International Women’s Day has been observed since the early 1900’s, a time of great expansion and turbulence in the industrial world…

1908 – Great unrest and critical debate was occurring amongst women. Women’s oppression and inequality was spurring women to become more vocal and active in campaigning for change. Then in 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York city demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights.

1909 – In accordance with the declaration by the Socialist Party of America, the first National Women’s Day (NWD) was observed across the United States on February 28. Women continued to celebrate NWD on the last Sunday of February until 1913.

1910 – At the Socialist International meeting in Copenhagen, an International Women’s Day of no fixed date was proposed to honour women’s rights movement and to assist in achieving universal suffrage for women. Over 100 women from 17 countries unanimously agreed to the proposal. Three of these women were later elected the first women to Parliament of Finland.

1911 – Following the decision agreed at Copenhagen in 1911, International Women’s Day was honoured the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on March 19^th. More than one million women and men attended the IWD rallies campaigning for women’s right to work, to vote, be trained, to hold public office and to end the discrimination However, less than a week later on March 25, the tragic "Triangle Fire" in New York City took the lives of more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. This disastrous event drew significant attention to the working conditions and labour legislation in the United States that became the focus of subsequent International Women’s Day events. 1911 also saw the women’s "Bread and Roses Campaign.

1913-1914 – On the eve of Word War I campaigning for peace, the Russian women observed their first International Women’s Day on the last Sunday in February of 1913. In 1914 women across Europe held rallies to campaign against the war and to express women’s solidarity.

1918-1999 – Since its birth in the socialist movement, International Women’s Day has grown to become a global day of recognition and celebration across the developed and developing countries alike. For decades, the IWF has grown from strength to strength annually. For many yeas the United Nations had held an annual IWD conference in order to co-ordinate international efforts for women’s rights and participation in social, political and economic processes. 1975 was designated as the "International Women’s Year" by the United Nations Organization. Women’s organizations and the governments around the world have also observed IWD annually on March 8 by holding large scale events that honour women’s advancement and reminding all of the continued vigilance and action required to ensure that women’s equality is gained and maintained in all aspects of life.

2000-2007 - This International Women’s Day is now an official holiday in Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. The tradition sees men honouring their mothers, wives, girlfriends, colleagues etc. with flowers and small gifts.

In 1999 I for the first time celebrated International Women’s Day abroad – in the Netherlands where I was on a student exchange program. There were 4 of us: three girls and 1 boy, and as a real Soviet man he bought flowers for each one of us, even though we did not have much "hard currency". For him there was any doubt that he should congratulate us all. Our Dutch hosts were looking at us in amazement, not knowing and not understanding what this day was all about. To us Soviets, it also was an equal shock to discover that the International Women’s Day is not only not an official holiday in the Netherlands, but a totally unknown phenomenon all together. And that is in a country that brags so much about their feminism etc. And despite the fact that it wasn’t the "Russian Bolsheviks" who invented this day, but it was, in fact, the United Nations who declared this day to be the International Women’s Day in order to celebrate women and their accomplishments and the great contributions they have made to the society.

We tried to explain to our Western hosts what this day means. They still could not understand. "Its something similar to our Mother’s Day. Isn’t it?" Well, yes and no! Because this day celebrates not just the motherhood, but all women’s achievements in life, and our women in the USSR were so much more than mothers! But how do you explain to these people in whose country women-doctors and women-professors are a very rare exception and who simply cannot imagine the women-engineers or women-factory directors?

To me, March 8^th always brings memories of the sweet smell of mimosa flowers – the most common present our men gave us in the USSR on that day. Even the little boys in schools were secretly preparing presents and cards for girls in their class, weeks ahead of the Big Day. The evening before the Women’s Day, many workplaces had special celebratory meetings where the best female employees were receiving awards for their achievements, often with a concert or a nice meal afterwards.

On the day itself, our men at home and at work were more gallant than any Knight from the old romantic novels. And of course, there were plenty of programs on TV dedicated to women – heroes of the war, hard workers, brilliant scientists and artists and kind, warm-hearted mothers. But this day was also for the grandmothers, daughters, sisters, granddaughters, nieces, cousins, wives, girlfriends and fiancées as well.

Today in capitalist Russia this day is still officially a public holiday. But just like everything else there, it is not the same anymore. Recently, I was on a visit there and going to the Moscow airport by car when I noticed a big crowd of women and girls standing along the road, seemingly in their ordinary working clothes, waiting for something. My first thought was that they were waiting for a truck to bring them to work on the collective farm in order to collect the harvest, like we used to do during Soviet times. But during that time we were usually cheerful, loud and full of jokes when we went to work in the kolkhoz (collective farm) but these women were silent. And when I noticed behind the bushes some foreign fancy cars with men who were sitting behind the wheel and watching these women, did I realize that those were the pimps and their female slaves – prostitutes waiting to serve the passing truckers!

What kind of celebration and respect for women can be in such a society? What do these women have to celebrate on that day? The fact that the women have now become commodities in this present capitalist Russia as well as in other former Soviet republics; that they are the first ones to lose there jobs and also the lowest paid ones; that tens of thousands of our young girls are dreaming of "becoming a model in the West" or "marrying a rich foreigner"? That the present husbands treat their wives worse

than in the days of Domostroi (Domostroi-Rules for Russian Households in the time of Ivan the Terrible)?

There is now no affordable childcare, many women are forced to abandon their children and some even kill their children, unable to look after them. Female alcoholism and drug abuse has become a mass problem. Most private companies demand from their female employees to sign an agreement that they will not become pregnant in the next five years! Women now worry themselves sick as to how they will, be able to feed and educate their children. The present situation in Russia for women has gone back to the conditions that existed in the Middle Ages!

I was recently watching a Belgian soap opera called "Matryoshki", about the Lithuanian and Russian sex slave workers in Belgium, and the most shocking was not even the treatment that these girls were receiving, but the very fact that they were already considering this as something normal, as just a part of ordinary life. And these are the daughters and the granddaughters of Soviet women who fought the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, who went into space as the first in the world, who were equal members in the truly humane society! Who of them could even in their worst nightmare imagine that their little girls would be living such miserable lives thanks to Mr, Gorbachev, Mr. Yeltsin and the present leader of Russia, the so-called "Liberators from Dignity"?

But we, the Soviet women, are lucky not only because we were born and lived in the most wonderful (even if it wasn’t perfect) society in all of human history. We are also lucky because, unlike our counterparts in the rest of the world who are only talking about the chance that "another world is possible", we know FOR SURE that it is possible. We have seen it for ourselves and have experienced it ourselves that IT IS possible and today our task is to educate the next generation and to raise them to believe that this better world is possible, that it is worth to fight for, and that the life of our young people today, is unworthy of human beings in the XXI Century!

Here will be plenty of work in the coming years for all of us – as mothers and as memory keepers of the Great October Socialist Revolution!