International Women's Day was started by women in the socialist movement.
From the 1890s, the women's suffrage movement was influenced and built by women
who were members of parties belonging to the Socialist (Second) International.
The figure most identified with the internationalist socialist women's
movement was Clara Zetkin. Through the 1890s, Zetkin developed a socialist
women's program and practice within the German Social Democratic Party ( SPD)
which became the model for women in socialist parties around the world.
It was not easy for our socialist sisters. During the 1875 debate over
whether to include women's suffrage in the founding documents of the SPD,
opponents cited the allegedly reactionary political tendencies of women,
especially their ties with the church. Zetkin first succeeded in getting the SPD
to endorse political rights "without distinction of sex" in 1891. In
response to the cry that women were too reactionary to risk enfranchising,
Zetkin responded that the vote was "a means to assemble the masses, to
organise and educate them" and that political organising would educate
women out of whatever "backwardness" they suffered.
Within the SI, the first pro-women's suffrage resolution was passed in 1900,
but particular parties continued to resist supporting the suffrage movement.
Zetkin led a campaign of socialist women to change this position. The first
all-women international socialist conference was held at Stuttgart in 1907. At
the SI conference a week later, women persuaded it that "socialist parties
of all countries have a duty to struggle energetically for the introduction of
universal suffrage for women".
Zetkin also fought to keep socialist women from being overwhelmed
organisationally by men. The most vigorous and powerful of the national
socialist women's movements, the US, Austrian and Scandinavian, followed the
lead of the Germans and organised women separately from men. In the US,
socialist women had their own organisation, the Socialist Women's National
Union.
In Germany this strategy was dictated by laws which prohibited women from
engaging in political activities, although by definition, all-women
organisations could not be political. This had the positive effect of nurturing
a whole generation of women leaders. In Finland the socialist party was
unusually supportive of feminists, and a large socialist women's network
developed which played a major role in the first victory for women's suffrage in
Europe in 1906.
The program put forward by Zetkin and other socialist women included support
for women's suffrage and special labour legislation for women incorporating
maternal leave, child-care and other issues relating to working women.
Within the suffrage movement, there were many differences between non-
socialist and socialist women. Zetkin was uncompromising on the matter of
cross-class collaboration among women, because bourgeois ideas were seen as
serious competition in the battle for influence among women militants.
The distinctly socialist argument for women's suffrage rested on the
recognition that the increasingly public character of women's labour had to be
matched with an equally public political role. The resolution of the 1904
socialist women's conference read: "The demand for women's suffrage results
from the economic and social revolutions provoked by the capitalist mode of
production but in particular from the revolutionary change in labour and the
status and consciousness of women".
In the United States, England and elsewhere such economic arguments came to
be widely accepted among non-socialist suffragists, an indication of the degree
to which socialist women influenced and led the larger movement. In many
countries women from all classes united around the issues and socialist women
worked alongside non-socialist women.
International Women's Day itself began in 1909 in the US as part of the
socialist campaign for women's equality. Many socialist women in the US were
organising workers into unions -
women like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who advocated political and sexual
equality, and who from 1906 to 1926 travelled the nation organising workers,
participating in 20 strikes and being arrested 15 times.
In New York in 1909 women shirtwaist makers went on strike after the sacking
of workers suspected of supporting unionisation. The "Great Uprising",
as it came to be known, began as a small walkout, but by the time the strike had
finished it had changed the course of the union movement and organised more
women than had ever been unionised before.
The following year 100 women from 17 countries attended the Second
International Conference of Socialist Women. A resolution by Zetkin and others
proposed that socialist women of all countries every year arrange a Women's Day
which would serve the primary purpose of agitation for women's suffrage. It was
to be internationalist and to be painstakingly prepared so as to mobilise the
largest number of women around a broad platform of demands which led the way to
women's political equality.
About a million women and men participated in marches in Denmark, Germany,
Austria and Switzerland on March 19, 1911. Holland and Sweden had marches in
1912, and Russian marches began in 1913. In Germany Alexandra Kollontai
addressed a huge gathering in Frankfurt, and in every town and village there
were meetings, many of them broken up violently by the police. Marches were
organised in the US, and by 1913 tens of thousands of women were marching in New
York with demonstrations also in California (1911), Wisconsin (1912) and
Washington (1913).
The first women's paper was published in Russia in 1914, called Rabotnitsa (
Working Women). Half the editorial board were women residing in Russia, and all
were arrested after their second meeting. Despite this, the first issue came out
on IWD 1914. Its 12,000 copies were sold on the day. Women did sewing jobs to
scrape together the money to produce the second, third and fourth issues. After
its fifth issue in late June 1914, it was closed down by the police.
International Women's Day in Russia began the February 1917 Revolution. When
workers were locked out of the Putilov armaments plant on March 7, the women of
Petrograd began to take to the streets. Stones and ice were thrown at police.
The soldiers and police, family men, raw recruits and even their officers were
reluctant to go out among the women.
By March 10 women were seizing the guns of the soldiers, the workers were out
on a general strike, students were joining the people in the streets. After the
abdication of the tsar, one of the proclamations of the Petrograd Soviet gave
women the right to vote.
A large international influence was had by English suffragists. Their
struggle linked the fight for women's vote with a fundamental challenge to
gender relations. They added a tactical radicalism to suffrage agitation.
The roots of the movement in England lay in the organisation of working-
class women and the dedication of activists inspired by socialism. The militant
revival of English suffragism predates the involvement of the Pankhurst family
and can be traced to a working-class based suffrage movement of Lancashire
textile workers in the 1890s.
The tactics of militant suffragism were borrowed from trade unionism and
emphasised open-air campaigning, factory-gate meetings and street corner
speaking. The movement literally took women out of the parlour and into the
streets.
Big demonstrations in Germany and in parts of Europe in 1914 at the start of
the war were close reminders of the British demonstrations. US suffragists were
especially quick to pick up the inspiration of the British militants. Many of
them were influenced by and sympathetic to socialism. Harriet Stanton Blatch
(who later joined the Socialist Party and stood as a candidate) and trade union
activist Maud Younger organised a working-class-based, tactically militant,
independent suffrage movement.
The British struggle also shaped the Irish suffrage movement. A leading
figure was Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, a socialist. Inspired by the big
demonstrations in Britain, she organised the Irish Women's Franchise League,
which heckled politicians, held demonstrations and broke windows with stones.
They won the vote in 1922, six years before their sisters in England.
In 1912 in Nanking, China, the Woman Suffrage Alliance, an independent
socialist feminist group, petitioned the provisional parliament to "enact
equality of the sexes and recognise women's right to vote". In order to be
taken seriously, they armed themselves with pistols, stormed the parliament
building three days in a row and had to be dragged off by guards.
The first world war split the suffrage movement, just as it did the socialist
movement. Many suffragists became pro-war, while a minority were decidedly
antiwar.
It wasn't until the rise of the second wave of feminism in the late '60s and early '70s, also inspired and influenced by many socialist women, that the women's liberation movement once again took March 8 as International Women's Day. While women now have the right to vote in almost every country and gains have been won through the struggle, the basic situation for women has not changed. The demands of the women's liberation movement are not so different from those of our sisters at the turn of the century.
