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Tuesday, March 08, 2011

100 Years of International Women's Day




Kate Rintoul writes in the Morning Star:


Today sees the celebration of the 100th International Women's Day (IWD), a movement started by the Socialist Party in America - who'd have thought it - when 15,000 women marched through the streets of New York demanding better working conditions and voting rights, and officially went global in 1911.


International Women's Day takes various forms in some countries, mostly in the East and former socialist states it is marked by a national holiday, celebrated much like Mothers' Day with men and children giving small gifts and flowers to the women in their lives.


While International Women's Day should be a day of celebration of women's achievements and positive attributes, it must also be one that identifies the continuing inequality and obstacles women face in far-off places and close to home.
 

1 comment:

Douglas said...

I celebrate International Women's Day with a quote from Robert Heinlein (the notebooks of Lazarus Long in "Time Enough for Love"):

Whenever women have insisted on absolute equality with men, they have invariably wound up with the dirty end of the stick. What they are and what they can do makes them superior to men, and their proper tactic is to demand special privileges, all the traffic will bear. They should never settle merely for equality. For women, "equality" is a disaster.