Do you have $100+ to spare? Then you could attend an International
Women’s Day luncheon hosted by the Chamber of Commerce or various
business organisations. But, although IWD has become mainstream in
recent years, it was historically a socialist event and that is how we
commemorate it
Clara Zetkin, a leading member of German Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the early 1900s, argued that the working class would never win its battles without women and raised the issue of special party work among women. Under her leadership a working women’s movement grew rapidly in Germany, and the female membership of the SPD rose from 10,500 in 1907 to 150,000 in 1913.
Zetkin proposed the establishment of an international women’s day at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in August 1910, inspired by American socialists who had held women’s demonstrations and meetings the year before. The slogan for IWD was to be: “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism.”
In 1911, more than a million women and men took up the idea of IWD enthusiastically, with rallies and marches in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark and other major industrial cities of Europe. According to the Russian revolutionary socialist Alexandra Kollontai, “Germany and Austria were one seething, trembling sea of women… Meetings were organised everywhere – in the small towns and even in the villages, halls were packed full.”
In subsequent years and throughout World War One, IWD continued to provide a focus for activists. In 1913 and 1914 women across Europe held peace rallies on or around 8 March. In 1915, socialist women held a march in Bern, Switzerland, in opposition to their own countries’ war effort, which was treason in wartime. They took a manifesto home to be distributed secretly in their countries. In 1917, female socialists in Turin hung posters addressed to women throughout the working class neighbourhoods protesting rising food prices. And in 1918 in Austria, 3,000 women, despite the ban on demonstrations, marched in small groups past the parliament and the Palace of Justice demanding peace.
In Russia Alexandra Kollontai played a leading role. She brought the idea of IWD to Russia and helped organise events in the pre-war years. In Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1913, Bolshevik women workers organised a “scientific morning devoted to the woman question” (this sort of subterfuge was necessary under tsarism). Kollontai wrote:
“This was an illegal meeting but the hall was absolutely packed. Members of the party spoke. But this animated ‘close’ meeting had hardly finished when the police, alarmed at such proceedings, intervened and arrested many of the speakers.”
In 1914 police again intervened and arrested many people. Some women were nonetheless able to celebrate IWD with flash meetings around the city, and similar small actions were possible in 1915 and 1916.
Peace and bread
By 1917, deteriorating living conditions had resulted in strong feelings. Frustration with food shortages and interminable queues had already produced food riots, and the large number of women workers in large factories had already carried out many strikes.
What happened in Petrograd combined food riots, economic strikes and a political strike. And it was all sparked by women determined to celebrate International Women’s Day.
The local Bolsheviks judged the time unripe for militant action. So when a group of women from the Vyborg district asked for advice on how to celebrate IWD they were told to “refrain from isolated actions and follow only instructions of party committee”.
The women decided to strike anyway. In spite of all directives, women in Petrograd chose to protest and strike for “Bread and Peace” on 23 February (8 March on the Gregorian calendar). Demonstrations organised to demand bread were supported by the industrial workforce. Women textile workers in several factories went on strike and sent delegates to metal workers for support. The women workers marched to nearby factories bringing out over 50,000 workers on strike.
By 25 February, the strike had spread to 240,000 workers. Mass demonstrations surged through the town. The following day large parts of Petrograd were in control of the insurrection and when soldiers went over on 27 February, the tsar abdicated.
General Khabalov of the Petrograd Military District summarised the problem facing the authorities: “When they said, ‘Give us bread!’ we could give them bread and that was the end of it. But when they said, ‘Down with the autocracy!’ we could no longer appease them with bread.”
IWD in Australia
The first IWD celebrations held in Australia were organised by the Militant Women’s Group (MWG), set up by the Communist Party following their establishment of a central women’s department in 1927. The group was first established in Sydney and later spread to country NSW, Brisbane and Melbourne. They were quite successful in involving non-party women as well as CPA members and published a monthly newspaper, The Woman Worker.
The MWG organised a rally in the Sydney Domain on 25 March 1928. The demands were an 8-hour day for shop girls, no piece work, the basic wage for the unemployed and annual holidays on full pay. The Sydney MWG again organised a public meeting for IWD in Belmore Park in 1929 – this time with a focus on support of wives and families of striking timber workers.
The first Melbourne event occurred in 1931. With the lead banner proclaiming “Long live International Women’s Day” 50 women led 150 men on a march to the Yarra Bank.
