International Women’s Day: why is celebrated on March 8?
The event, which claims equal rights, is commemorated in many countries and has changed this celebration in the calendar date.
The tradition of commemorating a day to demand equal rights of women’s centennial. Today, March 8, the International Women’s Day is celebrated in most countries.
However, up to this date it has traveled a lot. By the way, the event has evolved, it has changed and it has lost the word ‘worker’ of his head, which emerged with his spirit and unionist conception. On March 8 officially-declared by the UN in 1975 to all women and full equality of rights claimed. And this 2016 there is still little to celebrate, but much to complain about: the end of discrimination, sexist violence, pay equity is achieved, universal care, free choice is eradicated …
The idea of an International Women’s Day came in the late nineteenth century, but they were different events in the twentieth century that have led to the celebration we know today. One of them, perhaps the most symbolic but not the only, occurred on March 25, 1911, when some 149 people, mostly women died in the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York. The incident revealed the appalling conditions in which women, many of them immigrants and very poor working. The incident was not unique There was another fire in similar circumstances three years before-but provoked large demonstrations and marked on the calendar a day that had begun to commemorate two years earlier also in New York City, where Socialist Women – following a statement by the United States– party they celebrated the first National Women’s Day. It was February 28, 1909 and more than 15,000 women took to the streets to demand better wages, reduced working hours and the right to vote.
In 1910, the Socialist International proclaimed the International Women’s Day to demand women’s suffrage, non-discrimination in employment, access to education and other fundamental rights. The conference did not decide a particular day but was decisive: the day began to commemorate the following year. Germany, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland celebrated on March 19 with rallies attended by more than a million people, the vast majority women.
US and Central Europe, the commemoration protest began to spread to other areas. Late February 1913, Russian women celebrated International Women’s Day in other countries began to be noted on March 8. Four years later, in 1917, in reaction to the death of more than two million soldiers in the war, the Russian called a strike for the last Sunday in February. Protests and demonstrations that began Feb. 23 -8 March in the Gregorian calendar used in other countries– led to a general mobilization that brought about the abdication of the Tsar and led to an interim government which granted them the right to vote.
Over the years, other countries -China were incorporated in 1922, for example, and women of all kinds of realities until March 8 has become a moment of confluence to demand equal rights for all and remember that they have not yet reached.
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