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March 8 is International Women's Day

On March 8, 1837, textile and clothing workers demonstrated against the 12 hour Day, low wages and poor working conditions When the demonstrators left the New York [unclear: iuro] in which the clothing factories were situated, police intervened and charged the demonstrators. Many were arrested, others were trampled. It was not until three years later that these women were able to form their own union.

Fifty-one years later, another demonstration was held in the Lower East Side of New York on March 8. The women who led this were also garment workers, striking for the same reasons as in 1857. Thousands of women, men and children marched for better living and working conditions, an end to child labour and the right to vote.

The march was held after women had won a hard-fought strike - "The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand". The shirtwaisters of two shops (one of them the Triangle Shirtwaist Company) had been on strike for a month when a mass meeting of garment workers was called. A teenaged striker, Clara Lemlich, who had already suffered several broken ribs from police attacks on the picket lines, became impatient with empty speech making. She stood up and declared:

"I am working girl, and one of those who are on strike against intolerable working conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in general terms. What we are here for is to decide whether or not we shall strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared......Now!"

She carried the crowd with her in a tremendous outburst of enthusiasm, which even caught up the chairman. He cried out, asking whether they would take the old Jewish oath: "If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand whither from the hand I now raise!" - and the entire hall stood to take the pledge.

Over 20,000 workers, three quarters of them women, walked out the next day. Over the next thirteen weeks they faced attacks by hired thugs, evictions, starvation and repeated police onslaughts with dozens Deign dragged off in the "Black Marias". In the Courts the Magistrates did not bother to hide their bias and one judge is recorded as saying: "You are on strike against God and Nature, whose prime law it is that man shall earn his bread in the sweat of his brow." But in the end, the women brought International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) into more than 300 shops, with shorter hours and more pay.

There was a gruesome footnote to the strike. Less than two years later, fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. One hundred and fourty-six operatives died, many of them young girls. Some of the horrified onlookers carried with them all their lives the sight of bodies leaping out of the windows with clothing ablaze because there was no other way out; others died jammed against the doors to the stairways which were barred.

Charges were made against the company that the exits were blocked in order to keep union organisers out and to prevent the employees from leaving the premises in a sudden walkout. The employer's justification was that they had locked the fire exits in order to "safeguard themselves from loss of goods". The two partners were tried and acquitted; subsequently one of them was fined $20.

In 1911, March 8 was declared International Women's Day after Clara Zetkin of the German Socialist Party so moved, at the Congress of the Second International. Since then. International Women's Day has been celebrated in a number of ways, but it is only recently that its celebration has become a regular event.

It was first celebrated publicly in 1911, in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Switzerland and the United States. Three years later a mass demonstration was held against the war in Germany on March 8, organised by Clara Zetkin amongst others. Rosa Luxembourg, one of those who had pushed for the creation of International Women's Day was arrested on the march. Later, as a result of her socialist and equalitarian views, she was murdered by members of a fascist German group and thrown into a Berlin river.

In 1917, textile workers in Russia took to the streets by their thousands to protest against poor working conditions, long bread queues and famine, on International-Women's Day. Others joined them and the Revolution began.

In 1943, in Italy, women organised a mass demonstration against fascism.

In New Zealand, activity on international Women's Day is only a fairly recent occurrence. In 1973, women demonstrated at Parliament for a change in legislation on abortion, contraception and sex education. In 1978 a man demonstration was held at Parliament again for the fight to legal abortion. 1500 women, men and children took to the streets in the largest march for abortion in Wellington's history, to show their anger at the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act. This year there will be no mass marches on International Women's Day but meetings are being held around the country to remember those women who have fought and suffered for their rights and those women who still are.

Lamorna Rogers