Why is Women’s Day celebrated on March 8?

He Women’s day It has been celebrated for years, a key event in the world where we remember the importance of women in the world and all that they have achieved throughout history.

However, despite the great value they have, there are still cracks to heal. For example, and according to data from the HIMhay 2.7 billion women do not have access to the same job options that one in three men or women continue to experience gender-based violence. To eradicate these inequalities and more, it takes advantage of March 8. Now why that day? We tell you in the following note.

It has its roots in the labor movement from the middle of the 19th century, years in which women began to make their voices heard. At that time, the life of women in the West was a continuous story limitsthey did not have the right to vote, they did not manage their own accounts, they had no training and even their life expectancy was much lower than that of men because of childbirth and ill-treatment.

It was this mistreatment that created concern between them and, in 1948, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucrezia Mottboth from the United States, gathered hundreds of people in their country in the first national convention for women’s rights. There they argued that “all men and women are created equal”, demanding civil, social, political and religious rights for the collective.

As pointed out by HIM In a special on women’s activism over the years, this group of women was mocked, including for wanting the right to vote. However, the important thing was that they had already planted a seed, which would grow in the following years.

In 1908, a march of 15,000 demonstrators took place in New York demanding fewer working hours, better wages and the right to vote. Historians agree that this act was the direct prelude to International Women’s Day. A year later, the Socialist Party of America proclaims National Women’s Day, held for the first time in the United States on February 28.

In this context, German communist Clara Zetkin burst onto the scene, making history as a promoter of International Women’s Day. In 1910 and at the International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen (Denmark), she suggested the idea of ​​commemorating a women’s day on a global scale.

The proposal was heard by women from 17 countries and unanimously approved, but without agreeing on a specific date, although no date was agreed. A year later, with more than a million people in Germany, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland, The first International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 19, 1911.

There the demands multiplied: not only the right to vote and public office, but also the right to work for women, vocational training and non-discrimination in the workplace.

However, and as the HIMin its beginnings “the commemoration of International Women’s Day also serves as a protest against the First World War” is one of the keys to why the date of March 8 ended up being chosen, although there are several versions of why this day was chosen.

As part of the movements of pro peace which arose on the eve of World War I, Russian women celebrated their first International Women’s Day on the last Sunday of February 1913. In the rest of Europe, women held rallies around March 8, 1914 to protest the war or to show solidarity with other women,” the organization reports.

In reaction to the millions of dead Russian soldiers, the pink women take to the streets again with the slogan “bread and peace” on the last Sunday of February and continue for several days, which will culminate in the departure of the Tsar (west King).

“The metalworkers joined in her protests despite the fact that the Bolsheviks considered the mobilization of women to be reckless. On February 25, two days after the start of the women’s uprising on International Women’s Day, the Tsar ordered to shoot if necessary to end the women’s revolution,” says American historian Temma Kaplan, in “On the Socialist Origins of International Women’s Day”. ”.

Kaplan recounts that the Tsar’s measure failed and instead began “the February Revolution”, ending with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March. Shortly after, the success of Russian women was consecrated: the Provisional Government that formed after the withdrawal of the Tsar gave them the right to vote.

The peculiarity of all this is that the date on which this strike began in the Julian calendar, then the reference date in Russia, was Sunday February 23, but in the Gregorian calendar it was March 8, i.e. the date on which it is celebrated now.

In 1945, the United Nations was created to promote international cooperation after the ravages of the Second World War and the Charter of this multilateral organization became the first international agreement to enshrine gender equality. Thirty years later, in 1975, the United Nations established and celebrated International Women’s Day for the first time on March 8. coinciding with International Women’s Year.