International Women's Day (IWD) is marked on the 8th of March every year. It is a major day of global celebration of women. In different regions the focus of the celebrations ranges from general celebration of respect, appreciation and love towards women to a celebration for women's economic, political and social achievements.
Started as a Socialist political event, the holiday blended in the culture of many countries, primarily Eastern Europe, Russia, and the former Soviet block. In many regions, the day lost its political flavour, and became simply an occasion for men to express their love for women in a way somewhat similar to a mixture of Mother's Day and St Valentine's Day. In other regions, however, the original political and human rights theme designated by the United Nations runs strong, and political and social awareness of the struggles of women worldwide are brought out and examined in a hopeful manner.
The IWD is also celebrated as the first spring holiday in the Northern Hemisphere as the first day of March is considered the first day of the spring season.
I think it is wonderful that the day can mean so many different things to different people all across the world, because that is what women are, different, but that does not mean we do not need at least one global day to highlight common “women” causes, because we do.
Women have achieved much over the last 100 years and yet there is still much more to be done. From my own personal experience, a young girl can attend law school and become a lawyer but how many female senior law partners are there, and how many female top ranking judges are there? But it is not all about the “privileged” women of the West trying to shatter through the “glass ceiling”. Many women face life and death choices and situations daily, you do not even have to look very far, how does a single mother recently laid off/made redundant feed her young children? On an unrelated issue but pertinent to this subject, I heard on KERA/NPR today that it can take months to get a food stamp card in
Here is the link to the International Women's day website
I think this is a great blog posting: http://www.gracefletcherhackwood.co.uk/
And this is my favourtie tweet today: @SarahBrown10 Any woman who calls herself a post feminist, has kept her wonder bra and burnt her brains. Kathy Lette #IWD
3 comments:
I agree with you about how important international womens day is - and also its ridiculous that more women don't identify with it or want to be involved in it, as its seen by many women in the west as a bra burning male bashing event - rather like the way that too many people view 'feminism' (see our previous post on this blog about feminism, and also Gabby Hinsliff did an excellent post on IWD this year
http://usedtobesomebody.blogspot.com/2010/03/im-not-feminist-but.html
this was the link to the Hinsliff post.
Thank you for your comment Dhara and the link to the great blog, I am a feminist and there are no buts!
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