Ground Report | New Delhi: Women’s Day history; Every year, March 8th is celebrated as International Women’s Day. The date that has become one of the most important and famous, and in which equality between men and women is claimed.
It is a reminder of the incessant struggle that women have sustained both for their labour and social rights, in search of and in favour of a completely just and equitable society.
Everything arose on March 8, 1875, in the United States. According to the United Nations, hundreds of women textile workers in a New York factory known as ‘garment works’ demonstrated with the aim of achieving equal pay with men, in addition to obtaining an improvement in their working conditions.
This demonstration resulted in 120 female workers being murdered at the hands of the police, a situation that two years later was essential to create the first women’s union in history.
Later, in 1908, around 15,000 working women took to the streets of New York under the banner of ‘Bread and Roses’, demonstrating against endless hours, inhuman conditions and low wages, although it was not until three years later that would give the event that definitively marked the feminist movement. On March 25, 1911, the deadliest industrial disaster in New York City (as catalogued by the International Labor Organization (ILO)) occurred; 146 women died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist textile factory due to landslides, burns and smoke poisoning.
The tragedy resulted from the factory owners sealing off the building’s exits. These deaths were not in vain and led to important changes in labour legislation, in addition to the birth of the International Union of Women Textile Workers.
Clara Zetkin, at the II International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen in 1920, was the one who launched the proposal, approved unanimously, to commemorate International Women’s Day in March with the aim of achieving the vote for women. It was in 1975 that the UN made International Women’s Day official.
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