Q&A: The Roots of International Women's Day
Poster from International Women’s Day 1987 in Toronto
Earlier this week, on International Women’s Day, we sat down with NGM Community Manager Veronika Ilich. Affectionately known on the team as V, Veronika works with our friends and volunteers to facilitate events and keep Next Gen Men in motion. We talked about International Women’s Day and how its radical roots often get buried.
Read part two of the interview here.
Q: As someone who follows the news and follows the feeds, is there a particular issue or idea that is resonating the most for you, this International Women’s Day?
V: I think the conversation around ‘How do we have a just recovery for everyone,’ when we know that women have suffered this year with COVID, in terms of job loss and not being able to return to the workforce, because of lack of childcare and things like that.
Like yeah, everyone has been affected by Covid, but we're not all in the same boat. I think I saw a lovely quote from someone else, too, that was like, ‘we're not all in the same boat, we're all in the same storm—but some people are drowning and some people have yachts.’
And so I think our focus needs to be around economic recovery and how women have been largely left out of that conversation.
Q: If you were explaining IWD to an alien, what would you say? What it is, why is it important…[Austin Power voice] ‘what does it all mean, Basil?’
V: That's a hard one. When I think about International Women’ Day, it is an opportunity to talk about women's history, which tends to get left out of bigger conversations around history a lot of the time. On the other hand, I think it’s weird.
International Women's Day feels like it's been really sanitized, like we want to present an image of…[reads official description of IWD]…“celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women…a call to action for accelerating gender parity…celebrate women's achievements, raise awareness about women's equality, lobby for accelerated gender parity.”
And that just sounds very much like [laughs] so we're going to have an award show, or so we’re going to have a rally. [laughs] Woo! Get out your pink hat or whatever. But I just feel that International Women’s Day never really was this peaceful awards ceremony. It never was that in history.
You think about the agitators and the organizers…before women were even rallying, organizing, petitioning, going on hunger strikes, doing whatever they needed to do to get the vote, they were actually organizers in the abolition of slavery.
That was the start of this huge shift. Before the emergence of upper-middle class women, women whose husbands were doctors and lawyers, who had all this free time but were also excluded from political life. But before these women started organizing for the right to vote, there were others who were already organizing—for a cause that’s different, but related—and that was how the movement got its legs and learned how to organize.
Q: Abolishing slavery, winning the vote, maybe you would include the Prohibition movement too—these are all such huge social changes that these movements, or this movement, is fighting for.
What does this tell you about these women in history and the ambition they had, the vision they had?
V: What I hope that people think about when it comes to all this stuff is, first of all, women have always—whether or not we had many rights—agitated and organized and have done so much to impact the world around us.
I think women have been resisting patriarchy as long as there has been patriarchy. Long before there were ever days to mark things, like International Women's Day, women were like, ‘f*ck this.’ And I think that's cool, and it should probably be talked about a little bit more. But I don't think we should erase the complexities, too.
We should really be willing to dive into those things and look at things. There is a lot to unpack with respect to this movement. And so people who just gloss over it all—OK, Suffragettes, they won the right to vote— and they think everything was rosy.
Well, no. Black women didn’t get the right to vote until much later. Indigenous women in Canada didn’t get the right to vote until the 1960s, which is mind-blowing. There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t erase either and we shouldn’t gloss over.
We should be talking about the contributions of these women, while also interrogating these movements that were imperfect. And also talk about the contributions of these women who don’t get discussed.
Q: What’s the connection between what you’re talking about and the historical roots of IWD, how it got started?
V: There are some different origin stories of why they picked this day. I don't know if any of them fully get it right, because I've heard multiple different things. But they all come back to ideas of women, who are workers, who are striking.
March 8th, New York's Lower East Side, mass demonstration in support of equal suffrage. Huge demonstrations led by women who are workers. They’re saying, hey, we want equal pay, and living wages. We want these other things—workers rights broadly, the shorter work day, the safety in the workplace—all those things.
March 8th, 1917, thousands of women workers and housewives in St. Petersburg, Russia, also took to the streets. They were protesting against hunger and they ignited revolutions. The following day, they had like two hundred thousand workers join them striking.
So these have also been movements of working women. And these are also movements of women across the globe. And so it’s interesting…we might not be talking about Russia in the mainstream conversations about IWD, but the movement has been working women. It’s been women of colour. It’s been all sorts of women, and we don’t get all their stories. Sometimes we only know the Susan B. Anthonys or the Famous Fives, but it’s like, damn, we don’t hear about all these awesome, radical women, who were leagues ahead of their time.
Veronika Ilich is the Community Manager for Next Gen Men. Find her at NGM events, on the Modern Manhood Podcast, or on our online Inner Circle forum! She is passionate about social justice, and in particular, gender-based violence prevention and eliminating poverty. She is currently pursuing a Master of Social Work at the University of Calgary.