A history of International Women’s Day
Contextualising IWD in history, national and international politics, and the four waves of feminism
In 2017, I wrote my Masters Thesis on celebrities who use their voice to influence social and political change, what I coined ’celebrity social responsibility’. To narrow down a crowded field, I chose to focus on several famous faces who have used their image and status to campaign for women and girls, feminism, and gender equality in the context of International Women’s Day (IWD).
As part of my thesis, I dug into the history of IWD and learned a lot about its origins, history, current standing, as well as its uneasy linkages and relationship with feminist studies and thought.
I have never published my thesis and have no plans to, but I feel it is about time to share some of my research about IWD here. Perhaps at a later date, I’ll share my findings and thoughts on celebrity social responsibility as well (spoiler alert: I have misgivings ;-)
Before I start I want to make it clear that I am a white, cisgender woman and I acknowledge the many inherent and lucky privileges I was born into and embody. While I try as hard as I can to write with an objective voice and form opinions that take into account my privilege and consider diversity and difference, I fear that I have much to learn. If you feel that any part of my account would benefit from nuance or clarification in this respect, I appreciate you taking the time to comment on this blog post or reaching out to me privately via my Twitter account @hannahmlbrown.
I also want to make it clear that this account is as at June 2017. I will make it my 2020 mission to update it to take into account any recent changes.
So with all of this in mind, let’s get into it.
What is IWD and where does it come from?
IWD celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women and calls for action in favour of gender equality. Its origins are grounded in socialist women’s movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (also during the early period of first wave feminism) and to this day, its stated values hold true to these origins. However, over time it has diverged in practice, and has taken on a diverse range of applications in varying contexts — not simply geographically, but also culturally, economically and politically.
The term IWD is being used here to refer both to the global cause historically promoted as an international day for women, as well as the actual days on which IWD has been celebrated in the past, for example on 8 March 2017 (which will be referred to specifically as IWD 2017).
Given IWD’s core focus is women, it is important to note the movements, themes and theories associated with ‘women’, ‘feminism’, ‘feminist waves’, and ‘gender’ that are intrinsic to IWD’s origins, history and values. While these significant themes are not the core focus of this post, they will briefly be mentioned where necessary to further contextualise IWD.
History of IWD
The origins of IWD as well as its association with 8 March are difficult to pinpoint and historical narratives differ in terms of dates, events, and substance.
On the one hand, IWD’s socialist origins in Europe, Russia and the US have been celebrated, but on the other, these origins have been downplayed over time (especially during the 1950s in French feminist narratives)[1]. Around this time, there started to be references to a mass women’s rally in the US on 8 March 1907 celebrating a supposed women workers’ demonstration 50 years previously. However, it is disputed whether either of these events happened as according to some, the events are more myth than reality[2].
There is thus a tension between the collective memories of the origins of IWD. Western feminists in the 1950s co-opted IWD in opposition to the socialist values of those who started it[3]. This is perhaps unsurprising when one considers the broader social and political divide that characterised the world in the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to the Cold War.
IWD: the Early Days
IWD was first observed in the early 1900’s, during the later coined ‘first-wave feminist’ movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries[4]. At that time, women experienced oppression and glaring inequalities in all dimensions of social, economic, and political life. In this context as well as a broader climate of global unrest, women began speaking out, debating their role in society and campaigning for change. On the last Sunday in February in 1909, the first US National Woman’s Day was declared by the Socialist Party of America, which continued to be observed in the USA until 1913. Two thousand women came together in New York to discuss equal rights and demand women’s suffrage[5].
At the International Conference of Working Women held in Copenhagen in 1910, Clara Zetkin (Leader of the ‘Women’s Office’ for the Social Democratic Party in Germany, one of the founders of the International Socialist, and later a representative of the German Communist Party during the Weimar Republic) proposed the concept of an annual international women’s day. Her idea was that every country should celebrate women and demand action for universal suffrage and women’s rights on the same day every year. At the conference, over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties, working women’s clubs and politics, unanimously approved Zetkin’s suggestion.
On 19 March 1911, IWD was inaugurated in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland. At IWD rallies, more than one million men and women campaigned for women’s rights. In 1913, IWD was celebrated for the first time on 8 March, which has remained the unofficial global date ever since.
