Men and women have marked a before and after in the history of humanity, despite the difficulties encountered by the latter. Many of them are great protagonists of a large number of events that changed the way we see and understand the world.
On March 8, International Women’s Day is commemorated, a date that vindicates that fight for gender equality and pays tribute to all the women who paved the way towards a fairer society.
But why is this particular day celebrated? Although the origin of the celebration is not so clear, the worldwide celebration of Women’s Day began to take shape in the labor and protest movements that began to emerge in the 19th century. Specifically, there is talk of two historical strikes , carried out in different years.
In the year 1857 the textile workers of the Lower East Side factory (New York) went on strike. We are talking about a time that was marked by severe labor and salary insecurity. However, the situation of women was much more critical, as they were paid around 70% less than men , despite accounting for almost the entire workforce.
Faced with this situation, the workers of the entity organized a march in protest of these conditions , expressing the injustice of their reality. The act was ultimately frustrated by harsh police repression . But this event was the spark that would awaken the attention of thousands of women in the same state.
Years later, in 1908 , one of the most brutal and tragic events in the history of women’s protests took place. In the same city as the stage, New York, 40,000 industrial seamstresses from different American factories organized a strike to demonstrate again. Among his demands, he highlighted the request for equal rights, reduction of working hours (which at that time was 12 hours or more), the abolition of child exploitation (also very frequent) and the right to join unions.
This day would go down in history not only for this fact, but also for a much crueler one. In one of the factories where the workers’ strike was taking place, the owners ordered the doors and windows to be closed and the demonstrators trapped inside as a means of containment . That incarceration ended the lives of 120 women caused by a fire inside the building .
Two years later, in 1910 , at the II International Conference of Socialist Women in the city of Copenhagen , the 100 attendees (from 17 different countries) unanimously approved the establishment of March 8 as Working Women’s Day , at the request of the German Clara Zetkin, one of the best-known faces in the feminist movement. The following year it was held for the first time in 4 countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark. In total, it is estimated that more than a million women participated.
Finally, all this effort was recognized in the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1975 , when March 8 was officially recognized as International Women’s Day.
