INTERVIEW
International Women's Rights Day: why the date March 8?
Since 1977, International Women's Day has been held under the auspices of the UN with a particular theme each year.
The chosen date is the result of the action of numerous movements since the beginning of the 20th century, as historian Chloé Maurel explains.
Interview.
Women demonstrated for their right to vote in May 1936 during the major strikes which marked the Popular Front government in 1936. © AFP
By: Nenad Tomic
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RFI: In 1977, the United Nations established International Women's Rights Day.
But at the beginning of the 20th century, there were already numerous worker struggles and demonstrations by women demanding more rights in Europe or the United States.
What is the origin of the date March 8?
Chloé Maurel:
From 1909, the United States decided to organize each year, on the last Sunday in February, a "National Women's Day" in order to mark, in public opinion, the idea of equality for men -women.
We owe this initiative in particular to Theresa Serber Malkiel, an American Jewish socialist worker, also an activist for workers' rights, for racial equality and for women's right to vote.
Then in 1910 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Clara Zetkin, a German feminist journalist, launched a solemn appeal to organize an International Women's Day every year.
Why is March 8 often considered the result of the action of communist and socialist movements?
The socialist and communist movements played a leading role in promoting March 8.
Let us recall that in February 1909, in the United States,
National Woman's Day
was organized on the basis of the action of socialist women .
In Germany, Clara Zetkin is herself a great left-wing Marxist activist.
She created a newspaper called
L'Égalité
at the end of the 19th century , and she served as a German MP from 1920 to 1930.
As early as 1907, Clara Zetkin organized the First International Conference of Socialist Women in Stuttgart, which saw many women converge.
She was also unanimously elected president of the Socialist International Women.
It was at the Copenhagen conference in 1910 that she proposed, with the support of the Russian Alexandra Kollontaï, to organize an International Women's Day, based on the model of the National Women's Day of Theresa Serber Malkiel, Jewish activist, worker American feminist and anti-racist.
Clara Zetkin thus launches an appeal “to all socialist women in all countries” to organize an international women’s day every year.
Two years later, in the severe and authoritarian Russian Empire, left-wing movements took the initiative of celebrating an “International Workers’ Day” on March 3, 1913, then March 8, 1914. And, in the revolutionary year 1917, on March 8, many Russian women demonstrated vigorously in Petrograd [soon renamed Leningrad, today Saint Petersburg, Editor's note] to demand, in this period of the First World War, "bread and peace".
They will obtain satisfaction, since Russia, after the October Revolution of 1917, will sign a separate peace in 1918, the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, withdrawing from the world conflict.
And, once the USSR was created in 1922, March 8 was officially celebrated there every year.
When was March 8 celebrated massively around the world and why?
Since 1911, Women's Day has been celebrated not only in the United States, but also in Austria, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland.
Then, after the two world wars, which saw women exercise important responsibilities previously devolved to men, the movement grew.
After 1945, many states began celebrating March 8, eventually leading the UN in 1977 to declare March 8 International Women's Day.
Each year, this celebration organized by the UN has a specific slogan.
In 2024, it is: “Investing in women: accelerating the pace”.
Indeed, the UN emphasizes that investments made worldwide in favor of women, for example for their education or professional training, are 360 billion dollars lower than those made for men, and calls for repairing this injustice .
In France, what movements have marked the history of the fight for women's rights and since when have March 8 been celebrated as International Women's Rights Day?
In France, many women have distinguished themselves in feminist struggles since the French Revolution (Olympe de Gouges), then the 19th century (for example Louise Michel during the Paris Commune).
In the 20th century, it was with the arrival in power, for the first time under the Fifth Republic, of a left-wing president, François Mitterrand, that the celebration of March 8 experienced a boom: in 1982, Yvette Roudy, minister delegate for Women's Rights, recognizes March 8 as Women's Rights Day.
That year, on March 8, 1982, François Mitterrand gave a feminist speech and received 450 women from varied backgrounds, during a reception at the Élysée, and pledged to take important measures in favor of women's rights .
In 2024, France's decision [the first country in the world, Editor's note] to include the right to abortion in the Constitution is a flagship measure taken in favor of women.
Chloé Maurel is a doctor in history, specialist in the UN and international organizations, associate researcher at the Sorbonne (Sirice), author of
Les grands speeches à l'ONU
(Édition du Croquant, 2024).
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