International Women's Day

• 1. Introduction

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  International Women's Day falls every year on the 8th of March, observed in over a hundred countries, made a public holiday in dozens of them, and tied by the United Nations to a different theme with each passing year. But the date almost never existed. For most of its early history, the day had no fixed date at all. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a gathering of socialist workers in New York in 1909 become one of the most globally recognised days on the calendar? And how did it travel from radical labor movements and revolutionary street protests all the way to corporate breakfast events and flipped hamburger logos?

• 2. The Labor Origins

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  On the 28th of February 1909, in New York City, the Socialist Party of America held the first Women's Day event, organized at the suggestion of an activist named Theresa Malkiel. The gathering focused on conditions for working women. Some later claimed the date was chosen to honor a protest by women garment workers on the 8th of March 1857, but researchers who investigated that origin story concluded it was a myth.

  The following year, in August 1910, an International Socialist Women's Conference convened in Copenhagen, Denmark, ahead of the broader Socialist Second International meeting. Among the German delegates were Clara Zetkin, Kate Duncker, and Paula Thiede. They proposed making a women's day an annual, international event. The hundred delegates present, representing seventeen countries, agreed. No date was set. The purpose, as the delegates understood it, was strategic: a recurring day of mobilisation to push for equal rights, with women's suffrage at the centre.

  On the 19th of March 1911, the first true International Women's Day saw over a million people take part in Austria-Hungary, Denmark, Germany, and Switzerland. In Austria-Hungary alone, there were three hundred demonstrations. Women carried banners along Vienna's Ringstrasse honouring the martyrs of the Paris Commune. The date shifted year by year and country by country after that, until Germany settled on the 8th of March in 1914, possibly because that year it fell on a Sunday. German women would not win the vote until 1918.

• 3. Revolution and the Date

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  On the 8th of March 1917 in Petrograd, known on the Julian calendar as the 23rd of February, women textile workers walked out of their factories and asked neighbouring workers to join them. Their demand was captured in three words: "Bread and Peace." They wanted an end to World War I, an end to food shortages, and an end to Tsarism. Leon Trotsky later wrote about that morning, noting that the demonstrations had been foreseen but that nobody had imagined "this 'Women's Day' would inaugurate the revolution." Within seven days, Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated, and the provisional government granted women the right to vote.

  What followed was a long, slow institutional process to fix the 8th of March as the official date. The Bolsheviks began marking it, but the Communist International did not formally adopt it quickly. Alexandra Kollontai submitted a resolution to the first congress of the Communist International on the 6th of March 1919, but it made no mention of the date. It was not until the Second International Conference of Communist Women, held alongside the third world congress of the Communist International in 1921, that the date was fixed. A Bulgarian delegation proposed a single universal date. A representative of the Russian Soviet Republic named Nikolaeva proposed the 8th of March specifically, in memory of the Petrograd women's demonstrations of 1917. The proposal passed unanimously.

  From that moment, the holiday spread through communist states and movements. Chinese communists began observing it in 1922. In 1927, a march in Guangzhou drew twenty-five thousand women and male supporters, with participants from the Kuomintang, the YWCA, and labor organisations. After the founding of the People's Republic of China on the 1st of October 1949, the State Council declared on the 23rd of December that the 8th of March would be an official holiday, with women granted a half-day off.

• 4. Suffrage, Protest, Arrest

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  In 1914, while Germany held its first the 8th of March observance, a simultaneous march took place in London in support of women's suffrage. Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested in front of Charing Cross station that day, on her way to speak at Trafalgar Square.

  The history of the day is filled with such moments of protest meeting state force. In Tehran in 1979, a march intended to celebrate International Women's Day transformed into massive protests against mandatory veiling, which had been announced the day before. Thousands of women participated over six days, from the 8th of March to the 14th of March. The protests led to a temporary withdrawal of the mandatory veiling decree. When conservatives gained sole control of the government, veiling was enforced anyway.

  In Argentina, on the 8th of March 1984, the first International Women's Day demonstrations since the end of the military regime took place at the Congressional Plaza in Buenos Aires. The event was organised by the Multisectorial de la Mujer, a coalition of women's groups, feminists, housewives, and political representatives. Activist Maria Elena Oddone climbed the stairs of the Monument of the Two Congresses and raised a banner reading "No to motherhood, yes to pleasure." The press attacked the banner as too provocative. The feminist movement itself repudiated her. Oddone later wrote in her autobiography that she replied to her critics: "I am not a feminist to please anyone but to tell the truth about our condition. I did not write those banners to be liked. If they caused scandal, it is because the truth is always scandalous."

