As every year on March 8 thousands of people will gather in Barcelona to celebrate International Women’s Day and claim all the struggles for equality between all genders. In the city there will be a big demonstration and during all the previous days a lot of events and activities to commemorate a historic day.
But why is International Women’s Day on March 8 and not on any other day of the year? Why was lilac chosen as its color? We explain these details about the history of 8M so you know everything there is to know.
What happened on March 8th?
March 8 commemorates several milestones in the history of the struggles for women’s rights, with a clear beginning in the United States and all of them concentrated in the first decades of the twentieth century, key to the feminist struggle.
One of the main ones is the strike of women textile workers in New York in 1908. In March of that year, a group of women from the Cotton Textile Factory protested their working conditions, with wages that could be half those of men. The protests ended with violent interventions by the police, but set a precedent for their significant impact.
Another key date was May 3, 1908, when the first “Women’s Day” was organized at the Garrick Theater in Chicago, presided over by socialist women of the time, such as Corinne Brown and Gertrude Breslau Hunt, who dedicated the day to the cause of women workers.
Only a year later, on February 28, 1909, a “National Women’s Day” organized by socialist women was celebrated for the first time.
In 1910, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the activist Clara Zetkin proposed in Copenhagen (Denmark), during the Second International Conference of Socialist Women, to proclaim the International Working Women’s Day in March, although no specific date was set.
In 1911 there would be two new highlights. On March 8 (in commemoration of the 1848 Revolution and the Paris Commune) Women’s Day was celebrated for the first time in several countries. More than a million people marched in countries such as Germany, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland, demanding the right to vote, the right to hold public office and the right to work.
The second event had to do with another textile factory in New York: a fire in the Triangle Shirtwais shirt factory in New York killed 146 people, most of them women, provoking changes in labor legislation. Shortly thereafter, near the outbreak of World War I in 1914, women organized meetings around March 8 of the following year to protest the war or to stand in solidarity with other women.
The following year, at the height of the World War, more than 1,300 women from 12 countries gathered in The Hague on April 15.
When was the 8th of April established as International Women’s Day?
Despite all these movements in the first decades of the century, March 8 was not adopted as International Women’s Day by the UN General Assembly until 1977, although it had already been celebrated two years earlier.
Prior to that , in 1970, the first World Conference on Women had been held in Mexico. The year 1970 is also the first International Women’s Year and the first United Nations Decade for Women.
For more information more information on key dates in the struggle for women’s rights, check the UN website see the UN website