International Women's Day -- March 8: some history

The first International Women's Day was observed on 28 February 1909 in the United States following a declaration by the Socialist Party of America. Among other relevant historic events, it came to commemorate the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

In 1910 the first international women's conference was held in Copenhagen by the Second International and an 'International Women's Day' was established. German Socialist Clara Zetkin moved and promoted the IWD although no date was specified.

The following year, 1911, IWD was marked by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on March 19. However, soon thereafter, on March 25, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City killed over 140 garment workers. A lack of safety measures was blamed for the high death toll. Furthermore, on the eve of World War I, women across Europe held peace rallies on 8 March 1913. In the West, International Women's Day was widely commemorated during the 1910s and 1920s, but dwindled thereafter until the 1960s.

Demonstrations marking International Women's Day in Russia proved to be the first stage of the 1917 Revolution.

Following the October Revolution, the Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai persuaded Lenin to make IWD an official holiday in the Soviet Union, but was a working day until 1965. On May 8, 1965 by the decree of the USSR Presidium of the Supreme Soviet International Women's Day was declared as a non working day in the USSR "in commemoration of the outstanding merits of Soviet women in communistic construction, in the defense of their Fatherland during the Great Patriotic War, in their heroism and selflessness at the front and in the rear, and also marking the great contribution of women to strengthening friendship between peoples, and the struggle for peace."