  In China in 2015, five women known as the Feminist Five were detained for thirty-seven days after planning to hand out anti-sexual harassment stickers on the subway in the days before the 8th of March. Their arrest drew protests across the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Hong Kong, India, Poland, and Australia. They were released on bail on the 13th of April 2015.

• 5. Second-Wave Renewal

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  By the late 1960s, International Women's Day had been largely forgotten in the United States. An activist named Laura X organised a march in Berkeley, California, on the day in 1969. That march led directly to the creation of the Women's History Research Center, which collected nearly one million documents on microfilm covering the women's liberation movement from 1968 to 1974. Laura X also called for a National Women's History Month built around International Women's Day. The organisation's work carried on through the National Women's History Alliance, which successfully petitioned Congress to declare March as Women's History Month.

  In Europe around the same period, the day re-emerged as a day of activism, sometimes called the "Women's International Day of Struggle". Through the 1970s and 1980s, women's groups were joined by leftists and labor organisations demanding equal pay, equal legal rights, reproductive rights, subsidized child care, and an end to violence against women.

  The United Nations began celebrating International Women's Day in 1975, the year it had designated as International Women's Year. In 1977, the UN General Assembly invited member states to proclaim any day of the year as a day for women's rights and international peace. In practice, the 8th of March became the standard for the UN and most of the world. Each year's observance has since been anchored to a specific theme, from "Women and Human Rights" in 1998 to "DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality" in 2023.

• 6. Corporate Capture and Critique

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  By the twenty-first century, critics began to describe International Women's Day as heavily diluted and commercialised, particularly in the West. The website internationalwomensday.com launched in 2001 and was managed by a British marketing firm called Aurora Ventures, running on corporate sponsorship. The site promoted its own hashtag themes each year, separate from the UN theme, and those hashtags circulated internationally. Some social critics compared the resulting observances to Mother's Day greetings.

  In 2018 and 2019, McDonald's flipped the arches on its social media accounts, turning the letter M into a W. A franchise in Lynwood, California, operated by Patricia Williams, flipped the physical sign on its building. A backlash followed, with critics pointing out the chain's pay record for its workforce.

  In 2021, Burger King UK posted a tweet stating "Women belong in the kitchen." The tweet was framed as a lead-in to a message about changing the gender ratio in the restaurant industry, but thousands of users and dozens of publications called it sexist. The original tweet was deleted twelve hours later, and an apology followed.

  The tension between commercial participation and political purpose runs through the day's recent history. In 1995, the Women's Committee of Glasgow City Council erected a plaque beside the Suffrage Oak marking that the tree had been planted by women's suffrage organisations in Glasgow on the 20th of April 1918, the year German women finally won the vote too. The Suffrage Science award, a prize for women in science, engineering, and computing, was founded in 2011 on the hundredth anniversary of International Women's Day by the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences.

• 7. A Turning Point in France

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  On International Women's Day in 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron presided over a ceremony making France the first country in the world to constitutionally guarantee the right to abortion. The move came after lawmakers had approved the measure, and the ceremony on the 8th of March gave it a deliberate symbolic framing.

  The day has continued to serve as a hinge point for legislative and constitutional action across many countries. Berlin became the first German state to make the 8th of March an official public holiday in 2019, with parliament approving the measure in January of that year. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania followed in 2022. In Italy, the mimosa became the day's symbol in 1946, chosen by communist politician Teresa Mattei at the request of Luigi Longo; she favoured it over the French symbols of violets and lilies of the valley because those flowers were too scarce and expensive in poor, rural Italian regions.

  In the United States, actress and human rights activist Beata Pozniak worked from the 1980s onward with the Mayor of Los Angeles and the Governor of California to lobby Congress. In 1994, per her suggestion, Representative Maxine Waters introduced House Joint Resolution 316 to recognise the 8th of March as International Women's Day. The UN's own theme for 2026 carries three words: "Rights. Justice. Action."