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Women's History Month -- Something to celebrate!by Diane Rae Schulz |
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We definitely have something to celebrate! The story of how the month of March became Women's History Month is a long and involved one that began in 1908 with the U.S. Socialist Party's committment to a Women's National Committee to Campaign for the Suffrage. This Committee recommended that the Socialist Party set aside a day every year to campaign to women's right to vote. The idea of an National Women's Day gradually took hold and by 1910, at the National Congress of the Socialist Party, the Women's National Commission recommended that the last Sunday in February be recognized as International Women's Day. In Copenhagen, at the Conference of Socialist Women that August, Luise Zietz proposed internationalizing the American Woman's Day. The dynamic German socialist leader and fighter for women's rights, Clara Zetkin, seconded the proposal, and it passed unanimously among the women as it did a few days later in the general International Socialist Congress. And so International Women's Day was born. The day had been named, but a date was never specified. Consequently, until 1917, International Women's Day was celebrated on different days throughout the world. In the U.S., International Women's Day continued to be celebrated in February. Internationally, the day provided an opportunity to highlight the movements for woman suffrage and peace. The International Women's Day protest that changed the world occurred in Russia in 1917 (March 8 by Western reckoning, February 23 on the Gregorian calendar). Coming on the rise of long struggle and many strikes, International Women's Day 1917 inspired thousands of Russian women to leave their homes and factories to protest the terrible shortages of food, the high prices, the world war, and the increased suffering they had bitterly endured. The protest inspired the last push of a revolution. A general strike spread through Petrograd, and, within a week, Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. After 1917, and in honor of women's role in the Russian Revolution, International Women's Day secured its place on March 8 on socialist calendars. The date became official in 1921, when Bulgarian women attending the International Women's Secretariat of the Communist International made a motion that the day be uniformly celebrated around the world on March 8. The holiday continued to be celebrated by Socialists worldwide, including those in the U.S., until just after WWII when Socialism became synonymous with Communism in U.S. propaganda. It was not until 1969, when the Berkeley Women's Liberation group organized the first street demonstration about International Women's Day since 1947, that a flurry of activity to uncover Women's History began. As Laura X of the National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape (http://members.aol.com/ncmdr/whm98.html) reports: "Our Women's History Library, which maintained the International Archive of our movement from 1968-74, took a quantum leap forward from the national publicity as a result of that Berkeley demonstration. By the next year, 1970, there were Women's Liberation events in 30 cities around the world for March 8.... "Liberation News Service picked up the story from a SF paper about our parade in Berkeley and its sources from my list. This caused people from this and many other countries to send me everything imaginable about women in history, some of them about their own family members. People also came to visit from around the country, and to volunteer. 10,000 copies of the list, by now called the HERSTORY SYNOPSIS, were sold within a few short years....the microfilms of the records of our movement - nearly 1,000,000 documents [are] now available through the National Women's History Project in Windsor, CA (707-838-6000; Email: nwhp@aol.com) In 1981, the National Women's History Project spearheaded the drive for a National Women's History Week, choosing the week of March 8 to show the international connections among women. That year the U.S. Congress passed a resolution declaring National Women's History Week. Due to popular demand, In 1987 the week was expanded to the entire month of March, National Women's History Month." For more details of the story, and to search for Women's History Month activities in your area, please visit the National Women's History Project website: http://www.nwhp.org. |