Skopje, 8 March 2025 (MIA) - International Women's Day – March 8 is celebrated annually in remembrance of the protest by textile workers in New York, held on this date in 1857, demanding greater rights. The United Nations began commemorating this day in 1975, and two years later, the UN General Assembly called on member states to declare March 8 as an official holiday of the global organization dedicated to women's rights and world peace.

Since then, International Women's Day has been celebrated globally, focusing on the women's rights movement, gender equality, reproductive rights, and the fight against violence and abuse against women. This year the International Women’s Day is celebrated under the theme, “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.”

The celebration of this day is associated with the initiative to introduce universal suffrage, i.e., granting women the right to vote in elections at the beginning of the last century, as well as with the activities of the labor movements in North America and Europe. The first recorded celebration of International Women's Day took place on February 28, 1909, in New York, organized by the Socialist Party of America. By the following year, the first demonstrations and events dedicated to women's rights were organized in Europe.

In 1910 the first international women’s conference was held in Copenhagen by the Second International and an ‘International Women’s Day’ was established, which was submitted by the important German Socialist Clara Zetkin, 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. 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 commemorated during the 1910s and 1920s, but dwindled. It was revived by the rise of feminism in the 1960s. Demonstrations marking International Women’s Day in Russia proved to be the first stage of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Following the October Revolution, the Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai persuaded Lenin to make it an official holiday in the Soviet Union, and it was established, 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 defence 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. But still, women’s day must be celebrated, as are other holidays.”

In 1975, which had been designated as International Women’s Year, the United Nations gave official sanction to and began sponsoring International Women’s Day.

Photo: MIA archive