Leading up to the outbreak of and during World War I, IWD also became a day to protest war. Women campaigned for peace in Russia in 1913 on the last Sunday in February, which became Russia’s first women’s day. Women in other parts of Europe on 8 March 1914 rallied in solidarity. In 1917 (again on the last Sunday in February under the Gregorian calendar, which happened to be 8 March in the West), Russian women protested for ‘Bread and Peace’ as part of a series of events that led to the abdication of the Czar and the downfall of Romanov rule. Women were subsequently granted the right to vote by the provisional Government, the first major power to do so. Following this, IWD became synonymous with the date of 8 March in Europe. Further, Lenin (with the help of Zetkin) declared IWD a communist holiday in 1922, and it was subsequently taken up by communists around the world (for example, in Spain in 1936) until well into the 1960s[6].
Post-WW2 IWD
The decades between the start of WWI and the end of WWII saw universal suffrage in many countries around the world and increased opportunities for women in higher education.
Each war also saw an increase in women entering the workforce of those countries involved. Working women were, however, not paid equally with men, and there was a general trend, that men returning from war took back the jobs held by women. While this occurred after both wars, the period of economic growth after World War II resulted in a need for an expanded labour force, and thus women often retained or later regained work in higher numbers than after WWI (when recession caused high levels of unemployment). The unequal pay, uneven rights and discrimination working women experienced post-WWII led to strikes, protests, and increased female participation in unions. This formed the foundations of future feminist movements over the course of the next few decades.
Against this background, the 1945 UN Charter was the first international agreement to acknowledge that men and women are equal. The Preamble recognised the equal rights of men and women and Article One stated that one of the purposes of the UN is to promote and encourage “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to sex”[7]. The sentiments of the UN Charter regarding the equality between men and women were reaffirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (and later in The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of 1966).
In 1946, the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) established The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to prepare recommendations and develop proposals of implementation that related to urgent problems requiring immediate attention with respect to women’s rights and equality with men. Initially, between 1949 and 1959, the CSW therefore focused on areas in which it perceived women were particularly vulnerable, including political and marriage rights.
Also in the 1950s, 8 March became a symbolic day to celebrate women, particularly in France, Italy and in Eastern Europe by socialist parties and movements[8].
IWD in the 1960s-80s
The 1960s and 1970s saw feminism gain momentum as an international social and political movement, as more and more people recognised the many forms of discrimination faced by women around the world. Second-wave feminism, as this movement has been referred to, extended the struggle for women’s rights to those concerned with sexuality, domestic violence, reproductive rights and de facto inequalities, among others[9].
The CSW was tasked in 1963 with preparing a document that collated all international standards and principles regarding equal rights between men and women. This eventually resulted in the Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women being adopted in 1967; however, it was only a non-binding statement of intent. In 1972, the UN General Assembly formally asked the CSW to work on a binding treaty, which led to the setting up of a working group in the 1970s and the eventual presentation of a convention in 1979 (see below).
In the meantime, the UN General Assembly designated 1975 as ‘International Women’s Year’, celebrated the first formally UN-backed IWD on 8 March that year, and organised the first World Conference on Women in Mexico City during the summer of 1975. Following the conference, International Women’s Year was extended, with the UN declaring 1976 to 1985 the ‘UN Decade for Women’. At the conference, the UN also established a Voluntary Fund for the UN Decade for Women, which eventually rolled into the agency UNIFEM (now UN WOMEN).
In December 1977, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming a United Nations Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace to be observed on any day of the year by Member States, in accordance with their historical and national traditions. In the years following, countries around the world declared 8 March as IWD, including France in 1982.
In 1979, apparently buoyed by the outcomes of 1975, the UN adopted the CSW-developed Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which became the key international agreement on women’s human rights. The CEDAW gained legal effect in 1981, after it was ratified by 20 countries. Since then, 189 countries have become parties to the CEDAW.
A backlash against second-wave feminism in the 1980s, dubbed by the media as ‘post-feminism’, led to an impasse in feminist theory and activism in that decade. Post-feminists particularly lamented the second wave’s ethno-centrism and binary views of sexuality[10].
IWD in the 1990s
In the 1990s, third-wave feminism set out to address the issues highlighted by the post-feminist backlash by redefining what it means to be a feminist, and to recognise the diversity of women and more broadly, the fluidity of gender[11].
After the 1975 Conference in Mexico, the UN held a further three summits with respect to women and gender equality, including in Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985 and, perhaps the most significant, Beijing in 1995. Here, 189 countries adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, an agenda for women’s empowerment, which contained policy objectives in 12 areas of concern for women, including poverty, education, health, violence, media, and the environment. The CSW’s mandate was expanded in 1996 to monitor and review progress on the Beijing Declaration as well as ensure mainstreaming of women’s issues across the UN’s work streams[12]. Civil society, particularly women’s groups and networks and other non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations, in cooperation with Governments, was also encouraged to take on roles of implementation and monitoring of the Beijing Declaration[13].
