March 8, International Women's Day

International Women's Day is celebrated annually on March 8.

It is a good time to reflect on the progress made, call for more changes and celebrate the courage and determination of the women who have played a key role in the history of their countries and communities. It also serves to vindicate feminism by denouncing machismo and micro-machismos.

Why the March 8?

This celebration is not based on a single fact, because the versions and events that have led us to March 8 have been several until reaching the final declaration of International Women's Day.

The most relevant events that occurred before were many, between them:

The industrial Revolution

When women began to join salaried work, due to the industrial revolution, they became workers in factories, but they did not, at any time, continue to be responsible for work at home and for caring for people who made up the family unit.. Thus, protest movements began, even then, to demand better wages and hours for the working day.

Catalonia was not left out, we have an example in the strike in the textile sector of Igualada in 1881.

The Cotton Factory

The first strike of American textile workers was in 1857, but one of the most important took place on March 8, 1908, the day of the Cotton Textile Factory Fire. That March 8, some 40,000 people in the textile sector went on strike in the United States. Among them, the 129 women who were in the Cotton factory. They say they wove purple clothes. The owners locked them inside, perhaps so that they would not join the strike, with the bad luck that when an accidental fire broke out, they could not get out.

Copenhagen Socialist Women Conference

In 1910, during the International Conference of Socialist Women held in Copenhagen, the celebration of Women's Day was recommended for the last Sunday of February, to promote universal suffrage. It was proposed by Clara Zetkin, a feminist of German origin and approved unanimously.

Other New York Facts

On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company textile factory in New York also burned, where 500 people worked. In this incident , 142 workers died who had participated in a major strike the year before.

The 8th of March

With the outbreak of World War I, Women's Day became Peace Day. Russian women had been celebrating Women's Day for years and took to the streets protesting the lack of food on March 8. It was March 8, 1917. From then on, that day was already fixed on the calendars as Women's Day.

Later, with the resurgence of feminism at the end of the sixties/seventies, that date was definitively reinstated, which was corroborated by the United Nations in 1977 as International Women's Day.