A century of “women day”

Several thousand supporters of women’s rights, up to 4,000 demonstrated last Saturday in the streets of Brussels. This “World March of Women” was organized to demand the particular economic and financial autonomy of women or denounce violence against them.
The supporters ended at the courthouse, where a list of demands was presented to several political figures, including the Belgian Minister of Employment, Joëlle Milquet.

The first International Women Day manifestation was observed on 28 February 1909 in the United States followed by the celebration of International Women’s Day, launched in August 1910, intended, as its initiator, the Socialist Clara Zetkin, to “counter the influence of feminist groups on women of the people”.
The German international socialist women’s movement militant who is backed by Lenin, came with this idea at the 2nd International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen, without giving any specific date. It was mainly to wrest the right of women to vote.

Since the takeover by the Bolsheviks in Russia, the new tradition is established, and after 1945, the Women’s Day is officially celebrated every May 8 in all socialist countries where it is like Mother’s Day!

More amazing, in France in the 1950s, all the press activist PCF and the CGT, like women’s liberation movement group, wrote that March 8th commemorates the seamstresses event manifestation in New York on March 8, 1857.

But this event never happened, and contemporary newspapers had never mentioned it. It was an “invention” of seamstresses in New York about thirty years ago.

March 8 became an official date around 1980, but for that generation it was the anti-Mother’s Day, according to the philosopher and historian Genevieve Fraisse, author of “Women and history “.