By Josh Hughes
In 1908, a group of 15,000 fed up, oppressed and exhausted women marched through the streets of downtown New York City, demanding shorter hours, basic voting rights and equal wage pay. The next year, the Socialist Party of America helped create the first official National Women’s Day, which was originally observed on February 28, sparking the continued efforts to fight oppression and inequality for womxn all over the world. Over the decades to come, an additional group of over 25 countries also began celebrating a similar holiday, leading us to where we are today, celebrating International Women’s Day on March 8.
This year, following previous years’ efforts to create a centralized theme for the day, IWD takes on the concept #BeBoldForChange, which is, according to the official website, intended to “call on the masses to help forge a better working world – a more gender inclusive world,”. In other circles that celebrate the day, the theme for 2017 is expressed as “Women In The Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by 2030”, which speaks to a UN-Women initiated agenda setting extensive goals for equality and sustainable development by the year 2030. While the 2030 agenda covers 17 different goals that range from sustainable economic growth to combatting poverty worldwide, goals number four and five address the current issues related to International Women’s Day.
Goal number four seeks to create all inclusive and accessible education for all, promoting the idea of lifelong learning, and goal number five strives to create gender equality and empowerment to all womxn across the globe. While this comes from the UN’s website, these sorts of goals make for believable targets across continents and throughout the world as these next three decades pass.
While there is no definitive, official way to celebrate International Women’s Day, different organizations around both the country and the globe set up their own events and protests on March 8 to coincide with the theme of equality and celebration of women’s achievements. The Women’s March, for example, an organization that loosely coordinated the grassroots protest this past January that occurred around the nation, is setting up “A Day Without a Woman” to occur on March 8 of this year.
“On International Women’s Day, March 8, women and our allies will act together for equity, justice and the human rights of women and all gender-oppressed people, through a one-day demonstration of economic solidarity,” reads the Women’s March website.
The idea of the event is to put an emphasis on the enormous impact that all sorts of womxn have provided to our country’s socio-economic system, in the face of adversity and oppression. The organization suggests that women should take the day off from both paid and unpaid labor, and that women should either not shop at all for the day, or only shop at small, women and minority owned businesses. Allies can show solidarity by wearing red clothing on March 8.
“Let’s raise our voices together again, to say that women’s rights are human rights, regardless of a woman’s race, ethnicity, religion, immigration status, sexual identity, gender expression, economic status, age or disability.” continues the event page.
With the end of the quarter rapidly approaching, it’s easy to get caught up in studying (or procrastinating), but consider taking a bit of time out of your day to appreciate the impact that womxn around the world have had in every imaginable field, and take extra time out of your day to appreciate and celebrate that impact on March 8.
ABOVE: The Women’s March was a successful, large-scale protest attended by over ten thousand people in Bellingham alone. Photo by Morgan Annable // AS Review