Tomorrow is International Women's Day through the world. Established by the United Nations as a Global holiday in 1975, International Women's Day Day really began as an International Day at a Conference of Socialist and allied women held in Cophenhagen in 1910, preceding the general Conference of the Socialist(Second International) Clara Zetkin, a major women leader of the Socialist and later Communist movements was one of the champions of establishing an international women's day, with picked because of the militant strike of women garment workers in New York two years earlier on. The Socialist Party in the U.S. had held a women's labor/rights demonstration on February 28 1909 to honor the struggle of the previous year
The first demonstrations which numbered in the hundreds of thousands were held in Europe in 1911, first on March 19th. As the demonstrations spread, March 8 was chosen as the day.
In Czarist Russia, where the first demonstrations had begun in 1913, demonstrations on the last Sunday in February of women workers(Russia was still on the Julian Calendar and this day was March 8 on the Gregorian calendar, in effect was the opening shot of the February Revoluton, as Women workers, joined by men, marched for "bread and peace," for end end to the food shortages, the war, and thr Czarist autocracy. The day became an official holiday in the Soviet Union and later with the Chinese Revolution in the Peoples Republic of China. From 1936 to 1939 it was a holiday of the Spanish Republic, destroyed by Franco's fascists, backed by Hitler and Mussolini directly and by Neville Chamberlain and the conservative defenders of pro fascist, anti-Communist appeasement through the world
Below I have pasted a link to a short historical portrayal of the International Women's day, which the CPUSA will celebrate tomorrow on the Internet at 8 PM
Norman Markowitz
