Mind the Gap

As you probably know, (warning: blinding flash of the obvious coming up) International Women’s Day is coming up this Saturday.

In many countries, International Women’s Day is an official holiday, and for a lot of us it’s supposed to be an opportunity for the men in our lives to buy us flowers, do the washing up for us, and buy us new ironing boards, in case we don’t happen to be mothers yet. If you‘re a mother, you get not one but two new ironing boards every year, lucky you! A lot of workplaces will be arranging events. My workplace last year held beauty sessions – manicures, pedicures, the whole lot – with the money going to breast cancer charities. I’ve also heard tales of Cardiff University International Women’s Day events from the past, complete with chocolate fountains and Anne Summers merchandise. The message is clear: it’s great to be female in the 00s! Pass the chocolate swimsuits so we can swim around in that chocolate fountain!

Of course, that’s not what International Women’s Day was originally about. In fact, the whole idea goes back to 1908, after 15,000 textile workers marched through the streets of New York, to protest their poor working conditions. The Socialist Party of America then designated the last Sunday in February as National Women’s Day.

International Women’s Day was then established in 1910 by the Second International, as proposed by German Socialist Clara Zetkin . The first International Women’s Day was observed a year later, followed on 25th March 1911, barely a week later, by the horrific Triangle Factory Fire in New York, of which an eyewitness account can be found here  (warning, it’s pretty harrowing). There are also testimonials of women who worked in the factory, and a whole lot of other interesting documents, on the same site here . Nearly 150 people, mostly women, died in the fire, but the owners of the factory were taken to court, and it led to significant reforms in working conditions for textile workers – though not before a lot of the survivors‘ testimonies were discredited because, apparently, it sounded like they‘d been told what to say.

International Women’s Day continued to be observed for the next decade or so, mainly in Russia – where it was an official holiday -, Germany, and Northern Europe, but petered out some time in the 20s, to be revived during the second wave of feminism. You can read a more detailed history here.

The feeling these days seems to be that International Women’s Day should be a celebration of the rights we’ve won, and a general celebration of women and how wonderful we all are, and maybe we should all stand on pedestals and be decorated like Christmas trees so that we may be adored like the delightful angels we are. *cough* Of course cries of ‘women are all wonderful!’ couldn’t possibly be ample proof, if any was needed, that women’s rights are still a wee bit of an issue *cough*. Personally, I also strongly object to the idea that women are now liberated because some get to enjoy the kind of bourgeois lifestyle that, to be honest, I don’t find enviable or desirable at all, mainly because I don’t want to spend my life putting a monetary value on my own time or measuring my success by the tastefulness of my Woman On The Go ™ wardrobe.

But that’s nothing compared to the fact that the majority of women on the planet still don’t enjoy basic human rights, and still work in similar conditions to those in the Triangle Factory. A lot of the women working there were immigrant workers, some as young as 12 or 13. Things haven’t changed so much nowadays, not even geographically – meaning that you might think all factories are away somewhere in the far East, but there are hundreds of people working in unspeakable conditions right in the middle of our towns, and the only ‘help‘ they generally get offered is arrest followed by deportation. We’re all well aware that most of our clothes are made in conditions we‘d rather not have to think about, by mostly female workers who work 70-hour-plus weeks in terrible conditions, daren‘t take sick leave, and are often not even allowed to leave their workstations to go to the toilet – to take the few facts I‘ve actually read about, there‘s doubtless more to it than that.

Celebrating how free women have become, when we know exactly what those ’made in Indonesia’ labels on our clothes really mean, is a spit in the eye of most of the women in the world. If there has to be any celebration on IWD, it should take the form of gratefulness to past generations of feminists for what they have achieved.

More information on women’s working conditions and more is available on Human Rights Watch.