Thread by @anintegralstate

Today is International Women’s Day (IWD). Something to consider in the midst of corporate breakfasts or cupcakes. #IWD was born out of the struggles of working women. In 1910 Clara Zetkin, a German Communist, proposed an IWD to the International Conference of Working Women.

The day was mostly celebrated by the socialist movement until the UN declared the day in 1975. The first IWD was in the US, and came a year after mass protests from working women in NYC in 1908. In Australia, IWD has been celebrated since the early 1920s.

While IWD was celebrated on various days, March 8 became the offical day. On March 8 1917 in Petrograd, late Feb in the Russian calendar, women workers (importantly militant textile workers), demonstrated across the city, demanding Bread and Peace.

They demanded an end to World War I, to food shortages, and to Czarist rule.

While the song is not directly the Russian February/March revolution or IWD, it always make me think about the song Bread and Roses. This is the most exquisite version

For Zetkin, the women’s struggle was a working class moment. Not about equality, it was about liberation from oppression. For me, it’s also about liberation from gender oppression more broadly and the gender binary that harms and limits all.

Alexandra Kollontai, Russian revolutionary and theoretician, was the first woman cabinet member in any government. She was more questioning about the tensions involved in IWD, and whether there could be true shared interests between *all* women simply because they are women.

Today, these questions persist. And we also have other urgent ones to address. The erasure of the struggles and successes of Indigenous women, and centring of white women, on IWD is profound. Trans women also need to be at the centre of our efforts.

And despite the rhetoric around the value of essential workers during Covid, many of them women, where is the NON TOKENISTIC place for cleaners, childcare workers, nurses, grocery pickers and teachers aides - and Indigenous women - at IWD breakfasts and morning teas today.