The MWG was the beginning of an important network among women party members and others around them. Here is a quick glimpse of some of the women activists of the day, for whom International Women’s Day was an annual celebration.
Jean Young was involved with unemployed movement in early 1930s and a member of the CPA. As a barmaid, she was active in the Liquor Trades Union in Melbourne and became their first elected female organiser. The union executive initially restricted her from organising hotels because they “weren’t suitable places for women to enter”. Jean managed to convince them to charge women lower union membership fee as they had lower wages. She also convinced them to adopt a policy of equal pay. She successfully organised many hotels and restaurants including the Parliament House refreshment room.
Anna Morgan, an Aboriginal woman, spoke at the 1934 Melbourne IWD rally, where she denounced “black flag of the Aboriginal Protection Board” and called for legal changes and access to social welfare for Aborigines.
Anna was born in 1874 at a mission station in north-west Victoria and became a domestic servant at the age of 11. Her husband’s family had been allocated a farm block at Cumeroogunga on the Murray in 1888, but the Aboriginal Protection Board revoked the agreement in 1907. When Anna and her husband refused to accept this, they were expelled from the station, charged with trespass, lost many possessions and jailed when they tried to retrieve them.
Jean Devanney is well known for her novels and for her uncompromising promotion of women’s issues within the Communist Party, in particular reproductive control and sexuality. Phyllis Johnson recalled Devanney’s speech at the IWD meeting in Sydney in 1936:
“Jean dealt with women’s sexuality and shocked all of us there. We all felt that she was very politically advanced but to talk from the platform about women’s sexuality was entirely out of place. It was a taboo subject.
“She said that women had the right to enjoy sex as much as men did, but this was not so because sex was a man’s prerogative and that men generally had more pleasant experiences and more sexual excitement than women. We were like stunned mullets really.”
Tea and scones
In the late 1930s and the war years, IWD involved a broader range of participants, but it also became more conservative and conventional in its approach. The atmosphere of militancy and direct action waned, and the day was mainly celebrated with luncheons and afternoon teas. Photos of the events in the 1950s and early 1960s show women with gloves, hats and handbags, indistinguishable from apolitical and middle class women of the day.
Nonetheless, it is important to recognise that many of these same women, led by the Union of Australian Women (UAW), were prepared to carry banners in street demonstrations around such issues as equal pay and peace.
They were also not afraid to combat racism and to support Aborigines. Melva Walsh, from Moe in Victoria’s Gippsland, became UAW vice-president and addressed the IWD gathering in Melbourne in 1967. Long time member Marj Oke recollected: “Women would say to me: if you want to risk your reputation by belonging to something with blacks in it, go ahead, but I’m not risking mine. In opposing racism you learnt something of its sting.”
The UAW members responded quickly in 1963 when Aborigines in Traralgon were being evicted because people objected to living near them. Marj Oke and a car load of friends went to Traralgon and held a meeting in a hall in that street and were able to prevent the eviction.
Equal pay
But by the late 1960s things were beginning to change. 1968 saw mass action not only in France, but also in many other countries, including Australia. And then in 1969, the moratorium movement against the Vietnam War brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets. In the same year, major strike action defeated the penal powers used against unions for decades.
In this context, it is not so surprising that Zelda D’Aprano opted for direct action in response to the 1969 Arbitration Commission ruling on equal pay. Zelda was a member of CPA and worked for the meatworkers’ union in Melbourne. She and other unionists were in the audience when four male judges decided not to grant “equal pay for work of equal value” but only “equal pay for equal work” to the few women who did exactly the same work as men in male-dominated occupations. Female-dominated industries such as nursing missed out, and only approx 5 percent of women got equal pay. Zelda wrote about her reaction:
“There we were, the poor women, all sitting in Court like a lot of cows in the sale yards, while all the men out front presented arguments as to how much we were worth… I felt humiliated, belittled and degraded, not for myself but for all women.”
So on 21 October 1969, Zelda chained herself to the Commonwealth Building in Spring Street, Melbourne. “We decided I would chain myself up against the Commonwealth Government Building doors, because the government should set the example. Private industry won’t do anything if the government won’t.”
Ten days later she was joined by Alva Geikie and Thelma Solomon, and the three women chained themselves across the doors of the Arbitration Court.
