Celebrating what the comrades started

International Women’s Day is largely observed today as a sort of Mother’s Day for adults. Instead of sending flowers and chocolates, it is usually marked by op-eds on gender equality, by functions and speeches about the untapped economic and political power of those who ‘hold up half of the sky’ – if you count housework, actually more, and ‘Stree Shakti’. But Women’s Day has radical roots – communist ones, at that – which may or may not be worth reminding to well-wishers whose idea of a special day for women is letting them put their legs up on the table or khatola for one day.

March 8, 1917, saw Soviet female textile workers in Petrograd (today’s Saint Petersburg) participate in a huge, citywide protest. Their demand, ‘Bread and Peace’, was not airy-fairy – it wanted the ongoing World War 1 to stop, food shortages to end, and tsarism to be thrown out. Part of the Russian Revolution, it had mixed results, since the war dragged on for more than another year-and-a-half; food shortages would, with the Bolshevik takeover, become part of life; with only the Russian monarchy being liquidated – despite what it may seem in today’s Kremlin. But out of this socialist push from the Soviet sister-comrades came about today’s Women’s Day. Goes to show how even an old communist call can become such a twee United Nations-ey en-gendered thing.