WAKE ME UP WHEN WOMEN'S DAY IS OVER

If you're like me, that means you've locked yourself inside your home all day in a bid to avoid roving parades of indigenous lesbian organic women farmers burning McDonald's flags while singing folk songs berating the imperialist economy.

Painful herstory demonstrations and protest marches aside, though, you would think that the symbolic day would at least be an opportunity for the world's feminists and human rights advocates to highlight some of the real oppression that women face--especially in Islamic countries where burkas and headscarves are still the order of the day.

Instead of using International Women's Day as an opportunity to highlight the crushing oppression of women that does still exist in many parts of the world, most activists seize upon it as a chance to make shrill and simplistic political attacks on war and capitalism (incidentally, two things that have often brought women the greatest freedoms).

For example, an Auckland, New Zealand press release urging people to attend the local Women's Day rally condemns the presence of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq (those hotbeds of feminism!) and hails International Women's Day as "showing that [these] struggles are all part of one big struggle against capitalism, the system that creates injustice and war." While apparently unfazed by Afghan women not having the right to work, vote, or go to school under the Taliban or Iraqi women being raped, tortured, and executed by Saddam Hussein's regime, the caring kiwis are simply outraged that women in the Middle East may have to "struggle to stretch family budgets" due to war in their region.

Meanwhile, in New York City, the International Action Center is holding a Women's Day conference on "racism, poverty, and war" because they feel women "have born the brunt of economic capitalistic oppression." Of political oppression at the hands of Islamic religious extremists or Communist China, of course, the International Action Center conference brief breathes not a word....

"ranging from a communist holiday to a U.N.-sponsored event" - What's new???

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/womensday1.html

International Women's Day
March 8th commemorates women's rights and peace

by Borgna Brunner

In its various incarnations, ranging from a communist holiday to a U.N.-sponsored event, International Women's Day has been celebrated for almost 90 years.

Inspired by an American commemoration of working women, the German socialist Klara Zetkin organized International Women's Day (IWD) in 1911. On March 19, socialists from Germany, Austria, Denmark and other European countries held strikes and marches. Russian revolutionary and feminist Aleksandra Kollontai, who helped organize the event, described it as "one seething trembling sea of women."

Womens Rights and Peace

As the nascent annual event developed, it took on the cause of peace as well as women's rights. In 1915, Zetkin organized a demonstration in Bern, Switzerland, to urge the end of World War I. Women on both sides of the war turned out.

Women and the February Revolution

Both Zetkin and Kollontai took part in the most famous International Women's Day—the March 8, 1917, strike "for bread and peace" led by Russian women in St. Petersburg. The IWD strike merged with riots that had spread through the city between March 8–12. The February Revolution, as it became known, forced the Czar Nicholas IIto abdicate. (Russia switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1918, which moved the dates of the February revolution [Feb. 24–28, old style] to March.)

The "Heroic Woman Worker," Soviet Style

Kollontai, a minister in the first Soviet government, persuaded Lenin to make March 8 an official communist holiday. During the Soviet period, the holiday celebrated "the heroic woman worker." Today it is still a Russian holiday—celebrated in the fashion of Mother's Day with flowers or breakfast in bed—in which men show appreciation for the women in their lives.

International Women's Day in the United States

IWD was commemorated in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s, but then dwindled. It was revived during the women's movement in the 1960s, but without its socialist associations. In 1975, the U.N. began sponsoring International Women's Day

Sounds to me like it STILL have its socialist associations. It's just that the left lies about them in America.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.