Happy International Women’s Day!
Today, and throughout the month of March, we at Dr. Logan Speaks are celebrating women throughout history and up until today. In this post, learn about the history of Women’s Day and consider how you and your business can work to lift up women all year round.
Radical History
International Women’s Day was born out of movements in New York, Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century. In that time, when women were still fighting for the right to vote in many countries, women used the day to protest against discrimation, disenfranchisement, and war and violence. In the early to mid-twentieth centuries, strong movements to celebrate Women’s Day were mostly seen in communist countries. A 1917 women’s day strike in Russia helped precipitate the toppling of Czar Nicholas II. Once second-wave feminism appeared on the scene, the day was reclaimed around the world and the United Nations adopted it in the mid-1970s.
Critiques of International Women’s Day Today
Today, the holiday is seen less as a day of protest for social reform and more as a day to congratulate and celebrate women on their achievements. Googling “International Women’s Day card” will bring up results far more similar to gentle and warm Mother’s Day greetings than to protest slogans or calls for reform. Some cards display notes like, “You deserve to be happy today so enjoy your day to the fullest”; “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. You are an inspiration to me”; “A woman can make happiness bloom all around them,” and many more. The bright pink designs filling the Google images page is more evocative of Valentine’s Day than of women claiming and using their power to make change. In some countries, the customs of giving flowers or celebrating the holiday as a recognition of feminine beauty makes us wonder whether the radical roots of the holiday still have any resonance with the celebrations of today.
Reform Movements Today
Despite these perceptions, women around the world still use the day to advocate for themselves and for other women and girls. In many countries, women hold marches, protests, or street celebrations either as demonstrations or as specific calls for reform. Sometimes, women face violence from men or from police or military units who fail to support their peaceful demonstrations. At the same time, men often join in and march alongside women as supporters and advocates.
Raising Awareness
A large motivation for the Women’s Day movement is to raise awareness and normalize conversation about struggles that women face in the workplace, in domestic life, politically, economically, and in general. In 2017, many women in the US took the day off of work in order to simulate a “day without women’’ as their protest action. Other international feminist movements such as #MeToo and the 2017 Women’s March have helped raise awareness of issues faced mainly by women and have contributed to growing feminism in the last few years.
Thought Leaders
It is important to recognize leaders who have contributed to feminism globally and those who have pioneered feminist movements in our country. Two important women who have contributed to the feminist movement are writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and activist Audre Lorde. These powerful women of color also promote the intersectionality critical to a successful feminist movement. Adichie has written popular novels as well as an inspiring and thought-provoking nonfiction book based on a 2012 talk, We Should All Be Feminists. And we close with Audre Lorde, a Black lesbian feminist who pioneered conversations about LGBT inclusion, racial equity and feminism in academia:
“I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full bellies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or for further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is anyone of you.”
This International Women’s Day, let us look around ourselves and ensure that we are using what we have to lift up women and girls of all backgrounds.
Sources:
BlackPast: (1981) AUDRE LORDE, “THE USES OF ANGER: WOMEN RESPONDING TO RACISM”
United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific
