Several folks gathered at the Coffee House Cafe in Salem Oregon to hear an informal presentation about the history of International Women's Day and to discuss its relevance today.
{NOTE about the image at left: When I googled "International Women's Day Salem Oregon" - the only 2009 event that I readily found was our Willamette Reds event, but surprisingly, a link to the image residing at the Oregon Military Dept archives came up. The caption on the Military website states: A 1935 flyer announces the celebration of International Women's Day under the auspices of the Portland Section of the Communist Party. Oregon Military Department Records, Communist Activity Intelligence Reports, Brochures, Pamphlets, Publications, 1932-1936, Box 57, Folder 28.}
On to a brief history of the founding of this day....
During the end of the 19th century, there was an expansion of industrialization, population growth, and growing workers rights struggles.
In 1908 in the USA, the Socialist Party's Women's National Committee called for the party to designate a day to highlight the campaign for women's right to vote. Thus, "National Women's Day" in the USA began in 1909.
By 1909, there were mass strikes and demonstrations in the USA to protest inhumane factory conditions and for women's suffrage.
In 1910 the 2nd International Conference of Socialist Women convened in Copenhagen. The main issues were universal suffrage; social security for mother and child, including maternity leave and health care; the 8-hour day; the obligation to raise children in a spirit of anti-militarism; and demands for better working conditions. The conference, inspired by actions in the USA, passed a resolution to establish an International Women's Day. Two well-known attendees were Clara Zetkin (German socialist leader) and Alexandra Kollentai (a Russian delegate and a textile worker from St. Petersburg). Kollentai described the day as "a day of international solidarity in the fight for common objectives and a day for reviewing the organized strength of women under the banner of socialism."
Today, our group discussed the current relevance of IWD. That discussion included talking about the status of women today, through the lenses of statistics and our own and our sisters' anecdotes of struggle.
The National Women's Law Center recently polled women who indicated the following are their priorities; they also found that women see government as key to the solutions:
*A better health care system
*An end to the wage gap
*Affordable birth control, comprehensive sex education and protection for Roe v. Wade
*Access to high-quality child care
*Improved economic security for women and their families
*A solution to the drop out crisis
*A fair and independent judiciary
Statistics show that women are not gaining as a whole in the critical areas of pay equity, access to necessary health care, and more. It is also clear that women and especially African-American and Latina women are being very hard hit by the current economic crises.
In Oregon, OHSU gave Oregon an "unsatisfactory" rating in 2007 in meeting national goals for women's health. There is a significant lack of preventive care which is linked to a "prevalence of uninsured and underinsured women in our state - we know that one-fifth of Oregon women lack health insurance." And that is probably higher now. A member of our discussion group indicated that her sister died at age 37 from cancer which probably could have been successfully treated if she had had health insurance.
We discussed our experiences with child care, noting that lack of good quality child care disrupts the family and causes stress and loss of work for parents and most importantly is harmful to children. A member of our group stated that she and her husband, because of child care problems (access, affordability, and quality), took jobs with completely different shifts, so that one parent could be home with the kids; this resulted in the parents only seeing each other on weekends.
We discussed the strong support men show for breast cancer research fundraising drives, noting that all men have a mom, sister, wife, aunt, etc. who could be vulnerable to this disease. We discussed whether, while men are supportive of this issue, it's not so clear that they are all so supportive of other, related issues such as pay and job equity. In fact, these dots are not often connected, but they can be, because when women do not have full access to good jobs with benefits, they often do not have the health insurance needed to have preventative care to detect breast cancer early or the treatment for it.
We noted that in many countries, including Cuba, IWD is a very important day and is celebrated with many surrounding events and marches. Given the rather grim statistics on the quality of women's lives including those of us right here in Oregon, we should, we concluded, work to elevate International Women's Day to more prominence locally. This time, next year?
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