What Is International Women’s Day, and Why Should Men Care About It?
The history behind the movement, because every day should be International Women’s Day.

Since the early 1900s, International Women’s Day has been observed worldwide. A booming, expansive, time, it was first held on March 19, 1911 in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, with over one million men and women gathering at rallies and campaigns.
So what, exactly, is International Women’s Day?
At its origins, the day was devised to campaign for women’s equal rights to work, vote, hold public office and altogether end discrimination. But the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in NYC just less than a week after the first rallies shifted the focus and narrowed the lens for IWD: now, it became a crusade for better working conditions and labor legislation.
The day shifted to a March 8 celebration in 1917, when Russian women in the revolution went on a four day strike in a “bread for peace” campaign in protest of the deaths of more than 2 million Russian soldiers in World War 1. So powerful and effective was their protest that the Czar abdicated, and the Russian government granted women the right to vote.

It wasn’t until 1977 that International Women’s Day was officially recognized and adopted by the United Nations. Before then, it’d been marked with yearly campaigns and movements to support women’s equal rights in various countries and spheres; in the late 80s and 90s and tumbling into the early 2000s, however, the holiday lost recognition and momentum, with many no longer seeing the need for feminism as women had already achieved the right to vote, work, and own property.
No longer was the strife of women seen as a valid global issue, one of public policy and public health. But the 21st century brought with it the digital age, advanced technology and an entirely new set of strife and efforts to re-ignite the movement and give it the global respectability it deserved; gender parity had still not been accomplished, and in 2001, the official IWD platform launched with a focus on re-energizing, honoring and celebrating this day.
But International Women’s Day is just for women, right? Wrong.
There is a grand plethora of issues and reasons which should ignite everyone to participate in International Women’s Day, not merely women themselves. After all, on Mother’s Day, it’s not the moms of the world honoring themselves, but their children and spouses, all the people whose lives they touch and affect, coming together to celebrate and pay tribute to the important figures in their lives.

On an individual level, International Women’s Day remains an issue for men, too. The institutional power structures in nearly every field which contribute to gender inequality are largely dictated by men, and changes in large socioeconomic structures and policies are near impossible to invoke without men—the players with the power—involved in the equation, also fighting for gender parity.
On a larger scale, however, IWD is a men’s issue for the same reason it is still needed, that it did not fade out when the right to vote came along: there is still work to be done and progress to be made, constantly, and feminism is not merely a women’s issue, but an everybody issue. The platforms and pillars of feminism affect everybody—so long as gaps in gender pay wage, sexual harassment and assault, racism and colorism, domestic violence and reproductive rights still exist and are normalized, the fight for gender parity is a fight for everybody to be involved in, not merely a fight for women against the power structures, the oppressed against the oppressors in a continuous loop of silenced disadvantage.
Modern feminism may not look like the feminism born in the era of the first International Women’s Day, but it is just as crucial now as it was then to make feminism a fight for everyone, a universal and intersectional issue that doesn’t merely concern women. Think globally, act locally and make every day Women’s Day, because every woman deserves a safe, bright and loved future.
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