These events drew enormous attention to the Equal Pay campaign, and led to Zelda and others establishing a Women’s Action Committee (WAC) in early 1970. Over the next couple of years, there were several highly successful WAC protests. For instance in the “equality ride” on a Melbourne tram in 1970 a group of equal pay campaigners refused to pay more than 75 percent of the adult tram fare to protest that working women received 75 percent of male wages.
Women’s Liberation Movement
During 1971 there were more actions, and over this year, the features of the new movement became clear. In May the first trade union-sponsored community consultation on childcare was held. In August, the WAC sponsored a national conference on “Women in the Workforce and Trade Unions”. There was also a demonstration against the Miss Teenage Quest. A pro-abortion demonstration in Melbourne drew significant crowds in November as did the first child care demonstration in the city square in the following February.
And then came the first new-wave IWD march, on 11 March 1972.
Throughout Australia, women (and men) rallied and marched, listened to speakers and chanted. In all cities, there was a great sense of a new movement and new possibilities. In Melbourne up to 3,000 women marched, including lots of young women who brought with them a new and less earnest approach. For instance there was a group of women on bikes with tampons hanging from their hat brims, calling themselves “The menstrual cycles”.
The Sydney rally was advertised with a poster inspired by the image of Angela Davis, a black revolutionary in the US. The main demands were equal pay, equal opportunity for work and education, free child care, free safe contraceptives and safe legal abortion on request. Jean Devanney would have loved the new emphasis on reproductive and sexual rights.
Other cities also joined in. In Adelaide, 500 took to the streets. Canberra saw a rally in Petrie Place and a stall in Civic Square. In Brisbane traditional and new women’s groups met to debate “Which Way to Liberation?”
So the Women’s Liberation Movement took off. In Melbourne, the first Women’s Liberation Movement Centre opened at 16 La Trobe Street. New structures sprang up in every state. IWD became the annual central rally of a dynamic new movement.
From its beginnings in Europe in 1911, IWD has been a day for socialists and activists to celebrate the struggle for women’s liberation. In the words of Alexandra Kollontai:
Down with the world of property and the power of capital!
Away with inequality, lack of rights and the oppression of women – the legacy of the bourgeois world!
Forward to the international unity of working women and workers in the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat – the proletariat of both sexes.
http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7679:the-real-history-of-international-womens-day&Itemid=542
Clara Zetkin, a leading member of German Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the early 1900s, argued that the working class would never win its battles without women and raised the issue of special party work among women. Under her leadership a working women’s movement grew rapidly in Germany, and the female membership of the SPD rose from 10,500 in 1907 to 150,000 in 1913.
Zetkin proposed the establishment of an international women’s day at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in August 1910, inspired by American socialists who had held women’s demonstrations and meetings the year before. The slogan for IWD was to be: “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism.”
In 1911, more than a million women and men took up the idea of IWD enthusiastically, with rallies and marches in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark and other major industrial cities of Europe. According to the Russian revolutionary socialist Alexandra Kollontai, “Germany and Austria were one seething, trembling sea of women… Meetings were organised everywhere – in the small towns and even in the villages, halls were packed full.”
In subsequent years and throughout World War One, IWD continued to provide a focus for activists. In 1913 and 1914 women across Europe held peace rallies on or around 8 March. In 1915, socialist women held a march in Bern, Switzerland, in opposition to their own countries’ war effort, which was treason in wartime. They took a manifesto home to be distributed secretly in their countries. In 1917, female socialists in Turin hung posters addressed to women throughout the working class neighbourhoods protesting rising food prices. And in 1918 in Austria, 3,000 women, despite the ban on demonstrations, marched in small groups past the parliament and the Palace of Justice demanding peace.
In Russia Alexandra Kollontai played a leading role. She brought the idea of IWD to Russia and helped organise events in the pre-war years. In Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1913, Bolshevik women workers organised a “scientific morning devoted to the woman question” (this sort of subterfuge was necessary under tsarism). Kollontai wrote:
“This was an illegal meeting but the hall was absolutely packed. Members of the party spoke. But this animated ‘close’ meeting had hardly finished when the police, alarmed at such proceedings, intervened and arrested many of the speakers.”
In 1914 police again intervened and arrested many people. Some women were nonetheless able to celebrate IWD with flash meetings around the city, and similar small actions were possible in 1915 and 1916.
