The HistoryThird-party politics in the United States and a revolution on the other side of the world led to the establishment of an annual International Women's Day on March 8.
In the early 1900s the Socialist Party of the United States of America wielded enough power to be taken seriously. In 1912 its presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, received close to a million votes. By the start of World War I, the party had two members in the U.S. House of Representatives (Meyer London and Victor Berger), more than 70 mayors, and numerous state and local legislators.
In 1908, the Socialist party took up the cause of women's suffrage, recommending that the party set aside one day every year to campaign for the right of U.S. women to vote. That year, a branch of the New York City Social Democratic Women's Society chose March 8 to sponsor a mass meeting on women's rights. The following year, the Socialists agreed to designate the last Sunday in February as National Women's Day -- a day for socialist women throughout the U.S. to hold mass meetings.
In 1910, at the Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen, Luise Zietz, the first woman to sit on the executive of the Social Democratic Party in Germany, proposed internationalizing the American Women's Day. Her resolution passed unanimously, as it did a few days later in the general International Socialist Congress. International Women's Day was born, but a date was not yet set. Over the next few years, it was celebrated on different days.
Then on March 8, 1917, an International Women's Day protest in Russia changed the world. Tens of thousands of Russian women left their homes and jobs to protest the terrible shortages of food, the high prices of goods, and WWI. Their action inspired the final push of a revolution spreading a general strike through Petrograd. Within a week, Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.
In honor of the role women played in the Russian Revolution, International Women's Day secured its place on March 8.
Thanks to the websites of the Socialist Party of the United States of America and the National Women’s History Project.
