Women’s Day has history

Press, 7 March 1984, Page 9

Women’s Day has history

By

JACQUELINE STEINCAMP

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, a day for women around the world to affirm their dignity and solidarity. Why this date?

The origins go back 127 years. On March 8, 1857, women from the New York garment and textile industry, did an unheard-of thing — they held a demonstration. It was the first protest in the United States to be well supported by working women, and it drew public attention to the abysmally low wages, the 12-hour workday, the shocking working conditions, and increasing workloads of seamstresses, tailors,

machinists and dressmakers.

Demonstrators called for equal pay, for improved working conditions, and for the admittance of women to trade unions. But the police struck heavily. They moved in, dispersed the demonstrators (with many being trampled underfoot in the panic) and arrested the ringleaders.

Three years later, in March, 1860, these same women formed their own union, and called again for their demands to be met

Nothing much happened. Nearly 50 years passed, until in 1908, thousands of women from the New York garment industry demonstrated again on March 8. There were the same demands, plus new ones such

as laws against child labour, and votes for women.

But little happened. The male-dominated trade unions still refused to represent women or children. We read that in 1910 children were working in textile factories from 7.30 a.m. to 9 p.m. with no overtime pay. In 1911, a fire in New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory resulted in the deaths of 150 women and children. It was this disaster which drew attention to the atrocious working conditions in the industry, and which strengthened the struggling International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.

Though male Americans took little notice of women’s demands for justice and equality (federal laws did

not give American women the vote until 1920), their struggles were the spark that lit the concept of a day to honour women.

In 1910, at a European Socialist women’s congress, the German labour leader, Clara Zetkin, proposed that March 8 be proclaimed International Women’s Day in memory of the brave American women textile workers.

Over the next 60 years, International Women’s Day was celebrated mostly by women in Socialist countries. Even then, there was often official resistance, and meetings had to be held in secret.

By 1967, the day began to be celebrated in the United States, but it was not until the establishment of the United Nations’ International Women’s Decade that women’s consciousness began to be raised sufficiently for the day to be celebrated internationally. Saturday’s Women’s Fes-

tival in Hagley Park is an indication of just how far Christchurch women have come. It is fitting, too, that the original idea for the festival came from a group of trade union women.

Nevertheless, International Women’s Day is being celebrated in New Zealand metropolitan centres only. There is still a great deal more conscious-ness-raising to be done. “Celebrating International Women’s Day gives us the opportunity to consider the progress made by New Zealand women in gaining equality with men,” said Honor Bonisch, national president of the Federation of University Women. “New Zealand women were in 1893 among the first in the world to be enfranchised, yet in 1984 our Government has taken no positive steps to ratify the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,” she said.