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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
The following
FAQ is a contribution of the PH:ACTS people’s history collective
to Human
Rights Atlanta’s observance of IWD 2009. HRA is not responsible
for the content. For more
information, please contact phacts@mindspring.com.
What
is International Women’s Day?
International
Women’s Day is an annual day of recognition observed around
the world on the
Eighth of March. We celebrate the achievements and contributions
of women in the past. We
educate each other about the conditions, needs, rights, and demands
of women in the present.
We mobilize everyone, women and men, for the complete liberation
of women and all people in
the future. In the United States, IWD is now the anchor of Women’s
History Month in March.
What
is the goal of IWD?
The overarching
goal of IWD is to promote friendship, understanding, and solidarity
among
women worldwide. In a divided and unequal world, we “hold
up half the sky.” Coming from all
countries, cultures, communities, and classes, women can find commonality
in diversity. United,
we are a tremendous force for peace and justice, locally and globally.
What
are the origins of IWD?
The origins
of International Women’s Day are found a century ago in the
labor and women’s
movements in the U.S. New York women socialists rallied for women’s
suffrage in March 1908,
and the American Socialist Party observed National Woman’s
Day in February 1909. These
actions were reinforced by a great strike movement among women workers
in the garment and
needle trades. Following the call of the German socialist leader
Clara Zetkin, the first
International Women’s Day was held in March 1911. Marches,
rallies, and strikes in observance
of IWD grew over the next several years, despite the outbreak of
the First World War. In fact,
peace activists founded the Women’s International League for
Peace and Freedom in 1915. The
culmination of these protests was the famous strike of Russian women
workers in 1917, which
sparked the Russian Revolution. In honor of these women, the Eighth
of March became the date
for IWD worldwide in 1918.
Was
there a global women’s movement to take up IWD?
Women were
on the move after the turn of the twentieth century. Formed in 1904,
the
International Woman Suffrage Alliance brought together suffragists
who aspired to full
citizenship in their own independent countries. This first wave
of global feminism was by no
means confined to the U.S. and Europe. In the colonial and dependent
countries, the demands
for national self-determination and women’s self-determination
were often intertwined. Women
played active and visible roles in the Iranian, Mexican, and Chinese
revolutions and in protests
against colonial rule and white supremacy in India and South Africa.
Mexican women held two
Yucatán Feminist Congresses in 1916, and Latin American women
organized an International
Feminine Congress in Argentina in 1919. After both Muslim and Christian
women participated
in the Egyptian revolt against British rule in 1919, Huda Shaarawi
founded the Egyptian
Feminist Union in 1923. Some 25,000 Chinese women celebrated IWD
in Guangzhou in 1927.
The Pan Pacific Women’s Conference in 1928, the All Asian
Women’s Conference in 1931, and
the Arab Women’s Conference in 1944 were all signs of the
worldwide scope of women’s
activism. For example, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, who founded the Abeokuta
Women’s Union
in 1946 when Nigeria was still under British rule, soon emerged
as an international as well as
national activist and leader. Increasingly, women won the right
to vote in conjunction with
decolonization or revolution.
Did the observance of IWD + women’s suffrage = the emancipation
of women?
In 1922
International Women’s Day became a day of recognition for
women in the Soviet Union.
After the Second World War, it became a public holiday in China
and other socialist countries.
However, the onset of the Cold War discouraged the widespread observance
of IWD in the U.S.
Although the equality of women and men was a cornerstone of the
1948 Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, many women did not really enjoy free and full participation
in government
and society. For example, some or all women of color and indigenous
women were denied the
right to vote in the U.S., Australia, Canada, and South Africa.
Even when women were
enfranchised, as most were worldwide by 1980, formal and informal
bars stood in the way of
access to education, employment, property, and the professions;
freedom of sexual orientation,
gender expression, marriage, and divorce; legal availability of
contraception and abortion; and
security against sexual and domestic violence.
Who revived the observance of IWD?
Women were
on the move once again in the 1960s. In the U.S., women in the civil
rights and
antiwar movements challenged men who tried to subordinate them.
Many women – working
women and housewives, women of color and white women, older as well
as younger women –
began to demand changes in the homes, workplaces, and communities
they shared with men.
Some younger feminists went on to found the movement known as Women’s
Liberation by
forming consciousness-raising groups, studying women’s history,
protesting the Miss America
pageant in 1968, and reviving the observance of IWD in many cities
in 1969 and 1970. The
Great Speckled Bird, Atlanta’s underground newspaper, publicized
IWD in March 1969. Thus
this year’s observance marks the fortieth anniversary of the
revival of IWD in Atlanta.
What was internationalist about the revived observance of IWD in
the U.S.?
In the
U.S., the observance of IWD foregrounded the rich history of women’s
abolitionist,
suffrage, and labor activism. Equally important, it was internationalist
in two senses, reflecting
what many saw as the inner and outer dimensions of a U.S. empire.
On the one hand, IWD
highlighted the activism of African American, Asian American, Chicana,
Puerto Rican, and
Native American women – the women of communities and peoples
suffering from racial and
national oppression inside the U.S. On the other hand, IWD highlighted
the struggles of women
in Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Palestine, the Philippines, South
Africa, Vietnam, and other
countries – the women of countries affected in one way or
another by the actions of the U.S.
government and corporations.
When
did the United Nations recognize IWD?
The second
wave of global feminism has surged from the 1970s through to the
present. The
United Nations recognized IWD in 1975, at the start of a series
of conferences on global
women’s issues held in Mexico City, Copenhagen, Nairobi, and
Beijing. It adopted the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women in 1979.
CEDAW is a component of the international human rights framework.
By the time the fiftieth
anniversary of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
celebrated in 1998, the
principle that women’s rights are human rights was widely
acknowledged.
What does it mean to observe IWD in 2009?
Observing
IWD 2009 is not just an opportunity to look back to National Woman’s
Day in 1909
or the revival of IWD in 1969. In recent years, younger women, women
of color, immigrant and
indigenous women, LGBTQ women, and Muslim women in the U.S. have
continued to infuse
feminism with new demands and enliven it with new energies. We have
learned how forms of
oppressions are interlocked and how we can take an intersectional
approach to build alliances
and unlock the system of oppression. To the extent that it reflects
an inclusive vision of women,
IWD is part of this grassroots, living, twenty-first century feminism.
Where
do we go from here with IWD?
We are
living in a moment of profound crisis and reform following a long
period of backlash and
reaction. Now more than ever we need to grasp the interconnected
nature of the issues facing us,
locally and globally. We need to find inspiration in the worldwide
efforts of women in the past
to better organize to scale to meet the challenges of our times
in the global South and global
North. One way forward concerns the Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women. In 1980, the U.S. government signed
CEDAW, but ever since
the senate has refused to ratify it. Much like the ill-fated Equal
Rights Amendment, the failure to
implement and enforce CEDAW reminds us that powerful forces in our
society actually support
hierarchies of gender, race, and class and oppose the inclusion
and empowerment of all women.
Perhaps when we observe IWD 2010 we will be talking about a movement
in metro Atlanta to
pass municipal and county human rights charters and CEDAW ordinances?
labor donated 3/09
PEOPLE'S ACTIVISM COMMUNICATION TEACHING SCHOLARSHIP
P H : A C T S
HISTORY ARCHIVES CULTURE TESTIMONY STUDY
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