Today is March 8, International Women’s Day. It has a longer and more diverse history than you might expect. Let’s have a look.
The very first Women’s Day (that we know of) was called National Woman’s Day, and it was February 28, 1909! I bet you didn’t see that year coming. It wasn’t a calm day of commemoration, either; it was no Mothers’ Day. On the contrary, it was an overtly political observance, organized in New York City by the Socialist Party of America.
It didn’t take long to grow from National Woman’s Day to International Women’s Day. In fact it was just 18 months later that an International Socialist Women’s Conference was organized in Copenhagen. They’d been inspired by the Socialist Party of America’s day for women, and just seven months later, the first International Women’s Day was held on March 19, 1911.
International Women’s Day featured demonstrations demanding the right to vote, the right to hold public office, and against discrimination against women in employment. The day was celebrated on different dates for the first few years, and it fell on March 8 for the first time in 1914 (possibly because March 8 was a Sunday that year). After its start in North America, it became primarily a European commemoration. Its signature issue was women’s suffrage, but when the Great War came along, International Women’s Day also featured calls for an end to the conflict, an end to food shortages and starvation, and in Russia, an end to czarism. In 1917 the day turned out to be hugely significant because it marked the beginning of the February Revolution. That was the start of the Russian Revolution that ended the rule of the czars and instituted the socialist Soviet government. And eventually the new state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
After that, International Women’s Day was for years mostly celebrated in communist countries. In fact, when a country adopted a new socialist or communist regime, one of the things they seemed to do was declare March 8 International Women’s Day, and make it a holiday. In some cases, like China, women get the day off but men didn’t.
It wasn’t until 1967 that the day expanded much beyond the socialist/communist world. That was the year it was adopted by the feminist movement, slightly rebranded as Women’s International Day of Struggle, and widened its scope to call for equality in opportunity, legal rights, and pay, affordable child care, reproductive rights, and an end to violence against women. The idea of such a day gained enough momentum that the United Nations adopted it in 1975. And they went one better, too; they declared 1975 to be International Women’s Year.
Since then International Women’s Day has been taken up by corporations, and as a result it seems to have lost some of its edge. It was originally a call for radical social reforms. But corporations don’t really do radical, so the day now features a slightly vague and blandly-designed call for equality rather than huge demonstrations and civil disobedience.
It even has a website: https://internationalwomensday.com. It includes plenty of well-dressed, smiling, prosperous people working as hard as they can to…distribute hashtags? Yes, really. This year’s is #InspireInclusion. But it must be working, because everybody on that website looks very, very happy.
For all that it’s International Women’s Day, I couldn’t find many notable accomplishments by women that happened on March 8. There is one interesting one, though. It was March 8, 1910 — exactly one year before the first International Women’s Day was held — that Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman to hold a pilot’s license. In those days you only needed a license if you were going to be a commercial pilot. And only in France, because Aeroclub de France was the first organization in the world to issue pilots’ licenses at all. It’s thought that de Laroche could very well be the first woman ever to pilot an airplane too, but at this point it’s impossible to know for sure. Regardless, she was certainly one of the very first.
Later on she became a test pilot, and that occupation took her life in 1919 when an experimental plane she was piloting crashed. International Women’s Day doesn’t commemorate Raymonde de Laroche, but Women of Aviation Worldwide Week does (it’s the week each year that includes March 8). So does a statue at Paris-Le Bourget Airport.
Women of Aviation Worldwide Week has better activities than just resending hashtags, too. There are hands-on events in 52 countries, including taking women and girls up in small aircraft for their first flights. Tens of thousands have done that. Maybe International Women’s Day will eventually have its own air force.
