This Wednesday, March 8, thousands of demonstrators will gather in the streets to fight for women's rights.
An edition particularly marked, this year, by the repression of women in Iran or Afghanistan.
But where does this idea come from?
When is it from?
And why March 8?
To discover
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Institutionalization
In France, March 8 was taken over by the Women's Liberation Movement (MLF), a historic feminist institution marked on the left, to demonstrate against the establishment of the "Year of the Woman" by the UN
in
1975. For Marie-Jo Bonnet, pioneer of the MLF, it was then obvious to demonstrate.
She writes in her book
My MLF
: "
We all agreed (...) on March 8, 1975 to refuse 'to let ourselves be confined in a gadget year, in a program, a framework, a date'"
.
Sylvie Chaperon, historian and specialist in the history of women, reminds us that this event does not "
does not concern all feminists because some were enthusiastic about this idea of institutionalization.
There were only the most radical who did not want a consensual movement
”.
Two years later, the UN promulgates March 8 as International Women's Day.
"
Historically, we refer to the uprising of Russian women on March 8, 1917,
" says Carlotta Gradin, vice-president of advocacy for UN Women France.
In France, it was in 1982 that this date was officially recognized, under the impetus of Yvette Roudy, then Minister Delegate for Women's Rights.
However, the history of this international day has complex origins and follows a multitude of stories.
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Socialist origins
“
We started our research thinking that it was going to be easy to find its origin, we were far from imagining that it was going to be a real investigation!
laughs Liliane Kandel, sociologist and feminist essayist.
In 1975, Françoise Picq, three other comrades and she had to write for the first issue of the magazine
Histoire d'Elle
on the history of International Women's Rights Day.
To understand everything, you have to go back to the beginning of the 20th century.
It was Clara Zetkin, a German figure of socialist feminism, who proposed the creation of a women's day at the 1910 socialist congress in Copenhagen, on the model of the Women's day of American socialist women.
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For Liliane Kandel, "
these women who participated in the movement were part of the hard wing of German social democracy who thought that the class struggle should be superior to any other struggle, including feminism"
.
In this Marxist context, they were opposed in particular to bourgeois feminism which claimed the right to vote.
"
It was a question of priority, for Clara Zetkin and the others, there was no possible emancipation of women without a socialist revolution, while for the bourgeois it went through the right to vote", explains Liliane
Kandel .
"
The fact that these bourgeois feminists were ready to accept the property tax vote made union impossible
," says Sylvie Chaperon.
Read alsoThe Suffragettes: at the citizen polls
The following year, the German Social Democratic Party decided to organize the first edition on March 19, 1911. For Liliane Kandel, this date has a strong socialist imprint since it "
corresponds to the German revolution in 1848 in Berlin and the Municipality of Paris".
In the first years that followed, demonstrations took place in Austria, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland... on dates that varied from country to country.
In France a first demonstration was organized in 1913.
At the same time, on March 8, 1917 (February 23 of the Russian calendar), the women of Saint Petersburg took to the streets to demonstrate against the high cost of living and the return of soldiers.
“
For Trotsky, this is the first act of the Russian revolution
,” asserts Liliane Kandel.
This date then becomes a communist holiday that celebrates the revolution and the liberation struggles all over the world.
Every March 8, "
important meetings were held in which women are honored without being given a real political voice".
"
The date will be imposed little by little to celebrate this day
," says Sylvie Chaperon.
"
After the Second World War, a feminist association called the Union of French Women was created in 1944, whose activity was to organize March 8.
The association presented itself as independent but they obeyed the communist slogan all the same
”, she continues.
Establishment of a myth
We could then attribute the decision to celebrate this holiday of March 8 in reference to this uprising of communist women, as the UN did.
But the story does not end there.
In 1955, a completely different version was born in the French communist press and quickly spread to different countries.
That year, we find in the pages of Humanity
this
sentence: “
Once upon a time in New York, in 1857, garment workers.
They worked ten hours a day in appalling conditions, for starvation wages.
From their anger, from their misery, a demonstration was born...
”.
It is actually a myth that the two historians Françoise Picq and Liliane Kandel revealed during their research.
They demonstrate that there is no reference to these March 8 demonstrations in the American press or in the archives of the workers' and women's movements in the United States.
According to Sylvie Chaperon, “
the idea was to make a sort of outstretched hand towards the Western bloc and overcome the marginalization of communist movements imposed by the Cold War
”.
If it is now accepted that this origin was false, it nevertheless served as a reference until the 1980s.
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As the end of the story, we can say that there was no particular founding event but rather independent events that intertwined and culminated in the day we know today.
The fact remains that, for Carlotta Gradin, “
we cannot stop at one day.
It is essential to act and raise awareness, especially in a context of the decline of women's rights in certain countries
”.
The sad Afghan and Iranian news, among others, shows it every day.