International Women’s Day has arrived once more, bringing with it the opportunity to celebrate women’s achievements to history, culture, and politics — and, of course, to sell merchandise.
However, how did the day begin? Some suggest that the genesis tale is based on Russian communist roots, while others claim that it is based on an American origin narrative. The reality is that it is neither one nor the other. International Women’s Day originated in New York City with a Russian-born Jewish woman before migrating to the Soviet Union and returned.
Theresa Serber Malkiel was born in 1874 in what is now western Ukraine, during the Russian Empire. She was born into a middle-class family and obtained a solid education, but her Jewish family faced escalating persecution and emigrated to America when she was 17 years old.
According to historian Sally M. Miller, her schooling didn’t signify much in New York City. Malkiel, like so many other immigrant women, found herself in a difficult situation and took a work in a garment factory. Women earned half of what men did, just enough to pay rent in packed tenements and boardinghouses. Shifts may last up to 18 hours, accidents were common, and women earned half of what men did. So, like many other Jewish and Italian immigrant women at the period, Malkiel joined the labour movement and later founded a cloak-makers’ union.
Malkiel also became a communist and married Leon Malkiel, a fellow socialist and attorney, at the age of 26. Her husband’s money allowed her to quit the sweatshop, but after relocating to Yonkers and having a child, Malkiel maintained her activism, Miller said, assisting immigrant women, holding senior roles in the Socialist Party of America, and co-founding the New York Call with her husband. (As a side note, Henrietta and her husband, Nelson Poynter, eventually co-founded another newspaper, Congressional Quarterly.)
Malkiel was a strong advocate for women’s equality and the ability to vote, yet she was sceptical of the upper-class, nonimmigrant women who often led women’s suffrage organisations. She contended that real equality – for women, African Americans, immigrants, and child labourers — could only be achieved via socialism in her booklets, editorials, and lectures.
In 1909, she suggested the first National Woman’s Day in this framework. Thousands of people gathered around New York to hear lectures and poems, sing socialist songs, and advocate for the right to vote, according to Temma Kaplan of Rutgers University.
Some sources suggest that International Women’s Day commemorates the first recorded women-led labour strike, which occurred on March 8, 1857, and that Malkiel wanted to honour it, although there is no proof that such a strike occurred. Newspapers at the period don’t mention it, despite extensive coverage of women-led labour strikes in Pawtucket, R.I., and Dover, N.H., decades earlier. Furthermore, Malkiel’s 1909 National Woman’s Day took place on February 23, not March 8. (I’ll get to that later.)
Malkiel had a busy couple of years after the inaugural National Woman’s Day. She backed a massive strike of shirtwaist workers, called the “Uprising of the 20,000,” with financial help, lectures, and essays later in 1909 and into 1910. The strikers were mainly successful, securing greater pay and shorter working hours after braving a winter on the picket line, while factory owners refused to yield on safety concerns.
On Feb. 27, 1910, the strike ended at the same time as the second National Woman’s Day. This time, there were gatherings all around the country, including one at Carnegie Hall, where the speakers were “all women save one, and he denounces Man,” according to the New York Times. By 1911, it had expanded among socialist women across Europe, including celebrations in Vienna, albeit according to Miller, they were held on March 18 in remembrance of the Paris Commune.
“The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker,” a fictitious depiction of the revolt in which an American-born young lady joins her immigrant coworkers to demand better working conditions, was published soon after.
However, a year after their seeming success, the strikers’ precarity was exposed. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, whose employees had participated in the 20,000-man Uprising, caught fire, killing 146 people, including 123 women and girls who had been locked in by the factory’s owners. More people nowadays remember the fire than the rebellion that preceded it; in fact, a 1949 New York Times storey wrongly said that Malkiel’s book was published after the fire.
Malkiel shifted her concentration away from the Socialist Party, where she and other women were frequently upset by its leadership’s chauvinism despite the party’s public promises for equal rights, and toward adult education for immigrant women. When she died in 1949 at the age of 76, her contribution to International Women’s Day went unmentioned in a New York Times obituary, which by then used the plural “women’s” and was a major issue if you lived in a communist country.
Though the actual date changed each year, the event grew in popularity among European communist women. Then, in 1917, activities commemorating International Women’s Day in Russia erupted into a nationwide strike that culminated in Czar Nicholas II’s abdication. Since then, it has been celebrated on March 8 (or February 23 on czarist Russia’s Julian calendar), the day the strike began. In the Soviet Union and East Germany, it was a national holiday. Women in China are still allowed a half-day off.
Feminists in Western Europe and the United States revived it in the 1960s, and the United Nations declared it a day to honour women’s accomplishments in 1975. The fictitious genesis narrative of the 1857 strike was linked by Kaplan, a Rutgers historian, to 1950s France, when more mainstream feminists were likely seeking to dampen the Soviet vibes.
Social media has taken International Women’s Day to new generations in the twenty-first century, as well as new business possibilities that Malkiel and the millions of socialist women who started it would almost certainly disapprove of.
By Gillian Brockell