The first International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 8th, 1911, with over a million women in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and other countries holding demonstrations calling for women’s suffrage and protesting employment discrimination. But the roots of Women’s Day celebrations can be traced to strikes of the International Ladies Garment Workers.
One such strike, the Uprising of 20,000 in 1909, lasted for fourteen weeks, including walk-outs, marches, employer lock-outs, and police repression and brutality. With the slogan, “We’d rather starve quick than starve slow,” these women, mostly immigrants, brought public recognition to the unfair and unsafe conditions for garment workers. Their actions resulted in employer concessions, and improved the wages, hours, and working conditions of thousands of people. The strike was followed by ILGWU-led Great Revolt of 60,000 garment workers in 1910, and the movement was further galvanized by the tragic and avoidable deaths of 146 garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911.
The work of sewing has-in more than one time and place-led to revolutionary social changes. Let’s keep that up.
While in many places stripped of its political origins and meaning, International Women’s Day is still an official holiday in Afghanistan, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, China, Cuba,Georgia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Macedonia, Madagascar, Moldova, Mongolia, Nepal, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Zambia, and is widely celebrated in Cameroon, Croatia, Romania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Chile.