streets. “Bread” is the simple slogan. Then comes February 23, which is supposed to be Women’s Day this year. Like women in many other countries, Russian women also take to the streets.
The hunger is too great to ask for the right to vote. “Bread,” chanted the women. Then the first Cossacks appear, the troops that the tsar traditionally sends out against demonstrators with horses and whips. But the women do not back down. On the contrary.
In April 1917, women demonstrate in St. Petersburg for a say and universal suffrage. So that in communism everyone could actually become equal.
Another demand mingled with the calls for bread: “Peace!” And soon after: “Down with the autocracy!” For the first time, women farmers stand alongside the women workers. Men will be there soon. In a few days they will be followed by the soldiers who shoot their generals and fraternize with the workers.
The February Revolution thus ended the more than 300-year reign of the Romanovs – and paved the way for Lenin and the October Revolution. Tsar Nicholas II deliberately ignored the report on February 23 about the demonstrating women. Why did he care about a few angry workers and peasant women who were fed up with “his” war in Europe? A week later, the tsar had to renounce the crown, throne and title forever. The revolution that women had started with their day of fighting had torn him down.
A matter of the calendar
Even before the great war is over, the new, communist leadership of Russia decides to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. This shifts the data overnight by 13 days. February 1st is now February 14th. And from February 23 March 8, which the Bolsheviks declared in 1921 as a national holiday. After all, on that day, with the women’s demonstration, their story also started to roll.
In the same year, women’s delegations from all over the world arrived in Moscow for the Second International Conference of Communist Women. The German women’s rights activist Clara Zetkin was also there. It had been her motion in 1910, based on the national women’s day for American women, “to use a well-prepared women’s day as a new means of agitation for the introduction of women’s suffrage in all countries”.
At the request of the German women’s rights activist and later communist Clara Zetkin, International Women’s Day was held for the first time on March 19, 1911.
Since the Russian women had caused some agitation with their demonstration of 1917, the representatives of the Bulgarian delegation now suggested that Women’s Day be moved to March 8th – and thus at the same time an international day of remembrance for the struggle of Russian women against war and oppression create. The application was enthusiastically accepted.
irony and prejudice
International Women’s Day also takes place today, March 8th. It is true that women’s suffrage has now been won in almost every country in the world. Actual equality, however, which includes wages, opportunities and the division of labor, has still not been achieved in many societies. This is also the case in Switzerland, where wage analyzes are currently being used to combat the inequality in pay between women and men, while joint parental leave still seems a long way off.
In some places, women’s day is celebrated with flowers, in other places with demonstrations. Since the UN decided in 1975 to make International Women’s Day the official Women’s Day, class thinking has been disappearing more and more. It makes room for demands that connect the majority of all women.
«Imagine a gender-equitable world. A world free from prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination. A world that is diverse, equal and inclusive. A world where differences are honored and celebrated. Together we can promote equality for women,” notes the global committee for International Women’s Day and sets up the moto #BreakTheBias, in English something like “End prejudice”.
It is an irony of fate that February 23 – according to the old, Julian calendar, the actual women’s struggle day of 1917 – is celebrated in Russia today as “Defender of the Fatherland Day” and thus as an unofficial men’s day. On the night after this year’s Defender of the Fatherland Day, the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.
So, 105 years and a day after the women of St. Petersburg defied their Bread and Peace authorities, Vladimir Putin started a new war. Today it is not bread that is in short supply because of the war. But due to Western sanctions, the Russian market is thinning out again. What will be the consequences?
