International Women’s Day was celebrated for the first time in 1911, and since 1913 it has been March 8. The UN General Assembly made the day of women’s rights and international peace an official holiday in 1977.
As a result of the struggles of political, feminist and trade union movements, a decision was made at the beginning of the last century that one day of the year should be symbolically dedicated to women. Around this time, in most countries, women’s demands for expanding their social and economic rights, gaining the right to vote, and ending discrimination in employment and wages became stronger.
The first National Women’s Day was celebrated in the United States on the last Sunday of February, 1909.
then the II held in Copenhagen in 1910. At the International Socialist Women’s Congress, the German Clara Zetkin suggested that a women’s day be held every year worldwide.
International Women’s Day was celebrated for the first time on March 19, 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, with demonstrations – in which many men also participated – demanding women’s right to vote. (Women might vote in Russia from 1917, in Germany from 1919, but French and Italian women only from the end of the Second World War, Belgians from 1958, Swiss from 1971, Portuguese from 1976, and Liechtenstein women only from 1984 can exercise this right from
The date was set on March 8 in 1913 to commemorate the 1857 strike of textile workers in New York – according to other sources, a fire in a New York factory that took the lives of 129 workers on this day in 1908. It was first celebrated in Hungary in 1914.
Since the 1980s, women’s organizations have drawn attention to this day in parades to the decisive role played by women in societybut also to his vulnerability and defenselessness, in fact to the fact that legal equality is still not equal opportunity.
Thousands of women in many countries demonstrate on this day for women’s social rights and once morest their discrimination.
In the United States, equal pay for the sexes was enacted in 1963, but men still earn significantly more today. There is also a wage gap between the sexes in the European Union, even though a directive prohibited all remuneration discrimination as early as 1975. In March 2009, the European Commission launched a campaign to eliminate the average 16 percent gender pay gap, and in November 2017, it submitted an action plan to this end. In November 2022, the European Union adopted legislation on corporate gender balance, according to which at least 40 percent of non-executive director positions in listed companies must be filled by women by 2026.
On this day, in many places, non-governmental organizations raise their voices once morest violence once morest women, because they believe that victims of domestic violence, workplace sexual harassment, and prostitution are not sufficiently protected by the law, and the perpetrators of these acts remain largely unpunished.
According to a survey, 33 percent of women living in the European Union have suffered physical or sexual violence since the age of fifteen. Amnesty International is calling for the establishment of a unified and strong UN Women’s Agency to ensure that women in all parts of the world can enjoy their rights in practice.
The featured image is an illustration (Shuterstock).
