The real story of International Women\'s Day PDF Print E-mail
Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00

Fiona Bowker

On March 8 middle class feminists will be gathering over their pot-luck dinners in a convocation of self-congratulation and empathy. International Women's Day has somehow become entangled with the fight for the vote, and this is what most feminists will be talking about on March 8. They'll also undoubtedly be talking about their problems with advancement up the corporate ladder and perhaps, with the launch of the "Jenny Shipley is not my sister" campaign, there will be a shaking of heads at the coming ruling class offensive - but one thing they undoubtedly won't be talking about on March 8 is the real story behind International Women's Day.
 
International Women's Day was first suggested at an international conference of socialist women held in Copenhagen in 1910. Both the date and the idea were taken from a demonstration of American socialist women in New York on March 8, 1908 in opposition to the bourgeois suffrage movement there. The proposal, which was adopted by the conference, was made by one of the foremost revolutionary socialists in Germany at the beginning of this century, Clara Zetkin. Zetkin had little love for the middle class feminist movement that existed in Germany at that time. In distinguishing between these feminists and working class women, Zetkin explained:
          
the liberation struggle of the working class woman cannot be - as it is for the bourgeois woman - a struggle against the men of her own class The end goal of her struggle is not free competition against men, but bringing about the political rule of the working class.  Hand in hand with the men of her own class, the working class woman fights against capitalist society.
(quoted in Socialist Register 1976)
 
This is still the position of revolutionary socialists in regard to the feminist movement today.
 
While International Women's Day was founded by Clara Zetkin in 1910, the most important International Women's Day of all took place in Russia in 1917.  It launched the Russian Revolution.
 
On March 8 in our calendar (February 23 in the old-style Russian calendar), after having met together the night before to strategise for International Women's Day the following day, women workers in Petrograd acted against the decision of the District Committee of the Bolshevik Party and organised strikes in some of the textile factories in Petrograd. The strikes spread like wildfire, and it was only after 200,000 workers had already downed tools that the Bolshevik Party issued the leaflet two days later calling for a General Strike.  As one witness had it:
 
This revolutionary march of working women, full of the hatred of centuries of oppression, was the spark that set light to the great flame of the February revolution, that revolution which was to shatter Tsarism.
(Quoted in Halle's Women in Soviet Russia)
 
In 1971, International Women's Day was celebrated for the first time in London and Liverpool.  The demonstrators carried on their banners four basic demands: for equal pay now, equal education and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, and free 24-hour nurseries. They were political demands in that they were demands on the state, and they well suited the needs of working class women.
 
After this, however, the demands of International Women's Day were watered down by the bourgeois feminist movement by including such goals as "financial and legal independence," a woman's right to define her own sexuality and the opposition of women to male aggression. These goals, associated with personal politics and waffly ideas of self-fulfilment, suited the leisured class of feminists very well, but there was no longer anything working class women could identify with.
 
Today, International Women's Day bears little resemblance to the working class women's day Clara Zetkin founded in 1910, and which launched the Russian Revolution - it has been ripped away from workers and used to symbolically represent the aspirations of the middle class.
 
To the bourgeois feminists, I would like to say that Jenny Shipley is not my sister - but neither are you.