A week after the sadly liberalised International Women's Day 2020, the Australian Communist Party Melbourne Cell held its first major event, a night of speeches celebrating militant women in Australian working class history. We commemorated the true history of International Working Women's Day - a history steeped in red and bound in the struggles and victories of millions of working class women around the world[1]. In Australia, International Working Women's Day was first celebrated in 1928, when a rally in Sydney's Domain was organised by the Militant Women's Group of the Communist Party[2]. Celebration of International Working Women's Day remained primarily a Communist Party initiative until the 1970s, when the broader women's liberation movement bloomed.

In 2020 the Australian Communist Party strives to restore the red roots of International Working Women's Day and pay homage to the millions of militant women comrades who paved the way before us. ACP candidate member Rose began the night with the call to remember, and to not allow our rich and precious history to be scrubbed by liberalism. She lamented the modern day dominance of bourgeois liberal feminism, with its focus on individual empowerment that limits our potential to that of gaining more for ourselves at the expense of other working class women and men across the world. Likewise, she sounded the alarm about the rise of a reactionary portion of the third wave, which seeks to bind us only through an idea of biological essence, extinguishing the class basis that is our greatest form of power and solidarity as women. Finally, she stressed that although we were there to remember several inspiring individual women in the movement we do not see change as coming through any individual but through the power of the people organising together as a class.

Speeches were given by several women members of the ACP and guest speaker Shirley, a member of the CPA-ML. We learned about how Indigenous activist Gladys O'Shane, after leaving school at age 12 to become a domestic servant, honed her public speaking skills at Party summer schools and used them to fight relentlessly for the rights of her Indigenous brothers and sisters[3]. Another great model for working class women was Florence Cluff who became one of the first women elected secretary of a union, and was instrumental in radicalising her fellow trade unionists and fighting for equal pay for women[4].