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This International Working Women’s Day, reject corporate, “lean-in” feminism that seeks to build power through social inequality, exclusion, and classist hierarchies designed to divide us. International Women's Day has its roots in American socialism.
The 1915 International Congress of Women 
Organized by the U.S. Socialist Party, it brought together an audience of 1,500 women who demanded economic and political equality, on a day officially dedicated to “the female workers’ causes.”
The following year, women gathered in New York for a similar celebration. Inspired by these American initiatives, European socialists soon followed suit.
International Women's Day poster from March 8, 1914. This poster was banned in Germany.
Russian women first celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8 in 1913. Four years later, in 1917, working-class women in St. Petersburg, organized massive strikes & demonstrations under the theme ‘Opposition to the war, high prices, and the situation of the woman worker'
International Women’s Day would remain a communist holiday until the end of the 20th century; marked by carefully orchestrated, state-sponsored celebrations of women’s contributions to the state.
In the late 1960s, International Women’s Day reemerged as a significant day of activism.
In 2016 a strike wave started: in Poland, women organized a nationwide strike following a Polish parliamentary decision to consider a ban on abortion that would criminalize all terminations. The day became known as Black Monday.
Strike4Repeal was an abortion rights protest in Ireland on International Women's Day 2017. Calling to #repealthe8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution, which banned abortion in nearly all cases.
This led to passing a referendum to remove the constitutional ban on abortion, signed in to law on 18 September 2018.
On October 19, 2016 the #NiUnaMenos protest against femicide in Argentina took place; it was a large-scale response to the murder of 16-year-old Lucía Pérez. Similar demonstrations took place in other Latin American countries including Mexico, El Salvador, and Chile.
In 2017 the #internationalwomenstrike was called. Taking place in over 50 different countries and in 400 cities across the world. This marked the largest strike by American women workers up to that date.
Following the massive uprising of 2017 a new wave of direct action and collective struggle began.
IWS’ platform emphasizes intersectionality and demands an end to gender violence and the protection of Labor Rights, Full Social Provisioning, and Antiracist and Anti-imperialist Feminism revitalizing the roots of this day for the 21st Century
