Robin Oomkes pays tribute to the founder of International Women’s Day…
There are two interesting facts about International Women’s Day, which is celebrated worldwide every March 8th. One is that, apart from religious feasts, it’s the oldest internationally observed annual holiday. The other is that it came about via Clara Zetkin, a German writer, politician and public speaker who considered feminism a phenomenon for upper class women; to Zetkin, it was socialism that would set working class people free, women and men alike.
But that didn’t stop her proposing a special day to demand equal rights for women—universal suffrage, specifically—at a Socialist Women’s International meeting in Copenhagen in 1910. The proposal was accepted and from 1911, Women’s Day was celebrated on March 19th, mainly in German-speaking countries.
In 1917, as a reaction to the horrors of World War One, German communists added the concept of ‘peace’ to the day’s objectives. The date was moved to 8th March in 1921 as a tribute to the strike organised by female workers in St. Petersburg that triggered 1917’s February Revolution—Russia at the time was still on the Julian Calendar so March 8th in the West was February there—which in turn marked the beginning of Russia’s socialist revolution.
In Germany, Women’s Day is still very much regarded as a socialist as well as a communist phenomenon. After the 1917 split between Communists and Social Democrats, there were even two separate Women’s Days for a while, which the Nazis replaced with a single Mother’s Day to undermine the event’s leftist credentials and emphasise the importance of motherhood.
After World War Two, the Soviet Authorities reintroduced Women’s Day in the Eastern Zone and it remained a state-sponsored socialist affair until the end of the GDR in 1989. The GDR memorialised Zetkin by putting her on their ten mark banknote and twenty mark coin and, in 1954, established the Clara Zetkin Medal (Clara-Zetkin-Medaille) to honour female women’s rights activists.
Its communist connotations meant that West Germany hesitated introducing its own Women’s Day until the broader feminist movement gathered pace there during the 1970s. Likewise, the United Nations only mo…