Today is International Women's Day, and that means a day for "femvertising".

In much the same way that we've forgotten that Mother's Day was supposed to be an anti-war holiday, and Labor Day was supposed to be in commemoration of the victims of the Haymarket Riot (it's not even mentioned on the Dept. of Labor web site), International Women's Day was inspired by a climatic labor union strike in the United States.

The strike in question was the 1909 Uprising of the 20,000, which was led by lifelong socialist and all-around badass Clara Lemlich. You can read about the strike here.

It's a straight line from that strike to International Women's Day.



The triumph of the ladies’ garment workers’ efforts to have their union recognized led to Socialists all over the country organizing “Women’s Day” marches all over the country the following year, in March 1910. Inspired by the American women’s victory, that year Clara Zetkin, a German Marxist feminist theorist, proposed International Women’s Day at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen that year. In 1911, it was honored for the first time on March 8th, with hundreds of thousands of European women turning out to campaign for labor rights and the right to vote.

On March 8th, 1917, Russian women issued a “Bread and Peace” strike in response to the deaths of 2 million Russian soldiers in World War I, demanding the end of tsarism and a solution to national food shortages. This event has largely been credited with prompting Tsar Nicolas II’s abdication from the throne and Russian women being granted the right to vote; in the following decades, it was primarily celebrated in communist and socialist countries, until the United Nations officially started celebrating International Women’s Day in 1975.

In many countries, International Women’s Day still has political meanings. Turkey is a good example, but there plenty of others.



What’s even more inspiring than these storied origins is that women throughout the world — especially in Latin America and Europe — are observing International Women’s Day by going on strike today. In Argentina, Spain, and Italy, the major unions are holding general strikes, under pressure from rank-and-file women workers, showing that “it can be called from below,” says Cinzia Arruzza, a Marxist feminist philosophy professor at the New School and one of the organizers of International Women’s Strike USA.

In America, the place where it started, IWD is about selling consumer products.

Why is this important?

Consider the massive 2017 Women's March.

What was it for? I'm not exactly certain, but I am sure that no significant victories came out of it.

Now compare that to Iceland's 1975 Women's Day Off.



Forty years ago, the women of Iceland went on strike - they refused to work, cook and look after children for a day. It was a moment that changed the way women were seen in the country and helped put Iceland at the forefront of the fight for equality.

...It was November 1980, and Vigdis Finnbogadottir, a divorced single mother, had won Iceland's presidency that summer. The boy didn't know it, but Vigdis (all Icelanders go by their first name) was Europe's first female president, and the first woman in the world to be democratically elected as a head of state. Many more Icelandic children may well have grown up assuming that being president was a woman's job, as Vigdis went on to hold the position for 16 years - years that set Iceland on course to become known as "the world's most feminist country". But Vigdis insists she would never have been president had it not been for the events of one sunny day - 24 October 1975 - when 90% of women in the country decided to demonstrate their importance by going on strike.



Now THAT'S how you get people's attention.

One year after Women's Day Off, Iceland passed an equal pay law.

That was almost half a century ago.

One last note: who do you think came up with the idea of Women's Day Off?



The idea of a strike was first proposed by the Red Stockings, a radical women's movement founded in 1970, but to some Icelandic women it felt too confrontational.

...But when the strike was renamed "Women's Day Off" it secured near-universal support, including solid backing from the unions.

Red Stockings were a revolutionary socialist group.