Mainstreaming of these issues has since been a focus of many UN bodies and policies[14], including in development (for example, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and more recently the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)), peacebuilding (such as Resolution 1325) and institutionally (for example, the creation of UN WOMEN in 2010).
Perhaps influenced by the Beijing Declaration, the IWD thus took on a more official nature after the Summit. For example, the UN adopted annual themes for IWD, including: ‘Women at the Peace table’ in 1997 in line with the women, peace and security agenda; and ‘Women Uniting for Peace’ in 2000. Further, UN Secretary-Generals Annan and Moon each sought to highlight the importance of the day through press statements, speeches, and initiatives[15].
IWD in the 21st century
Since the turn of the 21st century, IWD has taken on new meanings and connections, which appear to be closely related to its move into the virtual world, influence of international and national policy agendas, the rise of online feminist discourse, and adoption by the corporate world.
Despite some progress, inequalities continue to exist between men and women across the world[16].
Digital IWD
In 2001, the global digital hub ‘internationalwomensday.com’ launched as a platform for IWD[17]. The hub website notes that “the global focus on equality and celebration is clear” with respect to the overall mission guiding IWD. It also sets out the specific values of the day, noting that they “provide an important parameter for guiding the action, behaviours and ethos associated” with IWD[18]. The values include justice, dignity, hope, equality, collaboration, tenacity, appreciation, respect, empathy and forgiveness and are very much rooted in the work of the Suffragettes in the early twentieth century, and the women who launched the original global women’s day in Europe in 1911. The values are very broad and perhaps do not reflect the evolution in theories of feminism that have developed since. For example, they only indirectly refer to diversity among women and do not mention intersectionality or, more specifically, the multidimensional nature of the struggles of women around the world, such as those of disabled women, minority women, low-caste women, indigenous women, poor women, or uneducated women.
The website claims that it sees vast amounts of traffic each year by millions of people and organisations wanting to learn about and share IWD content. To investigate this claim more closely, in 2017 I looked at the analytics related to the search term ‘international womens day’, ‘womens day’ and ‘IWD’ on Google Trends. This revealed that each year around 8 March, there is indeed a spike in searches relating to IWD.
As shown by Figure 1, since 2004, there has been an upward trend in use of the search terms. The jump in 2011 can be explained by increased activity around the day by the UN and political leaders, as it represented the 100 year anniversary since the first international women’s day celebrated in 2011 in Europe. Many initiatives were launched to mark this centenary. For example, in the US, President Barack Obama proclaimed March 2011 to be “Women’s History Month” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled the “100 Women Initiative: Empowering Women and Girls through International Exchanges”.
Figure 1: Interest over time in the search terms ‘international womens day’, ‘womens day’ and ‘IWD’ on Google (2004–2017)
It also appears that the search term ‘international womens day’ is most popular regionally in Australia, followed by the UK, Canada, India and the US, as is shown in Figure 2. And when looking at cities in Figure 3, the search term is most popular in five Australian cities followed by Dublin, Vancouver and Toronto, London and Manchester, then several cities in India and the US. Except for India, these figures demonstrate that IWD has its highest profile in Western countries.
Figure 2: Interest by region in the search term ‘international womens day’ on Google (2004–2017)
Figure 3: Interest by city in the search term ‘international womens day’ on Google (2004–2017)
Like the UN, the IWD website too adopts a theme each year to provide a framework and pathway for participants. The theme for IWD in 2017 was ‘Be Bold for Change’. The campaign sponsor was Ernst & Young with various other companies and charities supporting. The site provided several online resources, logos, videos, event and fundraising ideas and of course the hashtag #beboldforchange for people and organisations to use to share the messages of IWD on social media, at events and beyond.
The Politicisation of IWD
At the national level, IWD is an official holiday in at least 27 countries including Afghanistan, China (for women only), Cuba, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, Nepal (for women only), Uganda, and Vietnam. However, in many of these countries, IWD has taken on the flavour and tone of other more consumer-driven days like Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, on which women are showered with gifts of appreciation[19].
In the Soviet Union, IWD was declared a non-work day in 1965. Now, commentators have suggested that elevating IWD from a day of work or ‘action’ to one of ‘rest’ has reflected “a shift in what kind of womanliness is to be extolled” — from strong, brave women in the military and science to more traditional notions such as beauty and motherhood[20].
