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International Day of Woman, some history and some my thoughts.
March 8th, the International Day of Woman! How much have we women accomplished in the past 153 years and what we will accomplish in the 21st century? The road was filled with obstacles and it will be also bumpy in the future, with smoother and smaller bumps we hope.
It was in 1848, when 300 women and men assembled in Seneca Falls to join Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott and others to demand equal rights for women. Stanton presented the Declaration of Sentiments calling for a woman right to vote, right to receive a higher education, right to retain her own property and right to own her wages.
March 8th, the International Women's Day is a time to reflect on progress made, to continue our call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by ordinary women who have played an extraordinary role in the history of women's rights.
International Women's Day (8 March) is an occasion marked by women's groups around the world. This date is also commemorated at the United Nations and is designated in many countries as a national holiday. When women on all continents, often divided by national boundaries and by ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic and political differences, come together to celebrate their Day, they can look back to a tradition that represents decades of struggle for equality, justice, peace and development.
International Women's Day is the story of ordinary women as makers of history; it is rooted in the centuries-old struggle of women to participate in society on an equal footing with men. In ancient Greece, Lysistrata initiated a sexual strike against men in order to end war; during the French Revolution, in 1789/1799 Parisian women calling for "liberty, equality, fraternity" marched on Versailles to demand women's suffrage.
The idea of an International Women's Day first arose at the turn of the 20th century, which in the industrialized world was a period of expansion and turbulence, booming population growth and radical ideologies.
In 1909, in accordance with a declaration by the Socialist Party of America, the first National Woman's Day was observed across the United States on 28 February. Women continued to celebrate it on the last Sunday of February through 1913.
In 1910, the Socialist International, meeting in Copenhagen, established a Women's Day, international in character, to honor the movement for women's rights and to assist in achieving universal suffrage for women. The proposal was greeted with unanimous approval by the conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, which included the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament. No fixed date was selected for the observance.
In 1911, as a result of the decision taken at Copenhagen the previous year, International Women's Day was marked for the first time (19 March) in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, where more than one million women and men attended rallies. In addition to the right to vote and to hold public office, they demanded the right to work, to vocational training and to an end to discrimination on the job.
Less than a week later, on 25 March, the tragic Triangle Fire in New York City took the lives of more than 140 working girls, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. This event had a significant impact on labor legislation in the United States, and the working conditions leading up to the disaster were invoked during subsequent observances of International Women's Day.
In 1913-1914, as part of the peace movement brewing on the eve of World War I, Russian women observed their first International Women's Day on the last Sunday in February 1913. Elsewhere in Europe, on or around 8 March of the following year, women held rallies either to protest the war or to express solidarity with their sisters.
With 2 million Russian soldiers dead in the war, in 1917 Russian women again chose the last Sunday in February to strike for "bread and peace". Political leaders opposed the timing of the strike, but the women went on anyway. The rest is history:
Four days later the Czar was forced to abdicate and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote. That historic Sunday fell on 23 February on the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, but on 8 March on the Gregorian calendar in use elsewhere.
Since those early years, International Women's Day has assumed a new global dimension for women in developed and developing countries alike. The growing international women's movement, which has been strengthened by four global United Nations women's conferences, has helped make the commemoration a rallying point for coordinated efforts to demand women's rights and participation in the political and economic process.
We should work toward a goal that in 2020 we, women in the Western World, will participate in all aspects of our social, political and cultural lives as equal partner to men. And must work that we will see the first female president of the United States of America before the year 2010. If today we have 13 female senators by the year 2020 we should have 50% of all national and state political representatives to be women. This will energize the women of the rest of the world to follow our lead to achieve their right to life liberty and happiness. We should actively support and help them.
The objective must be that before the year 2050 poverty will be eliminated from the face of the globe. Because when women are empowered they no longer think of themselves as reproduction facilities and together with men will realize that better lives are only achievable through smaller families.
If I compare my generation with generation of my parents and grandparents, I see the change in the number of children each generation has had. When I was growing up all the women I saw around me where either pregnant or suffering from some child rearing diseases. I had an aunt that I never learned how she really looked as a beautiful and happy woman. She either was pregnant or had a breast infection. A disgusting thing to see. She was even pregnant when I left Iran. Looking at that miserable sight gave me the courage to think about doing something else with my life than having babies for whom I wouldn’t be able to be a devoted mother as I have been for my only son..
We have come so far from the early days of the establishment of the American Association of University Women when the authorities believed that education was hazardous to women’s health. Or the time when people believed women votes did not matter because they would only vote the same as their husbands. In recent years we have proven otherwise.
It was not long a go when women in this United States of America were not allowed to enter prestigious universities just because they were women and higher education was not something for the ladies.
I was just six years old when I decided that I wanted to know how a radio worked. At that age I did not know about men’s job or women’s jobs. I had no idea that engineering was considered exclusively a man’s job. I learned that later when I was denied my acceptance at Cal Tech just because it was an engineering school for men only.
Today there is not even one publicly supported institution of higher education that does not accept women.
In January 1971 I graduated as an electrical and electronic engineer. I could not find any employment. Partially due to bad times but mostly because I was a female and company after company told me that they had never had a female engineer. And the day I finally got my first job in June of the same year, I was told that I should be happy for the reduction in the gap between wages of men and women of the same occupation. My salary was only $10 per week less than that of a man, I was told. The personnel director’s reasoning was that sometime in the future I was to get pregnant and quit my job. So he was punishing me for something that could or could not happen in the future. This was 1971 not long ago. Today professional men and women in the same category are paid the same. We have not yet achieved the equal pay for comparable work but we certainly have achieved equal pay for equal work.
It was not long ago when we had to have our husbands’ last name and were referred to as Mrs. Somebody using our husband’s first and last name. We were not even addressed by our first names. We could not have credit in our own names and as soon as we were divorced we lost our identity. Our husbands on the other hand could keep theirs, even if we were the breadwinners in our family.
I remember when I divorced the father of my son. I could not believe it, it was like I had died and born again as a completely new person. Banks and business establishments cancelled my loans and credit cards, even though my engineering job was used as the collateral. I had to start over and re-establish my identity and credit worthiness. However it was difficult to get loans, credits, rent a house or try to live as a divorced woman with a child. Today women are able to have their own separate properties, credits, Bank accounts and can have a child as a single woman. We can even keep our father’s name. The one we were born with just like men.
At the turn of the 20th century we women could not vote, were property of our fathers and then on our wedding day he gave us away to another man with an expectation that he will have and hold for ever till death do us apart. This exchange of ownership happened when we were teenagers. And if this exchange did not happen then we were called "old maids." Throughout our lives we were some man’s daughter, then some man’s wife and at the end of our lives we were addressed as some man’s mother.
Today we are independent persons with the same basic rights as our counterparts. As Hillary Radham Clinton expressed in her speech at the 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing, "Women’s Rights are Human Rights."
In 1998 at the 150th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Madeline Albright, our then Secretary of State said it brilliantly:
"Today we look back across the years for inspiration and instruction. But we look ahead, for the movement launched here is still young, still blossoming, still spreading the good news of equality and empowerment, justice and freedom. It is now far more than an American movement. It is universal. It is gone global."
Let’s remember that the rights we have achieved in the past 153 years including our reproductive right, were not just given to us but were earned by blood, sweat and tears, by hard work and sacrifice. Let’s continue the movement and pass on the torch to the next generations until such time that all women all over the globe can enjoy "equality and justice for all" and not just for men or better said wealthy men.
Just remember that no enduring solution to society's most threatening social, economic and political problems can be found without the full participation, and the full empowerment, of the world's women.
With this conviction let’s march on.
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