Peace and bread
By 1917, deteriorating living conditions had resulted in strong feelings. Frustration with food shortages and interminable queues had already produced food riots, and the large number of women workers in large factories had already carried out many strikes.
What happened in Petrograd combined food riots, economic strikes and a political strike. And it was all sparked by women determined to celebrate International Women’s Day.
The local Bolsheviks judged the time unripe for militant action. So when a group of women from the Vyborg district asked for advice on how to celebrate IWD they were told to “refrain from isolated actions and follow only instructions of party committee”.
The women decided to strike anyway. In spite of all directives, women in Petrograd chose to protest and strike for “Bread and Peace” on 23 February (8 March on the Gregorian calendar). Demonstrations organised to demand bread were supported by the industrial workforce. Women textile workers in several factories went on strike and sent delegates to metal workers for support. The women workers marched to nearby factories bringing out over 50,000 workers on strike.
By 25 February, the strike had spread to 240,000 workers. Mass demonstrations surged through the town. The following day large parts of Petrograd were in control of the insurrection and when soldiers went over on 27 February, the tsar abdicated.
General Khabalov of the Petrograd Military District summarised the problem facing the authorities: “When they said, ‘Give us bread!’ we could give them bread and that was the end of it. But when they said, ‘Down with the autocracy!’ we could no longer appease them with bread.”
IWD in Australia
The first IWD celebrations held in Australia were organised by the Militant Women’s Group (MWG), set up by the Communist Party following their establishment of a central women’s department in 1927. The group was first established in Sydney and later spread to country NSW, Brisbane and Melbourne. They were quite successful in involving non-party women as well as CPA members and published a monthly newspaper, The Woman Worker.
The MWG organised a rally in the Sydney Domain on 25 March 1928. The demands were an 8-hour day for shop girls, no piece work, the basic wage for the unemployed and annual holidays on full pay. The Sydney MWG again organised a public meeting for IWD in Belmore Park in 1929 – this time with a focus on support of wives and families of striking timber workers.
The first Melbourne event occurred in 1931. With the lead banner proclaiming “Long live International Women’s Day” 50 women led 150 men on a march to the Yarra Bank.
The MWG was the beginning of an important network among women party members and others around them. Here is a quick glimpse of some of the women activists of the day, for whom International Women’s Day was an annual celebration.
Jean Young was involved with unemployed movement in early 1930s and a member of the CPA. As a barmaid, she was active in the Liquor Trades Union in Melbourne and became their first elected female organiser. The union executive initially restricted her from organising hotels because they “weren’t suitable places for women to enter”. Jean managed to convince them to charge women lower union membership fee as they had lower wages. She also convinced them to adopt a policy of equal pay. She successfully organised many hotels and restaurants including the Parliament House refreshment room.
Anna Morgan, an Aboriginal woman, spoke at the 1934 Melbourne IWD rally, where she denounced “black flag of the Aboriginal Protection Board” and called for legal changes and access to social welfare for Aborigines.
Anna was born in 1874 at a mission station in north-west Victoria and became a domestic servant at the age of 11. Her husband’s family had been allocated a farm block at Cumeroogunga on the Murray in 1888, but the Aboriginal Protection Board revoked the agreement in 1907. When Anna and her husband refused to accept this, they were expelled from the station, charged with trespass, lost many possessions and jailed when they tried to retrieve them.
Jean Devanney is well known for her novels and for her uncompromising promotion of women’s issues within the Communist Party, in particular reproductive control and sexuality. Phyllis Johnson recalled Devanney’s speech at the IWD meeting in Sydney in 1936:
“Jean dealt with women’s sexuality and shocked all of us there. We all felt that she was very politically advanced but to talk from the platform about women’s sexuality was entirely out of place. It was a taboo subject.
“She said that women had the right to enjoy sex as much as men did, but this was not so because sex was a man’s prerogative and that men generally had more pleasant experiences and more sexual excitement than women. We were like stunned mullets really.”
Tea and scones
In the late 1930s and the war years, IWD involved a broader range of participants, but it also became more conservative and conventional in its approach. The atmosphere of militancy and direct action waned, and the day was mainly celebrated with luncheons and afternoon teas. Photos of the events in the 1950s and early 1960s show women with gloves, hats and handbags, indistinguishable from apolitical and middle class women of the day.
Nonetheless, it is important to recognise that many of these same women, led by the Union of Australian Women (UAW), were prepared to carry banners in street demonstrations around such issues as equal pay and peace.