At the international level, IWD has also been politicised in recent years. In 2015, the UN reviewed and reported on the implementation of the Beijing Declaration. In the words of the Executive Director of UN Women Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the resulting report was a “wake-up call” as it revealed the lack of progress and in some instances the fact that the situation for women and girls had even worsened[21].
Starting in that same year, the UN aligned its messages around IWD with its key development policy document, the 2030 Agenda — known more popularly as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — including Goal 5 about gender equality[22]. UN Secretary-General António Guterres linked IWD to the SDGs in his IWD video message in 2017[23]. A similar connection was made by the Director-General of UNESCO Irina Bokova in her message[24] and the UN Women Executive Director in her speech at the UN on IWD[25].
The UN Secretary-General also stated his commitment to include more women in peace and security work, in line with the UN’s women, peace and security agenda. More broadly, in his full message for IWD in 2017[26], he discussed the legal, economic and power inequalities faced by women and argued that empowering women and greater gender equality can have a transformative effect not only for women, but also more broadly for communities, societies and economies.
The UN has been criticised however for its binary vision of gender, and lack of attention or focus on gender or indeed sexual fluidity, as well as the lack of attention on the structural causes of gender-based inequalities and discrimination[27]. Indeed, while the SDGs do include targets focused on the diversity of women and girls within the gender equality goal and more broadly, they don’t address either of these criticisms.
Online feminism
With the digital revolution and the rise of social media in the 2000s, came what has been dubbed fourth-wave feminism[28] or online feminism[29]. The movement is largely defined by technology, and the ability to use social media to quickly band together, share and aggregate content, and organise events, projects, and protests. The direction of IWD in online feminist discourse has similarly followed this trend and has also increased in awareness and political action as a result. At the time I undertook this research, IWD 2017 was said to have been the most political yet in the day’s history[30].
For example, online movements organised widespread strikes and marches for IWD 2017, notably ‘A Day Without Woman’[31] and ‘International Women’s Strike’[32], which called on women to take a day of work to protest against the gender pay gap, a lack of paid parental leave and reproductive rights. Other similar events were organised around the world in Australia, China, Japan, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Poland[33].
Civil society more broadly has also become part of this online conversation and movement, from large NGOs like Oxfam[34] and Care International UK[35], to feminist groups and networks[36], journalists[37] and social influencers and celebrities[38].
Corporate IWD
In recent years, IWD has not only been taken up politically, but also by corporate interests. The website notes that although IWD itself is an official top-down UN project, and agencies throughout the UN system organise events and initiatives for IWD, it largely relies on corporate projects as well as local grassroots activities, including rallies, conferences, meetings, speeches, networking events and performances. It states that IWD is thus not the sole responsibility of any government, NGO or other organisation, but rather is a day for every entity and individual to contribute in their own way to women’s empowerment.
There is evidence that the IWD website itself is managed by big business[39] given its focus on many gender-focused initiatives for companies around the world like Ernst & Young, Accenture, Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation, Cisco, African Development Bank, British Petroleum, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Western Union and more, as well as the fact that many of these global businesses are sponsors or partners of IWD, supporting it in some instances as part of their gender quality, inclusion and diversity initiatives and broader CSR efforts. Many of the website’s sponsors have a landing page on the IWD site, including Ernst & Young[40]. On its page, it presents information on the company’s gender policies and statistics, as well as its ‘Women. Fast Forward’ initiative[41].
Elsewhere, business has also been more and more active on social media in relation to IWD, with high profile campaigns in recent years by Western Union, IKEA Switzerland, Proctor & Gamble and United Colours of Benetton[42].
Owing to the piecemeal approach to IWD since becoming an official UN day in 1975, it is now practised in diverse ways across the world, including across nations, societies, sectors, institutions, organisations, and at the grassroots level. The multiplicity is due to several factors, including the extent to which IWD has been politicised and/or corporatised at both the international and national levels.
References
[1] Temma Kaplan, T. (1985). On the socialist origins of International Women’s Day. Feminist Studies. 11(1): 163–171.
[2] Kandel, L. & Picq, F. (1982). “Le Mythe des origines à propos de la journée internationale des femmes.” La Revue d’En Face. pp67–80. See also http://8mars.info/le-mythe-des-origines-du-8-mars?lang=fr.
[3] Kaplan, 1985.
[4] Rampton, M. (2015). Four Waves of Feminism. Pacific University. Retrieved from https://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/news-events/four-waves-feminism.
