SUPPLEMENT: Women’s Day established
March 8 2021 marks 110 years since International Women’s Day was first commemorated by the working class movement. What follows is what we believe to be the first English translation of a report of the 1910 International Socialist Congress of Women in Copenhagen, which passed the resolution to establish the event as a regular feature in the international socialist calendar.
The unsigned article first appeared in
Die Gleichheit (
Equality), the fortnightly paper of German Social Democracy’s women’s movement.
Die Gleichheit regularly featured reports from its sister organisations around the world. Edited by Clara Zetkin - once branded by kaiser Wilhelm II as the “most dangerous witch” in the country - she insisted that women’s liberation presupposed working class political organisation. Zetkin was eventually removed as editor by the SPD leadership in 1917: the paper had been struggling against the pro-war ‘fortress peace’ po