International Women’s Day was celebrated worldwide last Thursday. The motto chosen for this year’s celebration is “Connecting girls, inspiring futures”. The United Nations has been sponsoring this international holiday since 1975.
Women’s Day goes back to the early 20th century, precisely when women in both Europe and North America started their struggle to justly attain the right to vote. This fact, together with the battle for better pay and decent working conditions, particularly in the textile industry, instigated the socialist women of America to start the first Women’s Day in the United States. This occurred in February 1908. Following the organisation of the Shirtwaist Strike by women garment employees in 1909 and the demise of 129 female textile employees in the famous Triangle Fire of 1911 in New York, feminists and socialists all over Europe started interesting themselves in Women’s Day. One hundred women from 17 countries participated in the International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen in 1911. In that well-attended conference, Clara Zetkin suggested an International Women’s Day. Her suggestion was universally accepted.
It was sometime before a fixed date was established for this international holiday. Initially, it was celebrated on 19 March but was gradually moved to 8 March. Most probably the date was recommended by Marxist dissident Rosa Luxembourg. It was meant to coincide with the Triangle Fire’s date. However, the fire really took place on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation, which is known to this day by British Christians as “Lady Day”.
On 8 March 1917, (or February 23, if one considers the events under the Julian calendar widely used in those times in Russia), the working women of St Petersburg stood up for bread and peace, thus initiating the so-called February Revolution. One of the famous revolutionary chiefs, Alexandra Kollontai, persuaded Lenin, in 1918, to announce 8 March a national holiday in honour of the “heroic woman worker”. In her pamphlet composed for International Women’s Day of 1920, Alexandra Kollontai depicted the holiday as a “militant celebration” for “proletarian sisters”. She said that “captive housewives” needed emancipation so that they could attend meetings to be liberated from the “shackles of the family, of housework, of prostitution”.
The Church took a more inclusive outlook on the issue. The Church’s appreciation and promotion of women found an ardent defender and promoter in the various writings of Blessed Pope John Paul II. His final statements of the 1988 apostolic letter “Mulieres Dignitatem,” portray a papacy that understands and supports the female genius and vocation both in the Church and the world!
“The Church gives thanks for each and every woman: for mothers, for sisters, for wives; for women consecrated to God in virginity; for women dedicated to the many human beings who await the gratuitous love of another person; for women who watch over the human persons in the family, which is the fundamental sign of the human community; for women who work professionally, and who at times are burdened by a great social responsibility; for ‘perfect’ women and for ‘weak’ women – for all women as they have come forth from the heart of God in all the beauty and richness of their femininity; as they have been embraced by his eternal love; as, they are pilgrims on this earth, which is the temporal ‘homeland’ of all people and is transformed sometimes into a ‘valley of tears’; as they assume, together with men, a common responsibility for the destiny of humanity according to daily necessities and according to that definitive destiny which the human family has in God himself, in the bosom of the ineffable Trinity. The Church gives thanks for all the manifestations of the feminine ‘genius’ which have appeared in the course of history, in the midst of all peoples and nations; she gives thanks for all the charisms the Holy Spirit distributes to women in the history of the People of God, for all the victories which she owes to their faith, hope and charity: she gives thanks for all the fruits of feminine holiness” (§ 31).
Happy Women’s Day!
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap
SAN GWANN