Who Started International Women’s Day and Who Owns it Now?
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I’m trapped in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. I’ll try to smooth this out later. Tnx.
The lead story of this morning’s Democracy Now! was International Women’s Day. In Amy Goodman’s introduction, the first celebration was due to a ‘…group of women from seventeen countries gathered in Copenhagen…’ but her first guest, Kavita Ramdas, said:
…it actually started right here in New York City. It was a group of—prior to 1910, it was a group of activist women laborers in New York City who were challenging the fact that women in sweatshops used to be locked up in those sweatshops. And because the Socialist Movement made that workers’ struggle a banner and a cause, the United States essentially shut down any recognition of its own history…
The official International Women’s Day 2010 website attributes the first International Women’s Day to Clara Zetkin head of the Women’s Office of the Social Democratic Party in Germany. It was held on March 19 to commemorate the King of Prussia making concessions to the proletariat during the revolution of 1848. The website is registered in the .com top level domain and has sponsorship ads from the European Investment Bank and Thomson Reuters. Reuters got it’s start with men rowing out to incoming ships in New York harbor to get ‘advance news’ for select Wall Street patrons i.e. asymmetrizing information.1 Reuters got it’s start as neither socialists nor free market capitalists.
The United Nations website mentions the first National Women’s Day occuring on February 23, 1909
In What were the Origins of International Women’s Day, 1886-1920?, by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Lauren Kryzak. (Binghamton, NY: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000).
National Woman’s Day is Celebrated in the U.S. , 1909
In 1908 the Socialist Party of the U.S. established a Woman’s National Committee. One of the Committee’s first acts was to declare that the last Sunday in February should be recognized as National Woman’s Day. The first celebrations took place the following year, February 23, 1909. (See Document 9) In subsequent years National Woman’s Day was widely celebrated by socialists, working women, and middle-class reformers. (See Documents 6-15).
But farther down:
Women’s Day is Celebrated Internationally in Europe in 1911
The success of National Woman’s Day in the United States in 1910 probably influenced Clara Zetkin and other delegates in 1910 at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen, who created a Women’s Day, “to aid in the attainment of women’s suffrage.” … The first “International Woman’s Day” was held on the 19th of March, 1911, that day commemorating an 1848 uprising in Prussia. In 1913 International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 8, the date on which it is still celebrated today.
This publication is available to Harvard ID holders as an internet resource. The electronic redistributer Alexandra Street Press does have about a quarter of it’s catalog available for free. Unfortunately this isn’t one of them, but you can ask you librarian to request a free trial.
A significant confusion factor in this story is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire which occurred just weeks after the first International Women’s Day.
The officer, apparently oblivious to the three dead young women at his feet is probably looking up at other young women trying to decide whether it’s better to jump to their death than be burned. [Photo: unknown]
1For those of you who have forgotten or never taken Harvard’s Ec 10 asymmetric information is the bane of the ideal classical market in the form of the Welfare Theorem.
