Thread by @MackamanThomas

1/ Happy International Women’s Day to women the world over. Especially to the women of Ukraine and Russia whose mothers bore the brunt of Hitler’s armies 80 years ago and now face war and inhumane sanctions, caught in Putin’s invasion and Biden’s trap. A little history:

2/ Like May Day, Intl Women’s Day has some American working class and socialist origins. It emerged out of the struggle of women garment workers, Jewish and Italian immigrants, most famously in “The Uprising of the 20,000” in 1909.

3/ The trade unions said “the immigrant girls” were unorganizable “trash”. They were proven wrong. Many were socialists from Russia. They knew suffering, class politics and how to fight. The “unorganizable” turned out to be the cutting edge in the making of the industrial unions

4/ In 1910 German socialist Clara Zetkin, at an international gathering of socialists in Copenhagen, called for International Women’s Day to remember the New York strike, which had ended in March of that year.

5/ The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of Manhattan, March 1911, also gave inspiration to Intl Women’s Day. 146 died or jumped to their deaths, 123 of them Jewish and Italian women. The bosses, fearing “theft,” had locked the doors from the outside. We will never forget this crime.

6/ Never forget too that it was the women of Petrograd who on March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day, triggered the Russian Revolution. With demands of “Bread!” and “Down with the tsar!” the demonstration turned into a mass strike.