[5] Kaplan, 1985.
[6] Kaplan, 1985.
[7] United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 24 October 1945, 1 UNTS XVI, retrieved from http://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-i/index.html.
[8] Kandel & Picq, 1982.
[9] Rampton, 2015. Retrieved from https://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/news-events/four-waves-feminism.
[10] See, for example: Walker, R. (1995). ‘Being Real: An Introduction,’ in Walker, R. (Ed.) To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. Anchor Books: New York.
[11] Ibid.
[12] UN Women, Commission on the Status of Women. Retrieved from http://www.unwomen.org/en/csw.
[13] United Nations, Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action, adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women, 27 October 1995, Art 20.
[14] United Nations (UN). (2002). Gender mainstreaming: An overview. New York: United Nations.
[15] See for example, Kofi Annan’s statement in relation to IWD 1997 at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/feature/iwd/1997/ ; and coverage of Ban-Ki Moon’s speech on IWD 2012 at http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=41479&Cr=gender+equality&Cr1#.WTu6C3rXuVs .
[16] World Economic Forum, The Global Gender Gap Report 2016. Retrieved from http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2016/.
[17] Retrieved from https://www.internationalwomensday.com/.
[18] Retrieved from https://www.internationalwomensday.com/Values.
[19] Petras, M. (2016). Collective Memory of Intenrational Women’s Day in Part of the Feminist Community in Croatia. SIC Journal. Retrieved from https://www.sic-journal.org/ArticleView.aspx?aid=204.
[20] Morton. E. (2017). International Women’s Day: what values does 8 March really celebrate in the New East? The Calvert Journal. Retrieved from http://www.calvertjournal.com/opinion/show/7868/international-womens-day-march.
[21] UN Women. (2015). Summary Report: The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action Turns 20. New York: United Nations: p6.
[22] Retrieved from http://www.un.org/en/events/womensday/index.shtml.
[23] See António Guterres’s video message on IWD 2017 at http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2017/03/video-secretary-generals-message-for-international-womens-day-2017/.
[24] Retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002474/247425e.pdf.
[25] Retrieved from http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2017/2/statement-ed-phumzile-iwd-2017.
[26] See António Guterres’s video message on IWD 2017 at http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2017/03/video-secretary-generals-message-for-international-womens-day-2017/ and the full text http://www.un.org/en/events/womensday/sgmessage.shtml
[27] See, for example, https://www.womenpeacemakersprogram.org/news/post-2015-womens-coalition-response-to/.
[28] The Guardian, 2013, The fourth wave of feminism: meet the rebel women. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/fourth-wave-feminism-rebel-women.
[29] Martin, C. E. & Valenti, V. #FemFuture: Online Revolution. Vol. 8. Barnard Center for Research on Women. Retrieved from http://bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/nfs/reports/NFS8-FemFuture-Online-Revolution-Report.pdf.
[30] The Guardian, 2017, ‘We are international, we are everywhere’: women unite in global strike. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/08/international-womens-day-political-global-strike
[31] See, for example, https://www.womensmarch.com/womensday.
[32] Jezebel, 2017. ‘Watch Out You Machista’: A Network of Feminist Activists is Building Across Latin America. Retrieved from http://jezebel.com/watch-out-you-machista-a-network-of-feminist-activist-1793131419.
[33] See, for example, http://time.com/4694755/international-womens-day-2017-world/.
[34] Oxfam. 2014. International Women’s Day 2014. Retrieved from https://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/international-womens-day-2014 ; and
[35] Care International UK. #March4Women — International Women’s Day Event. Retrieved from http://www.careinternational.org.uk/march4women-international-women%E2%80%99s-day-event
[36] Jezebel, 2017.
[37] ELLE UK, 2017. Gloria Steinem On Feminism, Donald Trump, and Why Women Won’t Be Silenced. Retrieved from http://www.elleuk.com/life-and-culture/culture/longform/a34457/gloria-steinem-feminism-interview/.
[38] See, for example, https://www.newswhip.com/2017/03/international-womens-day-on-instagram/.
[39] See, for example, http://www.christinemcnab.com/cmcnab-blog/2017/3/10/who-owns-international-womens-day.
[40] Retrieved from https://www.internationalwomensday.com/EY
[41] Retrieved from http://www.ey.com/gl/en/issues/business-environment/women-fast-forward.
[42] See, for example, https://brand24.com/blog/womens-day-2017-social-media-campaigns/.