#womensday Today is International Women’s Day and women worldwide will again demand for a basic, but yet fundamental right: equality between women and men. In a statement to mark IWD, the European Trade Union Confederation warns that women are paying a double price for the economic crisis. Time has come for a real change of direction:
http://www.etuc.org/IMG/pdf/ETUC_
Statement_IWD_2013_EN_final.pdf
The massive bloody strike on 8 March 1857 of the female workers in the textile industries of New York who - demanding the reduction of the work hours to 10 hours per day, equal pay of men and women and health and safety conditions in the work places - were brutally attacked by the government and the employers, motivated the 2nd International Conference of the Socialist Women in Copenhagen in 1910 – held with the initiative of the great German communist Clara Zetkin - to call for the celebration of the 8 March as the International Day of Women:
http://www.wftucentral.org/wp-content/2012_03_05_statement_wftu_international-womens-day.pdf
The origins of International Women’s Day lie deep within the struggle of working class women to unions and the fight for women’s suffrage. These two issues united European and American women. In 1908 hundreds of women workers in the New York needle trades demonstrated in Rutgers Square in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to form their own union to demand the right to vote. This historic demonstration took place on 8 March. It led in the following year to the uprising of 30,000 women in the shirtwaist makers which resulted in the first permanent trade union for women workers in the USA.
