Worker Woman Day

International Women's Day, March 8, was born in struggle. On that day in 1908 hundreds of working and poor women, mostly East European immigrants, surged out of needle-trade sweatshops and tenements on New York's Lower East Side and marched defiantly to Union Square, where they held a militant rally.
The women marched under the suffragist banner of "Votes for Women," but their demands for higher wages and better working conditions also struck a blow against capitalism.
Their speeches denouncing the bosses, the landlords, the bankers, and all who oppressed them showed extraordinary revolutionary working-class consciousness.
That hundreds of working women dared to voice demands for a better life for themselves and their families made headlines. When news of it was telegraphed to Europe, German socialist Clara Zetkin saw it as the sign of the working-class women's movement she had been waiting for since she first raised the demand for equal rights for women within the socialist movement in 1889.
Finally, in 1910, under Zetkin's leadership and with the support of Rosa Luxemburg and the Russians Alexandra Kollantai and V.I. Lenin, the Second International Conference of Socialists in Copenhagen declared March 8 to be International Women's Day.