Wom*n’s Officer’s Report – Week 4, Sem 1, 2016

Last week, the Wom*n’s Collective and the Wom*n of Colour Collective co-hosted a picnic for our collective members, and a contingent took to the streets to rally on the occasion of the International Women’s Day (IWD) march. The day prompted me to reflect the history of IWD, and the potential that still lies in celebrating the event.

The first Women’s Day was held 107 years ago in Manhattan. The inaugural event was organised by the Socialist Party of America, in solidarity with the strike of the Garment Worker’s Union. Two thousand women took to the streets to demand better pay and working conditions in the factories. On 8 March 1917, IWD protesters joined Putilov factory workers in Petrograd to protest the introduction of food rations, in large-scale events that eventually triggered the February Revolution. The Soviet Union declared IWD a national holiday the next year, in recognition of the contributions of women textile workers to the mass strike and the changes it brought about.

Since then, the revolutionary roots of the day have been somewhat watered down, with IWD traditions bearing little resemblance to the first radical protests. In Italy, the day is celebrated by men giving women yellow flowers; the Taiwanese government, bizarrely, marks IWD by releasing a national survey on women’s waist sizes, warning of the consequences of obesity for women. In countries like Australia, IWD events are too often focused on white, bourgeois issues like corporate gender equity, celebrated at expensive champagne brunches that have little relevance to the lives of most working-class women.

Nevertheless, the day still acts as a reminder of the same issues feminists have been fighting for throughout the past century, like fair working conditions, equality in decision-making, and bodily autonomy. It is a good time to take stock of the gains we’ve made (primarily through direct actions, like those of the first Women’s Days) and the roadblocks that still impede the movement (like the corporatisation of gender equality); to remember that without justice for all women, there is no justice.