Women change everything D-1
How the women before us marched to the beat of their hearts
Shouldn’t every day be International Women’s Day? Shouldn’t every month be Women’s Month? I often find myself injecting a feminist angle in much of what I write, but when the opportunity so readily presents itself I am at a loss as to where to begin.
Last year, I wrote about three women from history who defied gender stereotypes to live extraordinary lives, mavericks in their fields who simply inspired me: Ada Lovelace, Gerda Taro, and Dorothy Parker. I have written here and there about some of my favorite female heroines of fiction, from young Scout Finch and Matilda to classic Lizzie Bennet and Bathsheba Everdene (no, she is not from The Hunger Games).
There are countless feminist and women’s issues that I attempt to touch upon, most recently period poverty in last week’s column.
So I decide to explore and research and begin at the beginning, why we need this day, and, beyond this day, what we are fighting for.
March 8 has been recognized as International Women’s Day by the United Nations since 1975. For history students (and now I am brought back to my high school history class) the date has significance as the start of the February Revolution in 1917. This resulted in the abdication of the last Tsar of Russia, the installation of a provisional government, and one of the first recognitions of the women’s right to vote anywhere in the world. Coincidence?
The rising discontent of the people with the Russian monarchy and the First World War (and now I really feel like I could bring up a paper from high school on “Peace, Land, Bread”) resulted in an unplanned protest in St. Petersburg. As men were sent to the frontlines during the war, women held the homefront and began to work in factories, supporting their families and their country. The rationing of bread and harsh economic conditions were unbearable. And so the women led, inspired by a women’s march on the same date a few years earlier in Germany. They found other workers to rally behind their cause.
There are fewer things as fearless and audacious as a revolution, and this was one of those revolutions in everybody’s history books. To think how large women’s role was in it.
March 8 celebrates women’s suffrage, a fundamental right and symbol of gender equality, as well as the extreme might of female disruption. Karl
Marx noted that “great social revolutions are impossible without female ferment.” This day reminds us women of what we can do. While there are talks and Women’s Marches around the world, we can see throughout history how women marching have changed the course of humanity.
The French Revolution is often regarded as the catalyst that shifted the world from monarchies and colonies to one of republics and liberal democracies with constitutional bases that many of us enjoy and take for granted today. In 1789, the first year of the Revolution, the Women’s March on Versailles was one of the earliest and
most significant events. Afterward,
King Louis XVI accepted the people’s call for the monarchy to move from Versailles to Paris, ultimately shifting the balance of control that brought down the French monarchy.
On Dec. 5, 1955, Rosa
Parks was arrested for standing her ground against racial discrimination when asked to give up her seat on the bus for a white man based on a policy of racial segregation. A few months before that, Claudette Colvin was arrested in a similar incident, and she was the plaintiff in the Browder v Gayle case that found bus segregation in Alabama unconstitutional. The Women’s Political Council circulated flyers that instigated the Montgomery bus boycott, recognized as one of the first large-scale American demonstrations against segregation, and a watershed moment for the civil rights movement.
The non-violent Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement in 2003, led by 2011 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Leymah Gbowee, pushed government officials to enter into peace talks and “marked the beginning of the end” (as Gbowee puts it) of the Second Liberian Civil War. This ushered in peace after 14 years of violence and led to the election of co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first elected female head of state in Africa.
Every International Women’s Day, we are reminded that a group of women standing behind a cause has toppled down monarchies, helped bring an end to segregation, even helped bring an end to war, changing the world for the better.
March 8 celebrates women’s suffrage, a fundamental right and symbol of gender equality, as well as the extreme might of female disruption.