Source?
http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/CWLUArchive/interwomen.html
On March 8, 1857, garment workers in New York City marched and picketed, demanding improved working conditions, a ten hour day, and equal rights for women. Their ranks were broken up by the police. Fifty-one years later, March 8, 1908, their sisters in the needle trades in New York marched again, honoring the 1857 march, demanding the vote, and an end to sweatshops and child labor. The police were present on this occasion too.
In 1910 at the Second International, a world wide socialist party congress, German socialist Clara Zetkin proposed that March 8th be proclaimed International Women’s Day, to commemorate the US demonstrations and honor working women the wor ld over. Zetkin, a renowned revolutionary theoretician who argued with Lenin on women’s rights, was considered a grave threat to the European governments of her time; the Kaiser called her “the most dangerous sorceress in the empire.”
http://www.regroupment.org/main/page_iwd.html
International Women’s Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 where it was widely publicized in the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, and popularized by speeches in numerous clubs and societies controlled by Bolshevik organizations which presented a Marxist analysis of women’s oppression and the program for emancipation.
Don’t look the UN or International Women’s Day to be clear with the origins. They just “ignore” them and start with “since the early 1900s”.
http://www.un.org/en/events/womensday/history.shtml
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp
If you live in the U.S., though, you may well have made other plans. But don’t feel too bad. The celebration that was born in this country has always done better elsewhere, and for reasons that have nothing to do with apathy and everything to do with history.
The first Women’s Day was observed in the U.S. in February 1909 in a large demonstration marking the one-year anniversary of the 1908 New York Garment Workers’ Strike. Quickly thereafter, women’s days became a rallying point around which people around the world protested war and fought for women’s suffrage. In 1917, a Women’s Day protest in St. Petersburg even triggered the revolution responsible for bringing down the Russian Empire. In 1975 the U.N. established March 8 as its official International Women’s Day and initiated the Decade for Women the following year...
According to historian Estelle B. Freedman, the absence of celebrations in this country has less to do with our indifference than it does with the holiday’s long association with the Communist bloc.
“Before World War I, International Women’s Day really took off here during the suffrage and labor movement,” says Freedman, a Stanford history professor and author of No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. “But then it was sustained as a communist, socialist holiday, particularly after the Russian Revolution. So, during the beginning of the Cold War especially, it wasn’t something that was embraced in the United States.”
Today IWD is still celebrated in places such as China and Russia as a sort of state-sanctioned Valentine’s Day/Mother’s Day hybrid...