March 8, International Women’s Day, provides a perfect occasion to reflect on the different histories of gender and class politics across the globe and, in particular, in the United States and Germany, two countries where feminists were fundamental to establishing this global holiday at the beginning of the twentieth century. There are many stories about the origins of this special day. Reliable histories suggest the day developed in reaction to a lack of specific consideration offered women workers in the May Day labor mobilizations of the 1880s and 1890s, as socialists organized to promote the eight-hour day.
On February 23, 1909, feminists in the United States, led by the Women’s Trade Union League, proclaimed a National Women’s Day to emphasize the need for women’s suffrage to offer a political voice for women working in factories. Here, this was not a socialist issue alone, but was a common cause for a cross-class coalition of feminists that emerged from the New York shirtwaist strike in support of working women’s labor rights. (The movement was further energized following the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire on March 25, 1911, in which more than 150 women died.)
In 1910, German socialist feminist Clara Zetkin cited the U.S. National Women’s Day as inspiration when she led the women of the Second International, a socialist alliance, to call for an International Women’s Day to highlight wage-earning women’s labor rights and desire for the right to vote. To this point, labor protection and woman’s suffrage had not proved as unifying an issue in Germany as it had in the United States. German middle-class feminists often supported a right to vote limited to property owners, both men and women, disenfranchising the entire working-class. So Zetkin and other “proletarian feminists” put their primary emphasis on socialist organizing work.
By 1911, International Women’s Day was fixed on March 8. As illustrated in a poster produced for the 1914 Berlin International Women’s Day rally, the day had become a celebration of working-class women’s political strength in Germany. On the poster, an angry proletarian woman waves the red flag of the socialist party in support of their demand for women’s suffrage. (Decades later, this strong heritage of socialist feminism continued to define the perspective of feminists in Germany, and International Women’s Day remained an occasion to mobilize women for women’s rights. In 1971, a socialist feminist group in Berlin took the 1914 poster and redrew it in more contemporary, less emphatically proletarian fashion to announce their own International Women’s Day rally.)
But even as International Women’s Day took on increasing significance around the world over the decades, in the United States, the day did not bring women out to rallies and protest events. In 1978, the first school district launched a Women’s History Week celebration centering around International Women’s Day. In 1981, Congress recognized the spreading popularity of this event by formally declaring the first week of March Women’s History Week (and in 1987, Congress made it a full month). While offering a tool for conveying a more gender balanced approach to history in the schools, the U.S. framing of these commemorations moved away from sharing in the international—and more socialist—single day of attention to women’s current political demands and made it a more general reflection on women’s contributions broadly.
American feminists also took August 28, the anniversary of the passage of the women’s suffrage amendment, as an alternative occasion to celebrate feminist mobilization. From 1923 on, the August anniversary was linked with a continuing demand for passage of an Equal Rights Amendment to the
U.S. constitution, a demand still unrealized today. Like the National Women’s Day that predated it, August 28 feminist events provided a cross-class mobilizing venue that carried fewer suspiciously socialist connotations. For American feminists, claiming their constitutional rights and fighting stereotyping and discrimination based on gender was seen as “like race” and a unifying cause.
Issues of injustice that particularly affect lower-wage-earning women are still on the agenda of U.S. feminist cross-class mobilizations—most notably, requiring employers to provide a minimum of paid sick leave, and seeking to expand the Family and Medical Leave Act to cover the part-time, temporary jobs, and small employers where half the female workforce is found. But, for better or worse, the separate path taken over the past century by U.S. feminists has weakened the prominence of International Women’s Day as an opportunity for calling for renewed national attention to such inequalities, even while affirming that these are issues for all women regardless of their own social class advantages to rally behind. U.S. feminists are able to forge an inclusive movement that is respectful not only of the issues but of the voices of women of color and non-citizen women. But while women immigrants often bring a memory of International Women’s day as important in their own countries, they have not yet found a way to bring the U.S. movement to take this more global perspective on women’s issues.
The comparative significance of International Women’s Day and its symbolic power could hardly be more different in Germany and the United States, but the points of overlap in its history signal the importance of both the German and U.S. varieties of feminism that developed over the twentieth
century. Both the socialist-infused version of Germany and the cross-class politics of the United States leave traces in contemporary mobilizations and feminist frames that are on display in how local women’s movements today celebrate International Women’s Day—or not.
Myra is the author of Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective