From: "Tom Condit" <tomcondit-AT-igc.apc.org>
Date:          Thu, 7 Mar 1996 21:18:18 +0000
Subject:       International Women's Day--facts & artifacts


INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY
Some facts and possible artifacts

For many on this list, it is already March 8, International
Women's Day. Every year for the past 15 years I've been meaning
to question someone about some details of this socialist holiday
and have always let it go by until too late. This year, thanks to
the wonders of the internet, I can at least do it on time.

Many of you are probably familiar with the usual version of the
origins of this day, namely that it commemorates a mass
demonstration of women workers in New York City on March 8, 1908,
and was subsequently adopted as an international holiday. This
"history" is sometimes expanded to make the 1908 demonstration
into a commemoration of a women workers demonstration in upstate
New York in the 1860s. So far as I can tell, none of this is
true, but I may be wrong, and I'm sure there are people on the
list with access to better archives than me.

Fifteen years ago I was assigned to do an International Women's
Day leaflet for the Peace & Freedom Party (just for tabling at
our IWD events, not agitational purposes). I decided to do a
little research to add some color to the story--a few more
details about this March 8, 1908, demonstration, so I went up to
the University of California Library and started going through
the socialist and women's periodicals of the period. The first
thing which became apparent was that 1908 was a notably dead year
for the class struggle in the U.S. Not only was there no mention
of the March 8 demonstration, not much else happened either. My
comrade Jinx Kuehn joined me in the research. Finally, we found a
folder on International Women's Day in the undergraduate library
which contained the tracks of those who'd been before us on the
fruitless search for the famous demonstration.

Here's a slightly annotated version of the leaflet we finally
came up with, followed by some research notes:

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

International Women's Day began in 1909, when the Socialist Party
(U.S.A.) women's groups held coordinated meetings and rallies for
women's rights and the vote on the last Sunday of February and
decided to do so on an annual basis. In 1910, the Second
International Congress of Working Women, meeting in Copenhagen,
adopted the idea of having such coordinated rallies on an
international scale, and the first truly "International" Women's
Day was held on March 19, 1911. In the years before World War I,
the socialists stepped up their campaigns for women's rights and
adopted the custom of exchanging speakers from different
countries at their rallies.  In 1913, the date for International
Womens' Day was moved to March 8.

The most dramatic International Women's Day demonstration was
held on march 8, 1917 (February in the medieval calendar still
used in Tsarist Russia) in Petrograd, the capital of the Russian
empire.  Against the advice of the male leaders of their party,
women members of the Bolshevik Party called a demonstration for
more food and an end to the war.  In bitter cold, they marched
from factory to workplace, pulling out the women workers.  When
both women and men walked out of the Putilov works, then the
world's largest factory, their numbers surged to the point where
the police and soldiers called out to suppress the demonstration
faced away or joined them.  Within days, the Tsarist government
had fallen and the stage was set for socialist revolution in the
Russian empire.

Today we meet on International Women's Day to pay homage to our
brave sisters who have gone before us and to reaffirm our
determination to struggle for the rights of working women around
the world.  Today, we fight for equality, free abortion on
demand, equal pay for comparable work, universal free childcare
and education, and an end to discrimination based on sex, race or
sexual orientation.  Fro the future, we are fighting for a
society reorganized from the bottom up, where all women and men
have equal voice in governing a collectively owned and
democratically managed economy and society.

SOME NOTES

The motion at the Copenhagen Congress was apparently made by
Clara Zetkin.  British delegates argued for a June date, which
was apparently when similar rallies were held in Britain.  One
researcher ahead of us said that the Russians were proponents of
March 8, for unclear reasons.  According to Alexandra Kollontai,
March 19 was picked for coordinated German and Austrian rallies
in 1911 because it was the anniversary of the date on which the
King of Prussia had agreed to universal suffrage in 1848
(although, the word of kings being what it is, it was never
implemented). Kollontai is our source for 1913 being the year the
date was changed.

So far as I can figure out, the March 8, 1908 legend comes from a
confusion in the Communist International between the origins of
the U.S. women's day, which was a political event, and "the
revolt of the 20,000", the mass strike of garment workers (about
75% women) in New York City in the winter of 1909-1910. The first
mention I can find in English of this supposed event was in a
journal of the Trade Union Educational League in 1922. One of the
researchers who went before us speculated that the authority of
Moscow was already such in the international movement that U.S.
communists would repeat without question Russian myths about
their own history.

Now, the February revolution is a pretty good reason to celebrate
International Women's Day. But maybe there's more.  Maybe
something really did happen on March 8, 1908.  Given the
composition of the U.S. working class, it would be easy for the
record to exist only in languages other than English (most likely
Yiddish, Italian or Russian). Does anyone in New York have any
ideas or information?

As to the 1860s connection, that demonstration really did happen
--a mass march of women boot and shoe workers through the snow of
upstate New York. Phillip Foner records it in his History of
American Labor; he cites a March 8 Boston newspaper account (I
don't remember the year)--which means the demonstration happened
some time before March 8.

Of course, the U.S. movement of the 1960s and 1970s with its
glorification of action over politics, needed to have the origins
of the event be in a demonstration rather than a political event.
Commemorating a political event involves learning something about
history and politics, but demonstrations can float in time and
space with no link to anything but the spirit of revolt.

Tom Condit


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