International Women's Day in New York (2017): "The women's question is nothing more and nothing less than a human rights issue"

Photo: Justin Lane/ EPA/ REX/ Shutterstock

Happy International Women's Day, everyone!

If you live in Berlin or Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, you can even look forward to a public holiday today as a man.

If you live somewhere else, you're unfortunately missing out at the moment.

And you may be wondering why women have their own holiday at all and why on this day at the beginning of March.

Here come the answers.

Who invented it?

The origins of International Women's Day go back more than 100 years, but are not, as is often claimed, based solely on an initiative by the German socialist Clara Zetkin.

In fact, the women's rights activist simply took up an idea from the USA.

A woman who is almost forgotten today had it there in 1909

“National Women's Day” was initiated by the Jewish socialist Theresa Serber Malkiel, born in 1874 in what is now Ukraine.

In 1891, Malkiel and her family fled anti-Semitic persecution in what was then the Russian Empire and emigrated to New York.

As a 17-year-old, she began working in the textile industry - its appalling working conditions led her to become an activist.

Malkiel was committed to socialism, fought for more workers' rights, advocated for immigrants and demanded equal rights and women's suffrage.

In 1909 she wrote in an essay:

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The women's issue is nothing more and nothing less than a human rights issue.

In reality, the liberation of woman means the liberation of the human being within her.”

Supported by the Socialist Party of America, Malkiel organized "National Women's Day" on February 28, 1909 - as a protest march for women's rights in New York.

2,000 people gathered in Manhattan alone to hear speeches and poems, sing socialist anthems and demand the right to vote.

Malkiel and her fellow campaigners were thrilled.

And they asked themselves: Couldn't such forces be released internationally - to expand not only the fight for women's rights, but also support for socialism?

How did Women's Day come to Europe?

It was a good thing that the US socialist May Wood Simons traveled to Copenhagen in 1910 for the Second International Socialist Women's Conference.

There she presented the idea of ​​creating such a day of protest for women internationally.

The female plenum with over 100 delegates from 18 countries agreed:

"In agreement with the class-conscious political and trade union organizations of the proletariat in their country, the socialist women of all countries organize a women's day every year, which primarily serves to agitate for women's suffrage."

Now all they had to do was convince the men.

The German politicians Käthe Duncker and Clara Zetkin agreed to take on the burdensome paperwork: They wrote the necessary motion to introduce the idea at the International Socialist Congress, which took place just a few days later and was attended by women and men together.

The motion impressed not only with its arguments, but also with numerous signatures from the female delegates to the Copenhagen Women's Conference.

The campaign was successful: the introduction of an International Women's Day was officially decided - Zetkin was delighted:

"This International Women's Day is the most massive demonstration for women's suffrage in the history of the movement for the emancipation of the female sex to date."

What a look back shows: Women's Day was not the initiative of a German activist.

It is an international joint project - a beautiful omen for a day when women stand side by side to demand their rights.

Why is it celebrated on March 8th of all days?

The first International Women's Day was celebrated in 1911, but there was initially no set date.

In the USA, women gathered for rallies on the last Sunday in February - in Denmark it was the beginning of March.

In Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Switzerland, however, women took to the streets on March 19, 1911;

the following year the Germans celebrated their Women's Day on May 12th.

It took place on varying dates until 1921 - but always on a Sunday or public holiday on which women did not have to work.

At the International Conference of Communist Women in 1921, delegates finally set March 8th.

This was a homage to the Russian revolutionaries: On March 8, 1917, the Petrograd textile workers initiated a strike that heralded the Russian Revolution and led to the overthrow of the Tsar.

Every year the day of honor had a different motto.

While at the beginning it was about women's suffrage, in the years of the First World War it was first dominated by patriotic slogans and later by demands for peace.

After women's suffrage was introduced in Germany in 1918, communists continued to call for Women's Day annually.

Socialists were initially skeptical and organized their own women's struggle days - in order to differentiate themselves from the KPD, expressly not on March 8th.

What did the Nazis think of Women's Day?

The Nazi regime banned Women's Day from 1933 as a left-wing devil's work.

True to Hitler's motto ("Woman has the task of being beautiful and giving birth to children"), the National Socialists instead exploited Mother's Day.

Introduced in Germany in 1923 by the Association of German Flower Shop Owners, Mother's Day became an official holiday as a "day of remembrance and honor of German mothers";

It was celebrated on the third Sunday in May.

Although ostracized, the Germans also secretly celebrated Women's Day in the "Third Reich," emphasizes historian Kerstin Wolff: On this day, people were invited to coffee parties or red feather beds were hung out of the windows to air out.

In 1934 and 1935, for example, illegal leaflets celebrating International Women's Day were distributed in the Lower Rhine region, says Wolff.

It wasn't until 1946 that a Women's Day took place again in the Soviet occupation zone.

It was celebrated in the GDR, which was founded in 1949, but it lost importance in the Federal Republic - until the New Women's Movement discovered it at the end of the 1960s.

In 1975, as part of the “International Women’s Year,” the United Nations declared March 8th International Women’s Day (IWD).

Two years later, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on all states to celebrate one day a year as “Day for Women’s Rights and World Peace.”

Currently, only employees in the federal states of Berlin (since 2019) and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (since 2023) have time off on International Women's Day in Germany.

28 countries around the world celebrate it as a public holiday, including Ukraine, Poland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Angola, Laos and Eritrea.

Everywhere men also benefit from the women's holiday - in China, Madagascar and Nepal the holiday only applies to women.