They were also not afraid to combat racism and to support Aborigines. Melva Walsh, from Moe in Victoria’s Gippsland, became UAW vice-president and addressed the IWD gathering in Melbourne in 1967. Long time member Marj Oke recollected: “Women would say to me: if you want to risk your reputation by belonging to something with blacks in it, go ahead, but I’m not risking mine. In opposing racism you learnt something of its sting.”
The UAW members responded quickly in 1963 when Aborigines in Traralgon were being evicted because people objected to living near them. Marj Oke and a car load of friends went to Traralgon and held a meeting in a hall in that street and were able to prevent the eviction.
Equal pay
But by the late 1960s things were beginning to change. 1968 saw mass action not only in France, but also in many other countries, including Australia. And then in 1969, the moratorium movement against the Vietnam War brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets. In the same year, major strike action defeated the penal powers used against unions for decades.
In this context, it is not so surprising that Zelda D’Aprano opted for direct action in response to the 1969 Arbitration Commission ruling on equal pay. Zelda was a member of CPA and worked for the meatworkers’ union in Melbourne. She and other unionists were in the audience when four male judges decided not to grant “equal pay for work of equal value” but only “equal pay for equal work” to the few women who did exactly the same work as men in male-dominated occupations. Female-dominated industries such as nursing missed out, and only approx 5 percent of women got equal pay. Zelda wrote about her reaction:
“There we were, the poor women, all sitting in Court like a lot of cows in the sale yards, while all the men out front presented arguments as to how much we were worth… I felt humiliated, belittled and degraded, not for myself but for all women.”
So on 21 October 1969, Zelda chained herself to the Commonwealth Building in Spring Street, Melbourne. “We decided I would chain myself up against the Commonwealth Government Building doors, because the government should set the example. Private industry won’t do anything if the government won’t.”
Ten days later she was joined by Alva Geikie and Thelma Solomon, and the three women chained themselves across the doors of the Arbitration Court.
These events drew enormous attention to the Equal Pay campaign, and led to Zelda and others establishing a Women’s Action Committee (WAC) in early 1970. Over the next couple of years, there were several highly successful WAC protests. For instance in the “equality ride” on a Melbourne tram in 1970 a group of equal pay campaigners refused to pay more than 75 percent of the adult tram fare to protest that working women received 75 percent of male wages.
Women’s Liberation Movement
During 1971 there were more actions, and over this year, the features of the new movement became clear. In May the first trade union-sponsored community consultation on childcare was held. In August, the WAC sponsored a national conference on “Women in the Workforce and Trade Unions”. There was also a demonstration against the Miss Teenage Quest. A pro-abortion demonstration in Melbourne drew significant crowds in November as did the first child care demonstration in the city square in the following February.
And then came the first new-wave IWD march, on 11 March 1972.
Throughout Australia, women (and men) rallied and marched, listened to speakers and chanted. In all cities, there was a great sense of a new movement and new possibilities. In Melbourne up to 3,000 women marched, including lots of young women who brought with them a new and less earnest approach. For instance there was a group of women on bikes with tampons hanging from their hat brims, calling themselves “The menstrual cycles”.
The Sydney rally was advertised with a poster inspired by the image of Angela Davis, a black revolutionary in the US. The main demands were equal pay, equal opportunity for work and education, free child care, free safe contraceptives and safe legal abortion on request. Jean Devanney would have loved the new emphasis on reproductive and sexual rights.
Other cities also joined in. In Adelaide, 500 took to the streets. Canberra saw a rally in Petrie Place and a stall in Civic Square. In Brisbane traditional and new women’s groups met to debate “Which Way to Liberation?”
So the Women’s Liberation Movement took off. In Melbourne, the first Women’s Liberation Movement Centre opened at 16 La Trobe Street. New structures sprang up in every state. IWD became the annual central rally of a dynamic new movement.
From its beginnings in Europe in 1911, IWD has been a day for socialists and activists to celebrate the struggle for women’s liberation. In the words of Alexandra Kollontai:
Down with the world of property and the power of capital!
Away with inequality, lack of rights and the oppression of women – the legacy of the bourgeois world!
Forward to the international unity of working women and workers in the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat – the proletariat of both sexes.
http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=7679:the-real-history-of-international-womens-day&Itemid=542
