Lhe Women’s Day, which has now become Women’s dayis an anniversary that was born with a much more noble purpose and far from the consumerist connotation into which it has become.
Women’s Day is not a holiday it’s a celebration
More than a day of celebration where mimosas, gifts, dinners out and stripteases are wasted, in fact, it should be considered as a day of celebration of all those women who have sacrificed themselves over the years to claim women’s rights. And who, thanks to their courage, have achieved fundamental goals even if not yet always recognized.
February 23, 1909 was the first true Women’s Day, not March 8
A wrong date
Moreover, if we really want to be precise, March 8 is neither the correct date to celebrate women. Meanwhile, because the legendary fire in the Cotton factory in New York in 1909 where hundreds of workers would die, episode to which the birth of the day is linked, it never happened (in Museum of the City of New York does not appear that while there is another, of the “Triangle” factory which took place on March 25, 1911, in which many women actually died, including many Italians).
The first feminist claims of 1908
March 8, 1909 is therefore not the correct date to refer to the first gender claims and the first struggles against sexual discrimination. Also because the real spark that ignited the feminist movement was lit the year before, when Corinne Brown, activist for women’s rights, spoke on May 3, 1908 at the VII Congress of the II Socialist International to denounce the exploitation of the workersthe sexual discrimination and the possibility of Universal suffrage.
February 23, 1909 – the first Women’s Day
It was this collective female awareness that started a year of battles and demonstrations, which brought the United States to dedicate the last Sunday of February to women. And the first was on February 23, 1909.
To arrive at 8 March, we must then wait for 1977. It was, in fact, the General Assembly of the United Nations that asked each member country to establish a “Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace”. And most of the nations chose March 8, which was already celebrated in several countries.
Let’s not make the anniversary trivial (which is not a party but a celebration)
For all this, women are not “celebrated”, but “celebrated”: for their courage and their determination to fight for their rights, without demeaning and reducing the day to something extremely mundane which has nothing to do with the story of women’s emancipation.
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