Intemational
Women's Day, 1985
March 8, 1985 will be the seventy-second International Women's Day. It comes at a time when there is a resurgence of the women's movement worldwide and, at the same time, a renewed offensive by the ruling class attacking women's basic rights.
International Women's Day has its origins in the struggles of women in the socialist movement. On February 28, 1907 women socialists in the USA organised the first Women's Day to demand political rights for working women.
In 1910 Clara Zetkin, the German socialist leader, proposed to the second international conference of Socialist Working Women that an annual celebration of women's day should be held. The first one was on March 19, 1911, on the anniversary of an uprising of the Prussian proletariat in 1848.
In 1913 the date for International Women's Day was changed to March 8. This was the anniversary of an important strike by women textile workers in New York in the 1880s.
The date took on new significance in 1917. It was the day that the February revolution (under the old Russian calendar) broke out, led by the working women of Petrograd.
As the number of countries celebrating International Women's Day grew, so did the demands put forward. In 1911, an article in the American journal New York Call pointed out that although Women's Day was established for the special purpose of demonstrating the socialists' support of the political enfranchisement of women, other demands are also put forward and other political and social questions. International Viewpoint 11 March 1985
It was the struggle against the increased cost of living, the demand for motherhood and assistance for women's and children's labour legislation as well as the cry, "Down with militarism" ', that constituted the Women's Day prog ramme in different years.'
The need for women to fight on all fronts is no less true today. In particular, women are in the forefront today, as before the First World War, in the fight against imperialism and war.
Within the peace movement, women have often shown through their actions the best way forward for the movement as a whole. Women's peace camps at Greenham Common in
Britain, at Comiso in Italy, in the USA and Australia, have proved to be a constant thorn in the side of imperialism.
In recent years, the same has been true in the struggle against austerity. In the following articles about the miners' wives in Britain or the women's movement in Mexico, it is clear that in many cases where reformist leaders of the workers movement have cowered in the face of the capitalist offensive, women have come forward to fight.
Women in the mining communities have been organised and the example of the British miners' wives in the last year has inspired women around the world. Leading up to International Women's Day, miners' wives will be touring France, Spain, Germany and Sweden to join in the celebrations in those countries.
In recent years women in Third World countries, including in Latin America and the Indian sub-continent, have begun to organise on a more permanent basis to defend basic rights. Such actions often spill over into the fight against women's specific oppression.
Whilst the influence of feminism and of the women's movement on a world-wide scale is growing and recomposing all the time, at the same time the ruling class - despite the United Nation's so-called decade of women that culminates this year — is stepping up attacks on women.
Such attacks are not only occuring through the activities of 'right wing extremists' but also with official backing from reactionary governments.
Statements by Ronald Reagan declaring his intention to attack women's abortion rights in the United States, and worldwide, give alarming credibility and backing to the so-called forces of the 'moral majority'. This points up the need for a response by the women's and workers movement on an international level to combat this offensive.
As in the early 1900s, so today, the socialist perspective has been the only one to offer women a real way forward. The debates thrown up by the struggles of women in Cuba and Central America and the gains of those revolutions are testimony to this, and those debates will continue within the framework of the fight to build socialism.
Alongside of the strengthening and recomposition of the movement in different countries, it is vital that an internationalist perspective for the women's movement be developed. The celebration of International Women's Day is an important event in the fight to build a truly international women's movement based on solidarity between women and with the labour movement both to defend our basic rights and to struggle towards our liberation.
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cause we know that there aren't any jobs elsewhere. When they have put all the miners on the dole what will be the conse- We can all see for ourselves.
quences? My father was a miner and he suffered a very serious They are getting paid to sit on the pit top; they're getting paid accident at Snowdown (Kent) colliery. This meant that he was to make cups of tea; paid to paint the pit top.
unable to work after his accident even though his mind was actually being paid to work. It's a waste of time and money.
very active and willing. He wanted to go to work but it was The real men are out on the picket lines. They're not scab-
I and my family watched him suffer bing on their own workmates.
BRITAIN